Feb 27, 2011 | Leadership, Personal Rant, Strategy
It seems to me that the government is on the horns of a dilemma.
On one hand, they need to appease the Greens, securing their votes, by introducing a carbon tax, a course of action that seems very sensible in the long run when you consider the weight of scientific evidence.
However, in so doing, Gillard will break what honest John Howard would call a “core promise” not to introduce one, hamstringing her ability to sell such a substantial change, at least without an election where the intention is on the table.
We have a two pace economy, digging stuff up and flogging it is the foundation of current prosperity, but we are no longer making anything, and the current “skills shortage” has little to do with employment levels, but everything to do with the gutting of education, particularly trade skills, over the last 25 years.
Now we are going to gut manufacturing, or what is left of it, with a tax that will do nothing to abate worldwide carbon levels, although it may make those who do not have to produce anything to make a living feel good.
There is some merit in the argument that a tax will stimulate innovation in the development of alternatives, and Australia should be in a good position to leverage the innovation, particularly as regards solar, but that is long term, the pain to manufacturing will be immediate, and I wonder if it is worth the pain, even if a miracle happens, and Gillard et al can sell it, and get re-elected at the same time.
This is what strategy is all about, choices, weighing the relative merits of a range of seemingly mutually exclusive options, determining where the best long term use of limited resources lies, whilst maintaining the current P&L. Posturing will not stand up to scrutiny, it takes intellectual honesty and transparency to make tough decisions and have the stakeholders prepared to support a course of action. Pity there is little of either evident in Canberra, or in the states.
Now we have sorted the carbon management issue, consideration needs to be given to a whole range of other strategic choices in health, education, taxation, Australia’s relationships, immigration, defense, and so on.
We seem to be a bit short on the vision thing!.
Feb 23, 2011 | Strategy
Which is the chicken and which is the egg?
Good strategy always requires good analysis as a foundation, but analysis without a clear understanding of the context of the analysis usually ends up as just data.
Effective strategy development generally has at its core a pattern of evidence that has been recognised as being of critical importance to the enterprise, either as an opportunity or as an emerging threat.
Evidence can be collected and massaged, but the recognition of the patterns in the data is a cogitative process, rather than a quantitative one.
Feb 22, 2011 | Management, Operations, Strategy
Boeing, for a while after it took over McDonnell-Douglas, “owned” the commercial airliner business, with only the Airbus consortium as competition in the large end of the business, although there are others in the small commuter end.
However, the 787 “Dreamliner” being 3 years late, and billions over budget, has seen a number of early adopter airlines move to the big new Airbus A380. In the case of Qantas, this decision took them from a one supplier airline, Boeing, to a two supplier airline, a huge decision in the long term context of the life of an airliner model, the 747 introduced commercially in 1970, and still going pretty strongly, delivering sales of spares, upgrades, training, and maintenance to Boeing.
Outsourcing, or “off-shoring” as it is in some cases often delivers a short term boost to a balance sheet, but the long term cost can be huge if it is not done well, and few do it well. Boeing appear to have stuffed it up with the 787, and will be paying the bill for many years.
I keep banging on about the phantom benefits of outsourcing, and the contrarian option of developing lean disciplines internally to retain and develop the capabilities to compete in the long term, and the very early appearance of a trend for bringing Intellectual Capital sensitive development “home”. The apparent challenges facing Boeing in the delivery of the 787 will provide lots of fodder for the argument.
Feb 21, 2011 | Branding, Customers, Operations
The world-wide recall in 2009 of 10 million vehicles across Toyota’s range must have cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but is dwarfed by the long term cost to their brand.
Now, the software blamed by pundits, politicians, sensationalist media, and the generally uninformed, for the accident that killed a family in California sparking the recall, has been cleared. Toyota comes out blameless, driver and dealer error in supplying the wrong floor mats, and not securing them caused the deaths.
The TPS disciplines which spawned the “Lean manufacturing” movement that has transformed manufacturing worldwide took over when the furor broke, and Toyota went looking for facts, seeking a “root cause” of the so called “Sudden Unintended Acceleration” problem, and finding nothing, commissioned unimpeachable outside engineers (NASA) to have a look, and predictably, they found nothing either. Meanwhile, the public was blasted by messages undoing 30 years of effort that positioned Toyota as a safe, finely engineered vehicle that would deliver performance and reliability for many years.
Toyota forgot that perception becomes reality, and by allowing the perception of their failure to remain in the market while they exercised TPS disciplines to seek a root cause error, consumers turned away. It will take a very long time, and a lot of effort to undo the damage not of their making.
There is a lesson for all marketers in all this, perception becomes reality, and it is hard to undo, even when the perception is wrong.
Feb 20, 2011 | Alliance management, Collaboration, Social Media
Things have changed, the tools of web 2.0 make collaboration, at least theoretically, really easy, so why it is so hard to get done?
Outside the web, where Wikipedia, Linux, Ideo and a few others have rewritten the rules, and boomed as a result, the output from new collaboration tools appears far more limited. Most businesses I deal with are struggling with co-ordinating a video conference, and that is about the end of the tools that they are using.
In a fundamental way, they need to consider the architecture of their collaborative efforts. What works for a co-located team, even if it has a few “fly-ins” will not work for a truly distributed team, or one that is working on a complex development, even when co-located. It seems a few rusted on practices need to be revisited:
- Responsibility for the outcome should be clear, along with budgets and timelines. It is the group that holds responsibility collectively, not individuals, and individual performance is measured by their contribution to the groups achievement of the outcome.
- The “how to” get the job done is left to the team.
- The team should be able to co-opt and manage outside skills as necessary to get the job done with relative freedom.
