Oct 18, 2012 | Lean, Management, Operations
Of all the resources we have, time is truly the only one where there is no chance of technology making it replaceable or renewable. We all know that, so why do we continue to waste it so indiscriminately?
Seems to me the answer is that we cannot see it messing up the floor, count it as it comes back as rework, or feel as engaged as when something tangible disappears before our eyes. The passing of time is usually only noted in the past tense.
It makes sense therefore to manage time obsessively, simply because it is so hard to do so, and if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. This simple observation implies that time management may be the source of real advantage.
If you just take inventory for instance.
Inventory and WIP is a tangible measure of the time you have to pay somebody for the failure in your demand forecasting, and extended process times. If there is any truth at all in the cliché, “if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it” then the greatest opportunity for improvement in most operations I have seen is in measuring, and as a result improving, the productivity of time that has already been paid for.
Oct 17, 2012 | Branding, Marketing, Personal Rant
This is a situation where a modest intellect has learned the language, and so can spew out a bunch of marginally related clichés. They understand some of the obvious stuff, can look at the numbers, and have a superficial understanding of customer behavior, and the context in which that behavior occurs, so they can babble about brands, marketing, and communication sufficiently well to fool some of the people, at least some of the time.
Real marketing is done by a very few very smart people who get to the deeper reaches of motivation and behavior, who are able to scrape off the over-burden of verbiage, and get to the real guts of the strategic and communication challenges being faced.
Marketing is inhabited by a group that is pretty ordinary, just look at the UAI’s required to get into the various marketing courses around the place. The smart people are doing something else. Is it any wonder that there is a real lack of good strategy and marketing intellect at the top of organisations, the people at the top who make the succession decisions see the lack of depth in the marketing “profession” and act accordingly.
This rant was motivated by a bloke I was pitching to in a sufficiently senior role to say “No”, who not only failed to grasp the basics of the argument I was putting, which could have been put down to a lack of communication skill on my part, but he also asked a number of questions that demonstrated he knew nothing, and to top it off, talked about himself a lot.
Save us from the idiots making decisions with nothing more than dartboard tools.
Oct 16, 2012 | Communication, Marketing
The way most of us see things is dependent on what we expect to see, and how it affects us. If you were a farmer with a just planted crop, rain is a great day, but if you are about to go on a picnic, rain sucks.
Similarly, marketing is about setting the context in the way we want our customers, and potential customers to see out product.
The iphone is widely understood to be a disruption of the phone industry, but as John Gruber of daringfireball points out with great insight, it is not. Rather, the iphone is a redefinition of the mobile computer, it just happens to have as one of its capabilities, the ability to make and receive phone calls, but that has almost become a minor item. What is really important is that it put the net into out pockets at all times.
Those phone makers left high and dry by the iphone, RIM, (Blackberry) Nokia, Motorola, at al, all tried to outdo the iphone by addressing the disruption, and building a better phone, but failed. It took those with the capabilities in software and computer hardware to get it at least partly right, Samsung, Google, and perhaps more recently Microsoft (although yet to be successful in the market) to make headway. These guys had little to do with phones, they built computers and the software required and evolving, and are flourishing.
Much is made of the “sameness” of the iphone 5, it is outperformed by Samsung’s galaxy on most objective parameters, but is still making all the money, so which is the more successful? Depends on your context doesn’t it.
Oct 15, 2012 | Leadership, Management, Strategy
To stay in business we all need to make money today, and we also need to understand where the money will be tomorrow, invest in these future cash generating activities, and sometimes make adjustments to the business model.
These adjustments are not just another re-organisation, but evolution in the way the enterprise interacts with and responds to changes in their competitive, technological and regulatory environment.
To a degree this is crystal-balling, predicting the intersection of your capabilities and customer needs, but it is more about being sufficiently agile to enable experimentation to occur in the manner in which you do business.
If you encourage and support such experimentation with the business model and customer offer in a framework that responds to the question “where will the money be in 5 years?” you will be in pretty good shape.
The old quote from ice hockey great Wayne Gretsky when asked what made him great, “I do not skate to where the puck is, but where it will be” is just as valid in business as it is in hockey.
Oct 10, 2012 | Leadership
We are in an evolving age of flattened, silo-less, collaborative enterprises, where accountability for outcomes is increasingly devolved to those teams and individuals on the “front line” who carry the responsibility for implementation.
Under these circumstances, the old carrot and stick management no longer works, and the replacements often leave many management groups struggling with the ambiguity, as employees fail to respond with initiative and enthusiasm for the new management style.
The dilemma was summarised for me by the rework of the old “give them an inch, and they take a mile” saying by a bloke who added, “if only”.
When you have a workplace largely educated and conditioned to following the established orthodoxies, rules and regulations that at best inhibit, at worst, penalise for initiative, why would the outliers and mavericks stick around?
Leadership and passion encourages the taking of the mile, and nothing really useful happens until somebody does.
