Mar 21, 2011 | Innovation, Lean, Marketing
This is an expression I have used for many years, it is just a metaphor for never throwing out an idea, leave it available for scrutiny later when you know more, or for parts to build something different, or just for inspiration when building the portfolio of projects
The brainiacs in Silicon Valley have now come up with a better expression, “Strategic Pivot” which is essentially the same thing, but geared specifically to innovation in the digital world. Perhaps unfortunately for silicon valley, not every innovation is a new app, most are far more mundane.
A new way of moving a product WIP from one production station to the next can be an innovation, as can an improvement in the process of collecting data on that movement, and further improving it by removing excess time and effort.
In either case, the metaphor, whichever one you choose, works. Never throw out an idea, just because you cannot see the value now.
Mar 20, 2011 | Leadership, Management, Personal Rant
An often heard claim, but leaders mean it, managers just mouth it.
Creating and nurturing a process of performance assessment should be a focal task of a leader, as it puts money in the bank over time. However, it is hard, confronting, and time consuming work, generally without a short term pay-off, and is virtually impossible to measure via the financial reports, still the default measurement for most.
There are a lot of frameworks out there, and lots of consultants ready to take your money to tell you how to do it, but without a determination to ensure future performance by investing in the capabilities of your employees, outsiders cannot really help.
However, two frameworks that may get you thinking.
The first is an essay by Marty Cagan, a successful venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Venture capitalists invest in ideas and people to deliver future returns, so being successful, Marty probably knows a thing or two about capability assessment.
The second approaches the challenge in a highly prescriptive manner, but curiously, if you look behind the avalanche of words, you see a similar approach to Marty’s, an analysis of the requirements to generate the required outcomes, analysis of the individual, and description of the gap. It is the Integrated Leadership System (ILS) that has evolved to provide a performance and assessment management framework for the Australian federal Public Service.
Between these two, there is enough to get a conversation started about the best way for your organisation to manage its “Greatest Asset” and hopefully lay the foundations for a system that reflects your needs and environment.
Mar 16, 2011 | Marketing, Social Media
Sorting the approaches and options emerging for on line marketing using social tools is sufficiently complicated to make your head break.
Logically, you use the net to try and sort out what is best for you under the circumstances you face, as the net is now the first stop when seeking information.
However, when you get there, it is like an overstocked supermarket, so many alternatives, each shouting their own greatness to you, offering you everything should you make the wise decision to “use me!!!!” Amongst all the e-shouting on the net, here is one that makes a lot of sense.
However, there is no substitute for the old fashioned marketing disciplines of understanding your customers needs, refining your offer of value to these customers, and communicating with them about how you can make their lives better, and most importantly, delivering on the promise.
In this context, the multiplicity of tools on the web become just more means to the end of adding value, they are not the end.
When confused, take the marketing Aspirin of keeping it simple, and ensuring above all else that you deliver on your promise, even better, over-deliver, to those few who trust you with their patronage.
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.
