Jun 7, 2012 | Management, Marketing, Small business, Strategy
Anyone who can read can read a Keats sonnet, but not everyone can “see” the lyrical quality, and feel the passionate introspection most have at their core. Those who can are truly literate in English poetry.
Data Literacy, a term I like, similarly implies not just an analytical capability, but also an intuitive capacity to understand the nuances and hidden gems in data, rather than just the capability to be informed by apparent outcomes.
Have you ever seen people making stupid decisions while pointing out that the data justified them?
I see it all the time. It seems to me that there should be a knowledge building chain here, rather than just a data analytical one:
- Gather data,
- Analyse data,
- Apply healthy skepticism to the outcomes,
- Gather more, preferably counter intuitive data,
- Pursue the trends, outliers, inconsistent data, apply informed analytics rather than statistics,
- Synthesis of the complex, often paradoxical information,
- Informed intuition, and data literacy evolves.
Not all numbers are equal, some are more reliable and informative than others, simply because they are the result of tested assumptions, and more and better informed questioning. The development of literacy takes time, effort, and resources, but is worth it.
Jun 5, 2012 | Change, Lean, Management, OE, Operations
Robust, repeatable, and easily taught processes are the foundation of good outcomes. It therefore makes sense to consider the factors that separate good processes from poor ones, the effective from the ineffective.
The measure of the process has two parameters:
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- Repeatability. The outcome is repeatable, it has become the way things are done, so has an element of “automatic” about it.
- Agility. In apparent contradiction to the above, effective processes must also be sufficiently agile to accommodate the short term stuff that just happens, and flexible so that they can evolve to continue to deliver optimum results in response to the changes in the environment in which they operate.
Over 35 years of participating, observing and analysing processes, there appears to me to be a small number of enablers that drive effective processes. The weighting of these factors is different from situation to situation, but all are evident to some extent in every successful location.
- Deliberate Design. Successful processes are the outcome of a deliberate design. Sometimes the design comes after a process has evolved, and it is modified and optimised post birth, other times, the design is a deliberate response to a situation that requires a process.
- Infrastructure support. Processes do not survive in a vacuum, so the organisational and operational infrastructure, and the culture of the organisation play a significant role in their success. Without any of these three infrastructure foundations, a process will become sub-optimal.
- There is an “owner”. This is just another way of saying that someone in the organization takes specific responsibility for the effective management and support of the process. The more important the process, the more senior the process owner should be. In almost every situation, a process adds to other broader processes, and each component should have its own owner. Eg. An inventory management process has many sub-processes, from the documentation of deliveries to the appropriate allocation of purchase order numbers and general ledger postings. The “Inventory Management” process may be owned by the CFO, but the supporting components will be owned by others at the more operational levels.
- Process metrics are in place. The old saying, “you get what you measure” is accurate, without performance measurement against current criteria, as well as some that may reflect how the organisation expects the process to evolve, it will solidify at sub optimum performance levels.
- Process improvement. Continuous improvement of processes is a feature of successful businesses, the environment in which businesses operate is subject to ongoing change, and therefore the enabling processes need to evolve to best reflect the environment. In an apparent paradox, improvement is really only possible in a situation of stability. To improve a process you need to be able to identify the impact of a change in the process on the outcome, and you can only do that when the impact of all the existing variables are known.
Jun 4, 2012 | Change, Innovation, Management, Marketing
On a flight from a regional town last week, the attendant went through the nonsense of the “safety speech”. Instructions on how to do up the seat belt as if nobody knows is pretty dumb, but of total irrelevance is the instructions on how to use the life-jacket. I remain unconvinced that a little whistle and light will do much good if the engine stops at 20,000 feet, and the only water within 100km is in farmer Browns property dam. What about a parachute?
However, it is all taken so seriously, passenger jokes are not appreciated at all. Surely an example of a mould that needs busting.
Another mould more likely to be busted by the avalanche of mobile and electronic payments innovation is the banks credit card and cheque business model.
I have observed the missed opportunity by banks before, and the pace of change is accelerating rapidly picking up as Apple, Google, Paypal, and a host of startups like “Levelup” “Square” see the opportunity in disruption, and are chasing hard, often using technology that evolved in an ecosystem with nothing to do with banking.
These changes pose a huge problem for banks, one that their legacy structures and business models are apparently having big problems addressing. The role and performance of banks around the world over the last decade, and in the current European mess has removed any residual loyalty consumers may have had, and opened them up to non bank competition that will change the nature of banking in the coming decade. Opportunities abound to bust the current mould.
May 30, 2012 | Branding, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media
This new avenue to live broadcast, as distinct from posting a video on Youtube, seems to me to be a game-changer.
Social media lives by interaction, engagement, that is what gives it its power, and to be able to go live to an audience, even if it is just your own family at first, offers the opportunity for the networking capacity of social media to accelerate at a logarithmic rate.
For a while I have wondered at the task facing Google competing against Facebook, which has an established base now of a billion, they have built formidable barriers to exit and entry, but “on air” could just change the equation.
The momentum seemed to be moving slowly towards Google, but this innovation will give it a great big shove, particularly in the light of the facebook IPO, with the shares currently being traded at 10% less than the issue price, and 25% below the peaks reached on the big day. There appears to be a healthy dose of cynicism that has suddenly emerged as a result of the obscene amount of wealth facebook insiders have skimmed, whilst the gullible have done their dough, and this cynicism can only assist Google+ build some much needed competitive momentum.
May 29, 2012 | Lean, Management, Operations
Return on Investment is the basic calculation made to assess any investment, but too often gets complicated by all sorts of assumptions and forecasts.
In these days of rapid prototyping, access to A/B testing tools using the web, and the logic of many small bets in the innovation process rather than a few large ones, the calculation becomes less important if you follow the simple rule:
“Keep the “I’s” small, and nobody will bother you too much about the “R”
