Jun 5, 2011 | Collaboration, Leadership, Operations
Consider, what the people on the production line are thinking about right now, finishing work, the fishing trip on the weekend, the necessity to get the car fixed and registered by next Monday, how can they pay that huge electricity bill, the game last night?
Think how much more productive it would be if they were thinking about how to do the job better, quicker, with less rejects, less risk of injury, to tighter more consistent specs?
And then consider weather or not it is a failure of the management culture that they are not doing so?
Googles 20% time, the famous 3M time, works for them, why not for everyone?
It is not easy to engage employees in this way, very few are able to do it, which is exactly why it is worth doing, as it delivers a huge advantage.
Jun 2, 2011 | Collaboration, Management
Setting an agenda for a meeting is a crucial but easily dismissed management tool, although the capacity of the chairman to stick to it plays a role in how effective the meeting becomes.
When setting an agenda, it is useful to consider the interaction of the thee basic reasons for having a meeting:
To impart information
To collaborate and build knowledge
To gain permission for a course of action.
Often meetings have these things mixed up, creating confusion, so being clear about the role of an agenda item, and grouping them together by their function can be extremely useful. Better still, have three meetings, but often this is not practical, as in a board meeting, or complex negotiation, so create breaks in the proceedings as you proceed from one form to another.
Jun 1, 2011 | Customers, Marketing
Considering in a recent workshop the parameters of service innovation being delivered by the enterprise concerned, we boiled down the variables to just two.
- What is it that the customers is trying to achieve that using our product will deliver better than any alternative?
- How easy (or hard) is it to do business with us, and how can we improve the experience?
It really seems too simple, but sometimes the simple delivers the best outcome, complicating it just gets in the way of clear thought.
When we answered these two simple questions, the follow up activities were obvious, as were the costs, necessary changes, and implementation timetables.
May 31, 2011 | Change
Just imagine Rip going to sleep in 1991.
His world was made up of pyramid shaped organisations organised geographically, and most likely he worked for one person in the same location. Rip got his news in the paper the next day, so long as he paid for it, and the proprietor/editor considered the item to be “news” worthy of printing, almost everything was sent by post, although the Fax had just burst onto the scene. When on holidays he took a few photos, then dropped the film into the local chemist for processing, getting the photos back in a week or so, the telephone was the big black thing in the corner with a rotary dial, 1 per household, and the computer at work took up an air-conditioned room, and involved the incantations of serious geeks to get them to work on Wednesdays, petrol is .20c a litre, and the hole in the Ozone layer has just been discovered.
Imagine his surprise to wake up in 2011, less than a generation later. Newspapers are virtually redundant, and news is free, businesses are global and the pyramid structure has been replaced by groups and matrices, the internet has replaced the post and encyclopedias, phones are devices that go anywhere, do anything, and photos are immediate, cheap, and transmittable on these funny phones, the environment is the great moral issue of our time (sic) and petrol in 1.48 a litre, with a Woolworths discount, and you have never actually met most of your friends.
Scary to think how disoriented he would be if he had slept for another 20 years, and woke up in 2031. You are awake, how ready are you for the changes coming in the next 20 years, as they will be greater than those of the last 20.
May 30, 2011 | Strategy
Strategy is all about making choices about where available resources will be allocated, considering both the benefits and risks of alternatives in the context of opportunity cost.
In this country we have reserves of natural gas tied up in seams below some of our richest agricultural land, the Hunter Valley and Darling Downs being just two.
To liberate this gas, which has the potential to offer us an alternative to coal fired power for many years, we run the huge risk of destroying the agricultural land above it.
At some point, the community needs to acknowledge this choice, and make it recognising the consequences, and there are severe consequences whichever path we tread.
My concerns is that we make the choice unwittingly, by stealth as state governments and power utilities and exporters nibble away at the deposits, bit by bit, until we wake up one day the deed is done.
In this link to Business Spectator is a link to a documentary “Gasland” which documents what is happening in the US. OK, it presents one side of an argument, but that one side is truly scary. We need the debate in this country to be wider than just the local communities that will be affected, it needs to be the whole Australian community.
This strategic choice is perhaps the major one we face in the environmental debate, but is one that appears to me to have little in the way of oxygen in the community.
