Simplicity Vs mastery of the detail.
Throughout my experience one factor continues to be a foundation for success in pretty much everything I see. Keeping "it" simple, or "KISS" reduces complication and the potential for misunderstanding, turf protection, and unintended consequences, and is far better...
Over-experienced, Over-qualified, Over-age.
All sorts of changes are occurring in our working lives, but one that has huge potential to add to the economy, but is actively ignored, is the large pool of over 50's (of which I am one) who are working at far less than their potential, and willingness to contribute....
Value adding ratio.
Articulating a Customer Value Proposition, understanding which activities add value to the customer, and which do not, is core to any successful marketing activity. However, so many CVP's I see are a bunch of words dreamt up over a beer, and have little to do with...
Leadership Libraries replaced.
Leadership is a topic that has probably had more earnest academic stuff written about it than anything else, libraries would be denuded if all the material was suddenly removed. Whilst it is dangerous to reduce complicated concepts to a list of bullet points,...
Role clarity and performance.
Writing position descriptions for employees takes up a lot of management time, just another job that has to be done by a date. If this is the case in your business, you have missed the point, as it is people that make a business, not the other way around. To me it is...
The power of will, not won’t
When I gave up smoking some 25 years ago, I did it "cold turkey" albeit after a lot of practice. It was not easy, but probably not as hard as the industry supplying stop smoking aids would now have you believe. The single strategy, which I applied with considerable...
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...