Print or electronic, not really either/or
A Wall Street Journal op-ed by Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google argues that the demise of printed media, particularly newspapers and magazines is as much a result of their own hubris as it is the advent of new media, and that the opportunities for journalism have...
The next billions
In Australia, we are considering the NBN, and the impact it will have, and argue about the best way to deliver it, cost effectively. A further debate should be the impact of connecting the billions of people in the world not yet connected, and what that may mean to...
Innovation at web speed.
"Open source innovation" is rapidly becoming an accepted strategy, an increasing trend as the communication tools on the net make it progressively easier, and people think up new ways to use them. Eric Von Hippel a professor at MIT wrote "Democratising Innovation"...
Sell the problem
Watching The Gruen Transfer a couple of weeks ago, one of the panelists quoted one of the oldest adages in marketing, 'Sell the problem" as if it was a revelation. Fact is, addressing the problem is often forgotten as marketers become so entranced by the features of...
Mutuality and network development
Social networks have boomed, tools to enable the networks abound, MySpace, twitter, face book et al being the most well known, but many more fail than succeed, and they do so based on the degree of mutuality that exists. Bear with me here. Imagine 2 people who have...
Focus on the process.
Focusing attention holistically on a whole process, end to end, and the productivity of the process will improve, improving the outcome. When you focus just on the outcome, all you get is the opportunity to improve the efficiency of the existing process, but it will...
Value of the human brain Vs Cost of the hands.
In any environment, those on the front lines see ways to complete a task easier, faster, cheaper, better, simply because they are doing it all the time, it is just that we usually do not listen enough when the front line employees they try to tell us, and once bitten...
Social Capital revisited
It occurred to me that during the recent election campaign, and subsequent "Phony Government" that both sides over-used the term "Social Capital", as well as mis-using it. Whilst it was not one of the hollow slogans of the campaign, it got a pretty fair run as each...
The web laboratory
Product optimisation is not product discovery, the techniques to get the best results differ, usually markedly, as the challenge to collect data to mitigate risk for entirely new products is substantially more difficult than collecting the same data for what is...
Inventory reduction is an outcome.
It seems almost all improvement programs I see have as a central objective the reduction of inventories. That is pretty easy to achieve, order less, less often, and in smaller quantities, objective achieved. However, when you count customer service, and cycle times...