Data, information and spin doctors.
Around a BBQ over the Christmas break, a bunch of us were chatting about what we would ban as a New Years resolution, as you do. Some innovative solutions to intractable problems emerged, peace in the middle east, an end to nuclear Iran/Korea/Pakistan, a clean coal...
New year Planning
As we approach Jan 1, the time many of us make promises to ourselves for the coming year, most of which don't last much past Jan 3, consider making a couple of real commitments: I will cease the busywork that achieves nothing, checking emails every 10 minutes, moving...
2010 in review, 10 trends to consider in 2011.
It is that time of year, when we look back and try and understand the forces that have driven our decisions and behavior in the past year, and that will continue to have a potentially disruptive influence in the coming year. In the spirit of the time, following is my...
Commercial sustainability needs people.
The next time you hear an argument that justifies moving Australian manufacturing to a low cost country in order to compete, refer to this post on the Evolving Excellence blog describing the work practices in a Toyota's Kyushu plant. Labor is much more than a pair...
Kaizen behavior to change culture.
Culture is about the hardest thing to change in any organisation, and I have seen many so called "culture change" initiatives fail at the first hurdle. If culture really is, as Michael Porter put it many years ago "the way things are done around here" and I believe it...
Impact of failure = Likelihood X Cost,– or does it?.
This formula is a pretty widely used one, and it can hold true both for a corporation, and an individual. At the intersection, where individuals are employees, it is doubly true, as failure can impact not just on the corporate coffers, but on the individuals prospects...
Solution or counter-measure
Applying a band-aid to a problem, a measure to counter the impact of a problem is often an attractive short term option, particularly to a management measured in the traditional way on output, to whom stopping a line is heresy. Superficially it may hide/solve or...
Enterprise productivity
Measuring productivity involves a combination of hard and soft measures, the soft ones being both the critical ones and the ones that have most impact. In 15 years of consulting across a range of businesses and industries, I have come to the conclusion that there are...
Ideapaint
A bit over a year ago, I conducted a "brainstorming" session designed to stir the creative juices amongst marketers and engineers in a fairly specialised manufacturing company. We did all the usual stuff, breakouts, whiteboards, butcher-paper, mixed in with some...
The parable of ‘Leaks and Horses.
Julian Assange has thrown the cat amongst the pigeons, but it was always going to happen at some time. The transparency capability delivered by the web has forever changed most commercial operations. It is naive to think that so called "classified" documents that...