Mar 15, 2011 | Personal Rant, Social Media
Today, March 15 is the 26th birthday of the internet as we know it. The first domain name, Symbolics.com, was registered on March 15 1985, and still exists.
From this humble beginning, just a generation ago has risen the greatest force for change since people realised that steam could be used to drive machines, and that idea took 150 years to filter through the world.
Sitting on the train today coming back from a meeting in the CBD, it appeared that every second person was using a smartphone for a seemingly wide range of things that had little to do with talking on the phone, and there were a number of tablet computers and e-readers going. Just a generation ago, phones were large black things with rotary dials that enabled you to talk to only one person at a time, and most households had only one! Newspapers were the curators, editors and suppliers of the news, most peoples network of friends was limited to about 50 at most, divided ionto a couple of categories, school, work, and social (mostly met at the kids activities), the post was the only way to get documents from one place to another, and marketing was all about broadcast communication to a mass market, segmented only by demographics and geography.
How things have changed in 26 years, I cannot begin to conceive what it will all look like in another 26 years.
Mar 13, 2011 | Change, Leadership, Personal Rant
If Australia was a business, considering the challenge of what to do about of carbon emissions would have a couple of characteristics that would have engaged the country’s boardroom:
- It is pretty obvious that some legislative framework will emerge to address what is a generally accepted problem. Even in the absence of legislation, the drivers of commercial sustainability are changing under our feet, and so we need to change quicker than they are to provide returns to stakeholders that continue to attract capital and skills in a globally competitive environment.
- Nothing Australia can do on its own will have any real impact on global emissions
- Anything we do will increase costs, if we do more than others, our costs go up more than others, making us uncompetitive.
- We would acknowledge the necessity of making strategic investments to accommodate and benefit from the changes as they occur, rather than being behind the 8-ball. Simple risk management.
- We would have looked at the changed capabilities our business needed to innovate, project manage, and leverage the regulatory and “commercial environmental” changes as they occur.
Instead of this risk/resource/return type of planning and decision making we have:
- Liberals doing a “Canute” burying their heads in the sand.
- Greens using perhaps short term electoral leverage to get us all into hair shirts sitting around (plantation sourced)log fires holding hands singing kum-by-yah.
- The government on an electoral knife-edge trying to please whoever spoke last.
- Voters being disenfranchised, simply because there is no political group taking a position that approximates a sensible long term, common sense view of what we should be doing, and besides, we do not trust any of them.
Back to our business analysis, what should we be doing?
- Taking small experimental steps to determine the cost/benefit of various alternatives before we make “bet the farm” decisions. Politicians should by now be aware of how unintended consequences can really stuff up a good idea (remember home insulation, health care changes, public/private partnerships et al)
- Being both strategic and agile in the way we structure the systems. Setting a price on carbon in a vacuum is stupid, but setting a very modest price and being prepared to vary it to quantify outcomes, and combining carbon price with elements of an ETS, makes sense, despite the uncertainty of the final level of cost impost that would remain. Combine this with support for the development and testing of innovative technology (which means most of the initiatives will fail, poison to attracting Government support but essential in an innovative system) being immune to the bleating of special interest groups, and relooking at the “carpark” of existing ideas and technologies previously parked for various reasons, would create a policy mix that has some potential to deliver for stakeholders…. Us!.
Easy. Untangled.
Mar 12, 2011 | Leadership
There are lots of blogs, facebook pages, twitter posts, and libraries on Leadership.
This is one of the consistently better ones, with often useful thoughts and links. http://leadershipfreak.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/how-to-extend-your-influence/
Mar 10, 2011 | Change, Social Media
Organisations of all types and sizes are grappling with the impact of social media. It is simply a fact of life now that many if not most customers, employees, and value chain partners use it, the potential as a marketing and communication tool is only just starting to be leveraged, and the clash with the cultural norms of the 20th century organisation are profound.
The social media egg will not be unscrambled, and setting out to manage its implications on all the relationships that exist to make an organisation work by command and control mechanisms simply will not work. A new set of rules needs to apply, and we need to think differently about governance practices we employ, and look to what works elsewhere.
In addition to the governance issues, being effective in a hugely cluttered environment with no barriers to entry is remarkably difficult, so some simple marketing guidelines may be useful, irrespective of the delivery mechanism:
- Be relevant to those you wish to connect with, the #hashtag function in twitter enables others to search and filter posts for relevance.
- Concentrate on the important users/followers, having 25,000 followers may look impressive, but is useless for any sensible connection with the few who are important.
- Ask for input, help, comment, and it will come from a few of those who are engaged, clearly the ones you want to build a relationship, who share a connection.
- Build relationships first, sales may follow later, but without a relationship, there will be no sales. Consumers are a wary lot, rightly so, and looking like a pushy digital “used car salesman” will just turn people off.
Mar 9, 2011 | Communication, Leadership, Management
There is a big difference between these two states, and they can have a powerful impact on the way organisations react to the decision maker.
Someone who is seen as decisive, but as yet undecided will be have the respect of others, who will usually assist in the process of coming to a decision in a positive manner.
By contrast, someone who is seen as indecisive, will be ignored, and work-arounds will be used to get things done, and at some time, if it is a personal trait, it needs to be removed from behavior patterns, or the individual will be removed.
