Carbon strategy dilemma
It seems to me that the government is on the horns of a dilemma. On one hand, they need to appease the Greens, securing their votes, by introducing a carbon tax, a course of action that seems very sensible in the long run when you consider the weight of scientific...
Analysis or strategy
Which is the chicken and which is the egg? Good strategy always requires good analysis as a foundation, but analysis without a clear understanding of the context of the analysis usually ends up as just data. Effective strategy development generally has at its core a...
Another nail in the logic of outsourcing
Boeing, for a while after it took over McDonnell-Douglas, "owned" the commercial airliner business, with only the Airbus consortium as competition in the large end of the business, although there are others in the small commuter end. However, the 787 "Dreamliner"...
Toyota’s branding mash-up
The world-wide recall in 2009 of 10 million vehicles across Toyota's range must have cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but is dwarfed by the long term cost to their brand. Now, the software blamed by pundits, politicians, sensationalist media, and the generally...
New architecture of collaboration
Things have changed, the tools of web 2.0 make collaboration, at least theoretically, really easy, so why it is so hard to get done? Outside the web, where Wikipedia, Linux, Ideo and a few others have rewritten the rules, and boomed as a result, the output from new...
Authority and responsibility.
This is a story of 2 bosses. One bloke I worked for over a considerable period in two different corporations never told me exactly what to do. We agreed outcomes and the resources to achieve them, project time frames and milestones, and he was always willing to...
Spontaneous collaboration.
Forming and directing groups has become pretty easy with the advent of email, mobile phones and photography, face book, and other forms of mobile, instant technology applications. This reality is simply that the new tools have removed the transaction costs that...
Outsourced project agility
Finding professionals to develop stuff for you is getting easier by the day. A whole range of services are evolving to meet short term needs, by matching the booming IT capabilities in emerging nations prepared to work for what in a developed economy is peanuts, to...
Information access can get things done
Access to information, rather than being for abstract analysis, is a call to action which in the past has been to the individual, but now can be across huge numbers who have no connection apart from the cause. As the analysis of the dynamics of the changes occurring...
Consensus is not collaboration
These terms are often used as synonyms, as managers seek to evolve a culture of inclusion and shared responsibility, but they are markedly different. Collaboration is essential, and now so much easier given digital the tools to hand, and increased understanding of...