Riding the skunk.
"Skunk works" is a term most are familiar with, indeed, so familiar that the pros and cons, and the do's and don'ts are debated endlessly. Weather a Skunk team separated from the main operations of an enterprise "delivers" or not is generally a function of the...
Communities of interest and practice
A community of practice used to mean a small group of specialists who engaged in face to face consideration of issues of mutual interest, resulting in innovative solutions to issues concerning their area of speciaisation. Interaction between "connectors" with similar...
Peer production.
What a nice term to describe the process of improvement that can occur in a voluntary manner, where the reward is not monetary, but the recognition of peers that you made a contribution to a worthwhile outcome. The value of "I did that"!! Linux and Wikipedia are both...
Manual Vs Electronic
Last week talking to a colleague, we agreed that a skill that seems to have been lost in the rush to electronic aids is being able to look at a bunch of numbers and know if it is approximately right or wrong. It seems that many over 50 just "know" if the column is OK,...
The Australian myth.
The new focus on Rural and regional Australia (R&RA) in the current parliament has great merit in ways hard to quantify. The nature of "Brand Australia", how we see ourselves, has always been about the wide brown land, the sunburnt country, the Akubra hatted...
Make it easy to do business
A frustrating "customer service" experience recently reminded me of this lovely parody of customer service meets lean principals. If it wasn't so true, it would be funny. Getting customers is hard, and getting harder, so when one comes to your door it is for a reason,...
Brand building brilliance.
The communication alternatives are mind-boggling today, but sometimes someone comes up with an innovative way to combine them. Imagine Social Responsibility Marketing linked with social networking and the broadcast media, backed by comment around the world, for what...
5 Sales sins.
Sales is something we all do, all the time, professionally as well as in our private lives. We may not always be selling a product for an employer, but we will be selling our ideas, priorities, time, and experience, in some way. Here are some simple rules: Talk as...
Digital trust
It seems that there is something at work that is largely unnoticed. We no longer trust what we read in newspapers, but we tend to trust what we see on the net, weather it be in wikipedia, on a site like Business Spectator that has journalists of real stature, or in...
New media Politics.
Isn't it interesting, the next election in NSW will be contested by a large number of independents, and they will all have a shot at being elected. It is pretty easy to just put this down to the appalling dross we have been putting up with for ages, but is it the only...