Thee secrets of successful innovation
Successful innovation rarely comes from a formulaic approach where the marketing department has a brainstorm, prioritises the outcomes, then they progress through a "gated" process culminating in a launch. Usually it comes from three sources: A sufficiently close...
Don’t listen to just your customers
Another of the management paradoxes littered through this blog , and this one is counter to almost everything I have ever written. In the context of true innovation, listening to customers exclusively leads you to adjusting, improving, repackaging what you currently...
Healthy deckchairs
It is a scary thought, but roughly 30% of our economy (Public sector expenditure) is subject to the disciplines of neither the market or democracy. Bureaucracies are institutions that thrive on complexity, it is far easier to make an existing process more complex,...
Transactions and obligations in a demand chain
Isn't it interesting, when we pay for something, we have an expectation of what that transaction will deliver to us, but there is little sense of lingering obligation. However, if we just do something for someone, any small piece of kindness or consideration, it...
Customers drive chains
Integrated value chains are nothing new. IBM had one before it started "outsourcing" what turned out to be the future to Microsoft and Intel, Ford had one at centered around the Dearborn factory, from where the company controlled by owning everything from growing the...
What is the problem, and how do we fix it?
Working my way through a book on the implementation of "Lean" called "Manage to learn" an interesting book that further evolves the textbook as a story genre started by Eliyahu Goldratt's best selling book "The Goal" originally published back in the early eighties, I...
Effectiveness, not just amount, of spending
All you hear about currently is the Australian "health debate" a debate the pollies have decided to have as a political exercise, are discussions about who gets to spend the money i.e. exercise the power, it has little to do with the health outcomes of Australians,...
Transparency effect
Can you imagine the changes that would have occurred in the behavior of the tobacco industry in the 70's and 80's had there been the "net-enabled" communication tools available then, when the big tobacco companies were conducting a rear guard action against those who...
What is different now?
"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn...
Visions & Values
These are sometimes used interchangeably, and they should not be, as whilst they go together, they are very different. Visions may change, values should not, and increasingly, as we are in a world of commodity offerings, and I suspect the long term is going to belong...