The APP report, a great idea squandered
Years ago as a senior manager in a large organisation, part of the monthly routine was to write an APP report: Achievements, Problems, Plans, kept to an A4 page, used as a scene setter for the more detailed monthly report. At the time it was a pain in the posterior,...
Carbon emotionalism
Am I the only one, or are others getting as sick as I am of the shallow, cliché ridden utterances of both sides of this "debate"? The government is pushing their carbon tax, which will become law on July 1 next year, making the fundamental mistake of calling it a...
The organisation as a village.
Thinking about they way organisations work, the "industrial" model of hierarchical functional management, expertise and knowledge hoarded, and little transparency of effort and outcomes is way past its use buy date. We are social animals, who evolved in a village,...
SME’s take heart!
Ask a SME manager in packaged goods, "would you like a phone call from Woolworths ordering stock of your new product for every store in the country?" and you will most likely get a tear with the nodded head. Enter the "Orabrush" story, they got the call from Walmart...
To train or not to train.
One of my clients, a modest sized business inhabiting a narrowing but quite deep niche of manufacturing, has over a period of time put considerable resources into training their essenial technical people to be expert in the fields vital to their success. A topic of...
“Dad Dancing”
What a great term, coined by Euan Semple, to describe the phenomenon of older (largely) male senior executives pretending they have "got" social media. Like many others, I spend a lot of time trying to persuade people of the value that can be generated by intelligent...
Reference class forecasting
People routinely forecast optimistically, they under-forecast costs, and over-forecast outcomes. We have all seen it happen repeatedly in businesses and the public sector, most of us have seen it on personal level. Demand planning is the core of effective operational...
SME’s in FMCG in a tight spot.
SME's in the Australian food industry are up against it if they see their futures as suppliers to the major chains, who require a combination of utter commitment, globally competitive costs, and supply certainty requiring substantial scale and the attendant capital...
When marketing doesn’t matter
Rubbish you say, marketing always matters. Well, the next time you try and get some sense out of Optus or Telstra when you have anything that does not fit into an easily packaged Q&A form for someone in Bangalore who does not know Sydney from Senegal , try and...
How do I make money from Social Media?
About the most commonly asked question on the net is how to make money," how do I monetarise this great idea"?. To my mind, it is the wrong question. The right one is "How do I deepen the relationship of those who are attracted by the great idea"?. When you have made...