The fundamental management distinction: Principle or Convention?
My time is spent assisting SME's to improve their performance. This covers their strategic, marketing, and operational performance. Deliberately, I initially try and downplay focus on financial performance as the primary measures, as they are outcomes of a host of...
How do we prepare for AI roles that do not exist?
Most BBQ conversations about the future of AI end up as a discussion about jobs being replaced, new jobs created the balance between the two, and the pain of those being replaced by machine. It is difficult to forecast what those new jobs will be, we...
Are we in an AI bubble?
Nvidia 2 years ago was a stock nobody had heard of. Now, it has a market valuation of $US2.7 trillion. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft from the beginning of this year have invested $30 billion in AI infrastructure, seen their market valuations accelerate,...
Treat ‘prompt engineering’ as you would a ten year old.
Management is all over the place, scrambling to 'get AI'. A common failure of that scramble is a reality: rubbish in -- rubbish out. Outcome quality depends on two factors: Data quality. The quality of the data that is used to generate that outcome. The quality, depth...
Strategy does not include execution.
A short time ago I sat in a workshop where one of the featured speakers continued to conflate strategy and execution into the one process. Those who know me watched with amusement is I tried to maintain a philosophical silence. Rather than jumping up and...
A Future Made in Australia: Does feeding ourselves count?
The recent declaration of "A Future Made in Australia" by the Prime Minister has put the future shape of the nation’s manufacturing sector back on the agenda. There was however, nothing specific on the importance of agricultural innovation and value...
Why special purpose teams often don’t work.
Special purpose teams are generally formed to solve a problem. However, it seems that 'collaboration' has become so integral to many corporate cultures, that every problem becomes an opportunity to ‘collaborate’. Teams are often formed without sufficient...
Political Strategy: Choose between the now and the future.
Our current politics is an intensely adversarial, short-term, zero-sum game. Is this what is best for the country? The federal budget is due in a few days. Based on the selective leaking and conversations happening, the budget will be focused, or at...
Is 3% of GDP the right answer to our manufacturing complexity problem?
As we seek to move towards 3% of GDP as a measure of the R&D in the economy, we are assuming that simply increasing the percentage will increase the output, in some sort of linear manner. Ranking as we do at 93 on the Harvard list, squeezed between...
How do we measure and value resilience?
'Resilience' is a word we are hearing a lot these days and will hear more today. On this ANZAC day 2024, there will be a lot of words sprayed around that amount to acknowledgement of the resilience of ANZAC troops. They clung to the cliffs on the...