Oct 17, 2010 | Innovation, Operations
Usually discussion about innovation focuses on the new stuff, the things that have, or need to change to deliver a changed outcome.
During a discussion recently about “green electricity” in Australia, specifically solar power, it struck me that the costs of the Photo Voltaic panels was dropping rapidly, and is the focus of most of the activity, and certainly all the publicity. By contrast, all the surrounding elements of the value chain necessary to deliver the innovative technology, the processes to source parts, deliver, maintain and install the cells, and link them to the existing grid, were all going up in price, more than offsetting the benefits of the drop in price of the core technology.
Innovation is only of any value when it is delivered, when the benefits flow, and usually the “delivery” is a forgotten element of the whole process during the hype.
Oct 14, 2010 | Customers, Innovation, Marketing
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it is the driver of everything that contributes to improvement. Doesn’t matter if it is improvement in a factory, using the “5 why” tool, or some question, the answer to which advances our knowledge of space. The driver is curiosity, and the result, the potential to be better, to know more, to deliver benefit.
For a marketer, being curious should be second nature, but how long since you sat one-on-one with a customer and sought direct feedback on how your product performs Vs the competition?, why they bought it?, how could it be improved?, what job was it really doing? And so on.
It is one thing to absorb research reports, dig through the numbers, engage in esoteric conversations about innovation, and understand at a macro level the things that contribute to success, but it is something entirely different to get down in the weeds with your customers.
Oct 13, 2010 | Alliance management, Collaboration
It is a pretty simple observation that for a group to act collectively, there must be a strong central reason for them to do so. The larger the group, the more difficult it becomes to maintain this sense of collaborative security, and more and more dissention to individual decisions occurs.
For this reason, for large groups to be successful there must be a very strong purpose into which all members “buy” and that has the effect of enabling them to deal with the individual decisions they may not like for the sake of the central purpose, so long as there has been due process exercised in the decision making process.
Consider the difference between the disregard generally apparent towards our political parties, and the high regard we have for the ideals of a group like the Salvation Army, irrespective of what we may think about their position on spirituality, and the music they play on the corner on Saturday morning.
Oct 12, 2010 | Change, Leadership
Creating change in any organisation is a huge challenge to the capacity of an organsations leadership. Over many years of assisting in all sorts of projects, I observe it often tends to become overly complicated, perhaps over-intellectualised, so I have a simple 3 part framework that seems to work, and when a project wavers, it offers a grounding.
- Determine and articulate what needs to change, and why
- Agree and clearly communicate what it needs to change to, and what the end point looks like
- Build a program based on 1 and 2 against which you can drive the change, and measure progress.
This framework appears to work as well for a small change to a part of a processing line to an organisation wide culture change.
However, the danger is that the change by threes approach is inconsistent with the need to embed a hunger for continuous improvement which is a journey for which there is no end point, into the culture, so leadership is crucial.
Oct 11, 2010 | Communication, Marketing, Social Media
That democratic cliché “freedom of the press” is a bit misleading, because to be able to exercise it, you needed to own or control the capital equipment and distribution channel to get your message out, so clearly this freedom was limited to a very few.
However, freedom of the press has an entirely new dimension, as now anyone can publish, you just need a computer and a weblog account. Of course, you still have to get people to engage with what is written, but you can put it out there easily and cheaply.
This change in the balance of power is the most compelling change in the nature of news gathering and dissemination process since the invention of the printing press, and it is pretty clear that the “old” press is struggling with commercial sustainability, whilst on the flip side, the views on the web need a greater level of skepticism than the Financial Review.
Freedom of the press, and freedom of speech are now pretty much the same thing in most places around the world, we just need to be careful about believing what we read.
