Apr 15, 2010 | Leadership, Strategy
These are sometimes used interchangeably, and they should not be, as whilst they go together, they are very different.
Visions may change, values should not, and increasingly, as we are in a world of commodity offerings, and I suspect the long term is going to belong to the few that have a set of core values that drive behavior.
Google to date has managed to keep its essentially commodity offering of search sufficiently differentiated and interesting that it dominates the scene, and is the latest in a very small group of brand names that have become verbs. However, in China, the fastest growing search market, and inevitably the biggest at some point, Google are modest sized players, so their decision to not censor search requests as per the demand of the government and risk being precluded from the market tells us a great deal about the values of the company.
In the long term, this decision, consistent with the Google value of making information freely available to all, will benefit the business, although the short to medium term is likely to be painful financially, and disastrous for their market position in China.
Apr 14, 2010 | Change, Leadership, Management
Deep knowledge is pretty common these days, the facilities to accrue it are readily and freely available, and it is no longer a key differentiator.
However, what is still not common is what has always separated the run of the mill to the standout, organisations with engaging leadership, motivated people, and good judgment.
Judgment comes from a combination of deep knowledge, varied experience, qualitative or spatial skills, analytical skills, and a preparedness to learn from experience. It is primarily a personal quality, but increasingly it is becoming a pre-requisite for an organisation to take on these human qualities via its articulation of purpose, values, and emergent strategy.
A businesses I had some contact with a while ago had deep knowledge, there were PhD’s galore, but the lack of judgment and wide experience had hamstrung their efforts in the face of a changing competitive environment. The changes necessary will be challenging and painful to the people, and their view of their roles, probably not all will make it despite their undoubted knowledge, as the business model must change, and with it the way they create and sustain value.
Knowledge is a pre-requisite for success, but is not a guarantor of success.
Apr 13, 2010 | Leadership, Management, Operations
Getting collaboration when you really need it, when the interaction can add value is usually at the beginning of a project. The closer you get to the completion of the project, the more the parameters tend to be set, it is the detail that changes, a much more mechanical process of executing what has been agreed through the early collaboration stages when things were more flexible and creative.
However, it is often towards the end of the project, particularly when the outlook is positive, that it becomes easier to attract those who may have been useful at the beginning, but whose contribution later will only cause hesitation and changes that result in a slippage of delivery dates for the project.
Of course, the worst “collaboration” is when someone exercises institutional power after the point where it is useful.
Towards the end of a project, it is co-ordination and project management that is needed, not collaboration, which should have happened at the beginning. How often it gets all arse-about!
Apr 12, 2010 | Marketing, Strategy
Great marketing strategy is hard to develop, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it.
The difficulty lies in the need to hold several often opposing ideas in the brain at the same time, very hard for most.
First, where to compete. This may be geography, channel, product category, market segment, and so on.
Second, how to compete. This may be the media used, branding strategy, articulation of the value and differentiation of the product, which of a choice of initiatives will be followed, which measures will be used, and so on.
Following one logic is easy enough, but the necessity to reconcile and make the trade-offs and choices necessary to hold two, many of which are mutually exclusive, is very hard.
Apr 11, 2010 | Demand chains, Management, Operations
Developing a forecast of what you need to make to sell is a different proposition to doing a demand forecast, it is much more than a semantic difference.
A forecast is usually an extrapolation, sometimes very sophisticated, but an extrapolation nonetheless, of the past, and the only thing we know for sure, is that the future will be different.
A demand forecast looks at the drivers of demand, essentially looking backwards through the supply chain from the customer, and anticipating the level of demand by factoring in all the things that drive the customer to order a volume of product in any given period.
ERP systems are driven by forecasts, they are the core of any system, and the more accurately the forecast, the better the system works within the limitation of the rules written in. However, when the forecasts are informed by the drivers of demand, not just the inventory levels and automatic restocking rules in place, the value that can be delivered in vastly enhanced.
