Leadership and market research
The thing about market research is that it can only elicit responses to the questions that are asked from within the context of what they already know and understand. Innovative solutions are rarely a result of asking a group, or committee, about what they would like....
Digital no substitute, just complementary.
Why is it that in the face of plummeting communication costs, and remarkable availability of new tools to make it easy, that business travel continues to grow? On first glance, we should be travelling less, not more, but on further consideration, perhaps it is the...
Product Development Portfolios that work.
Creating and managing a development portfolio is a critical factor in the success of most commercial enterprises, but one that is done poorly in many I have seen. Some recent with a client struggling with the challenge for his organization served to clarify my...
Transparency and blame
Achieving transparency is at the core of a lot of what I do in the fields of demand chain development, strategic alignment, and mentoring leaders. Transparency enables emerging problems and issues to be identified, and addressed quickly, efficiently, and with a...
“Experts” stuff up negotiation
If you ever needed a lesson in the pitfalls of negotiating under pressure, take a look at the mess created by the agreement of the terms of the revised Mining Resources Rent Tax between the large miners, and the Federal government . If it wasn't so serious, it would...
About competition.
The scary thing about competition is that someone always loses, even if it is only an opportunity. Many would like to believe that we should all be friends together to save the pain, but outside the public sector, it does not happen like that. Successfully competing...
Waterfall Planning
The corporate obsession with planning, appropriate in principal often becomes just an exercise in managed optimism. Many times I have witnessed, and been party to budgeting and planning sessions that are driven by a notion that all the bad stuff that has happened this...
The 2 parts of innovation.
Usually discussion about innovation focuses on the new stuff, the things that have, or need to change to deliver a changed outcome. During a discussion recently about "green electricity" in Australia, specifically solar power, it struck me that the costs of the Photo...
Down in the weeds.
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it is the driver of everything that contributes to improvement. Doesn't matter if it is improvement in a factory, using the "5 why" tool, or some question, the answer to which advances our knowledge of space. The driver is...
Groups need a purpose
It is a pretty simple observation that for a group to act collectively, there must be a strong central reason for them to do so. The larger the group, the more difficult it becomes to maintain this sense of collaborative security, and more and more dissention to...