Defining the future of agriculture
Most of the really great innovation that happens has as a core component, a re-definition of what the future should look like. From Orville and Wilbur Wright, to Henry Ford, Martin Luther King and Steve Jobs, the words they used explained why they were doing ...
4 Challenges of Urban agriculture.
As our cities continue to suck people off the land, and grow bigger, swallowing adjacent farm land, we face the challenge of how we feed ourselves into the future. It may not be a problem now, or in 5 years, but it will be a problem. China's urban middle class is...
An Authority or In Authority.
How often have you been in a position of trying to get something done in the face of an illogical or bureaucratic impediment ? It is enormously frustrating, Authority being exercised. On the other hand when faced with complexity, ambiguity, or technology beyond our...
3 foundations of demand chain success
Creating a demand chain out of an environment forged by a competitive and opaque supply chain mentality is no small task.This change is particularly challenging in agriculture where there is considerable regulatory and interest group oversight and thousands of years...
Marketing debt.
I have just been a part of a post investment review with a client, looking at what a significant investment in capital equipment has delivered, compared to the planned outcomes, that underpinned the Capex. Not a pretty sight, and now they have to learn the lessons...
Digital freedoms.
Digital technology has offered all of us an astounding range of opportunities to challenge and interact with our social environment, creating as we go. Gary Hamel has summarised them into a "5 C" list,: Contribution Connection Creation Choice Challenge. You read them,...
The pendulum of social
As a boy, I used to go to the local grocer with a few bob in a knotted handkerchief, get a standard bag of goodies, bread, butter, and a few chops in return. The grocer knew what my Mum had sent me to get, and she knew about how much it would cost, and any...
How to herd cats.
Everyone knows herding cats is impossible, right? Quite often this is a metaphor used to apply to NGO's and voluntary organisations, bureaucracies, particularly local government, farmers, and children. Getting them to one place, at one time, in an organised and...
3 questions to apply “Lean” to social media.
Lean thinking is well established in manufacturing and office operations, but social media? Hardly? Lean thinking is all about the removal of anything that does not add value to the customer. So, if we extend this a bit to potential customers as well, given that ...
Crying for a Lean agricultural demand chain
Lean thinking, evolving from the Toyota Production System is changing manufacturing world, but agriculture has a long way to go. Just as building cars used to be a production oriented operation until Toyota turned it on its head, so too is agriculture production led....