Oct 13, 2010 | Alliance management, Collaboration
It is a pretty simple observation that for a group to act collectively, there must be a strong central reason for them to do so. The larger the group, the more difficult it becomes to maintain this sense of collaborative security, and more and more dissention to individual decisions occurs.
For this reason, for large groups to be successful there must be a very strong purpose into which all members “buy” and that has the effect of enabling them to deal with the individual decisions they may not like for the sake of the central purpose, so long as there has been due process exercised in the decision making process.
Consider the difference between the disregard generally apparent towards our political parties, and the high regard we have for the ideals of a group like the Salvation Army, irrespective of what we may think about their position on spirituality, and the music they play on the corner on Saturday morning.
Oct 12, 2010 | Change, Leadership
Creating change in any organisation is a huge challenge to the capacity of an organsations leadership. Over many years of assisting in all sorts of projects, I observe it often tends to become overly complicated, perhaps over-intellectualised, so I have a simple 3 part framework that seems to work, and when a project wavers, it offers a grounding.
- Determine and articulate what needs to change, and why
- Agree and clearly communicate what it needs to change to, and what the end point looks like
- Build a program based on 1 and 2 against which you can drive the change, and measure progress.
This framework appears to work as well for a small change to a part of a processing line to an organisation wide culture change.
However, the danger is that the change by threes approach is inconsistent with the need to embed a hunger for continuous improvement which is a journey for which there is no end point, into the culture, so leadership is crucial.
Oct 11, 2010 | Communication, Marketing, Social Media
That democratic cliché “freedom of the press” is a bit misleading, because to be able to exercise it, you needed to own or control the capital equipment and distribution channel to get your message out, so clearly this freedom was limited to a very few.
However, freedom of the press has an entirely new dimension, as now anyone can publish, you just need a computer and a weblog account. Of course, you still have to get people to engage with what is written, but you can put it out there easily and cheaply.
This change in the balance of power is the most compelling change in the nature of news gathering and dissemination process since the invention of the printing press, and it is pretty clear that the “old” press is struggling with commercial sustainability, whilst on the flip side, the views on the web need a greater level of skepticism than the Financial Review.
Freedom of the press, and freedom of speech are now pretty much the same thing in most places around the world, we just need to be careful about believing what we read.
Oct 10, 2010 | Leadership, Management, Strategy
This is a term I commonly use to describe a management style that I believe delivers the best results to any enterprise.
In one sense, central management is loose, against a clearly articulated and understood strategic purpose, it allows line management to make decisions, determine activity priorities, encourages mistakes by enabling calculated risk taking, experimentation, and just getting things done that delivers value to customers.
On the other hand, management is very tight, there is a rigorous planning and risk management regime that does not weed out risk, but exposes it to scrutiny, there is a culture of quantification, but equally, recognising not everything, particularly new stuff can be easily quantified, and there is a deep commitment to continuous improvement, and all its associated disciplines.
In these circumstances, creativity will flouish without losing sight of the main game, but it calls for the enterprise leadership to give up a key attraction for many leaders, using the office to get people to do whay you say on a daily basis.
Oct 7, 2010 | Customers, Management, OE, Sales, Strategy
Since man sought to organise themselves beyond family groups, geography has been the fundamental organising principal of almost all the institutions created, it was really the only thing that made sense. Everything from businesses to empires and the church(s) were geographically organised structures.
Since the 70’s, many commercial institutions have attempted to reorganise along a customer or product driven logic, largely with limited success. Geography and the transaction costs associated with removing the natural barrier of distance have conspired to make it difficult and costly, and the old management silos are hard to break down until the enterprise is in real trouble, as IBM was in the 80’s.
For the last 10 years at a huge rate the net has removed geography as a significant driver of organisational structures. It simply makes no sense to now have multiple overheads in neighboring geographies, when the net tools enable the sharing of everything immediate.
The outcome, structure your organisation to focus on what keeps it alive, customers!
