May 24, 2010 | Management, Personal Rant
What a wonderful, emotive description, courtesy of Seth Godin, of the sort of make work activity we all undertake to put off doing those difficult, risky, confronting jobs that can really add value.
It takes effort not to stomp on a roach when it crosses the floor, but stomping it is basically a useless, time wasting exercise, just like checking emails every 10 minutes, reading industry rags cover to cover, redoing a completed presentation in the hope of making it that 0.5% better, and the thousands of other things we dream up to keep us in out comfort zone.
Make a difference to your day, let the roach live, and do something useful with your time.
May 23, 2010 | Alliance management, Innovation, Leadership, Operations, Strategy
The momentum of innovation in the auto industry has picked up a notch, as a resurgent Toyota allies with Tesla to re-open the NUMMI plant closed earlier this year to produce a mass market electric car.
Toyota got the ball rolling 10 years ago with the Prius, and still leads by a mile in the eco car market, but the competition is emerging. This alliance with Tesla in the plant where Toyota allied with GM for its first plant outside Japan, demonstrating comprehensively that the quality of Japanese cars was not a function of some cultural phenomena peculiar to Japan, but simply a function of good management (a lesson GM never really got) may be just as significant.
It is reassuring to those of us who have watched Toyota transform the manufacturing mentality of the world over the last 30 years with their development and wide sharing of TPS, that after the recent stumble over quality, a stumble some predicted as the Toyota juggernaught seemed to be taking over the auto world, that they have been able to embrace the alliance, and return to the basic values that made them great.
With luck, they will be as open about the engineering and operational evolution of the JV electric car, and the lessons they learn from the alliance with Tesla, as they have been in the past. If so we will all learn a whole lot more.
May 20, 2010 | Change, Innovation, Leadership
Being successful is hard enough, sustaining that success appears even harder, as success breeds a status quo that is focused on more of the same stuff that worked last time, but not necessarily what will work in the future. Safety first, risk elimination, self interest, and hubris appear to become the norm.
This process is pretty well documented with the benefit of hindsight, but it is not always obvious as it is happening.
Microsoft was the success story of the 20th century, it transformed the way we worked and lived, it developed a virtual monopoly in a highly contested market, it remains hugely profitable, but has it dropped the ball whilst still generating those profits on the back of past success?
Microsoft missed the transformation of the music industry, tablet computing, gaming, were wiped out in search, and are losing share in their core server software markets to Linux, and now Google has a free alternative to Office, currently with microscopic share, but perhaps it is a beginning .
The slow erosion of Microsoft a business that just a decade ago was considered sufficiently powerful to attract the attention of the anti-trust laws in the US, potentially forcing a break-up as happened to previous businesses that had developed a virtual monopoly. Now, Microsoft appears to have lost all its edge, and is just trading on past success and the mountains of cash accumulated as a result.
The AT&T telephone monopoly was broken up in 1984, probably a few years before it would have happened by the mergence of new technology, Standard Oil of New Jersey broken up by the Sherman Act in 1911 would have taken a bit longer, but would certainly not have been able to maintain it monopoly after the discovery of oil in the Middle East.
Again, we see the parallels to the natural eco-systems that provide so many lessons for corporations, where sustainable success is dependent on evolution, and change at the margins, not power over the existing environment.
May 19, 2010 | Leadership, Management, Strategy
One of the best leading indicators of commercial activity I know is the level of activity at 6.30am late in the trading week at the Flemington markets in Sydney. Whilst it is entirely qualitative, and covers retail activity in a single category, fresh produce, over a long period of observation it has nevertheless been a pretty potent macro forecasting mechanism.
Over the past few weeks I have been out there on a number of occasions, in the critical early hours. The standholders are all sounding worried, their sales are down, and the competition for the sales that are there is fierce, and there is even no real problem getting a park, and wheeling around a barrow.
You can show me all the macro economic models, spreadsheets, and learned forecasts you like, but none have the immediacy, intimacy, and sensitivity as a bit of time at the coal face.
My FMFM (Flemington Markets Forecast Model) developed view, is that we are in for a really tough time. In 6 months, coincidently when we are likely to be in the agonies of another federal election campaign, I will come back to this post, and see again, if the FMFM model is better than all the gumph spin, misinformation, and hubris coming out of our “leaders” in Canberra.
May 18, 2010 | Innovation, Marketing, Strategy
Digital interactivity has moved to the centre of marketing strategy. The launch of the iPad by Apple has moved it noticeably.
I have not seen one, just read the reviews, and when you sift through the hyperbole, it seems that the iPad has a pretty good chance of changing the way a large section of the market behaves. For communication centric uses, the iPad will possibly be a revelation, but to applications that require number crunching, it will not replace a computer. Now the market will segment by what sorts of applications you require, not just the size, and performance characteristics, and PC Vs Mac segmentation that has prevailed.
The other segmenting drive is the coming battle in “e-book” publishing, which will be facinating to watch. Amazons Kindle got the ball rolling, but the momentum will be built by the iPad when they get the iBook store running properly, which should not be long. It took Apple several years to get the iTunes store running, and it created a tsunami in the music world, it may be a bit harder in books because they are simply harder to digitise, but the lessons from launching iTunes will not be lost, and the current book publishing business model is clearly about to be broken apart.
