Planning and politics.
The reluctance of the Federal Government to be transparent about the assumptions underpinning the investment in the NBN would fail the tests of due diligence most boards undertake when making a major commercial allocation of resources. As a cynical shareholder in...
Innovation requires simplicity
Peter Drucker once said that innovation is the only sustainable competitive advantage, and most who have thought about it would agree. However, in most situations, this commitment to innovation tends to result in more and more potential products and technical...
Location of a consumers wallet
I am a member of three frequent flier programs, Qantas, Virgin and Singapore, and get frequent updates, offers, and spam from all three, all ignored. I know where and why my business is split, but they do not, and none have ever asked me the question, although it...
Long term trends, short steps.
Innovation breakthroughs are rare, but the innovation that rewrites the rules of an industry is the focus of most management attention. Most innovation activity, and the source of most value from innovation, comes in small steps, one day at a time, along a path whose...
The four challenges of collaboration.
When all the verbiage is removed, there seems to be four great challenges to effective collaboration, irrespective in my experience of the specific environment in which the collaboration takes place. The need to be cross functional, which cuts across all the...
Data free zone of innovation.
By definition, Innovation exists in situations where there is little information available to make an objective assessment of risk, rather than one where you can assemble a range of data to make that risk assessment. Submitting innovation ideas to a data driven test...
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,...