If you can’t measure it you can’t manage it. Right?
It is a truism that if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. Largely those who have practiced measuring and then managing for improvement have done well, Toyota with their TPS have taken over the world auto industry, and 6 Sigma, first embraced by GE has driven...
Loud Vs right.
New communication mediums have allowed small groups, and individuals to make a lot of noise, but the volume of noise does not necessarily relate to the logic or accuracy of their position, just to their ability to make noise. Listen for the validity of a point of...
A point of view.
We talk about vision, mission, and all the rest, but at a more fundamental level, evolving a point of view, shared throughout the firm, about the "shape" and trends of the industries we are in, and those of the industries we intersect with, is a really basic thing...
The road to “free”
The path to free will be a major challeneg for the current century, as the price of stuff follows the marginal cost of producing it down to virtually free. Music is effectively free off the web, despite the best efforts of the music industry, yet the other parts of...
A brand or a “narrative”
Politicians on both sides of Australian politics are calling for a "narrative" to describe the values that the electorate should hold dear, particularly advocating a set of values that happen to be consistent with theirs, and their particular brand of politics. What...
Road to the top.
In a world of disruptive change, the perhaps usual path to the CEO's office needs to be rethought. Over the last 50 years, CEO's have largely come from accounting and business management backgrounds, more latterly, marketing & strategy have had their shot, but in...
Have we forgotten how to communicate in writing?.
Yesterday I received a number of communications, by various means that broke all the accepted rules of grammar, spelling, and what an old fogey like me considers common courtesy, and it got me thinking. Email, phone text, and now twitter and its ilk have had an...
The facts and the stories.
Remember your history teachers, one who just had you remembering the dates of events, hard work remembering, and why bother anyway, but what about the one who told you about the people, and engaged you with the stories around the dates and events? It became easy to...
Measuring the quality of a sales lead.
Generating and qualifying leads is a key function that rarely receives the attention it deserve, and is rarely measured for effectiveness other than looking at sales results. Like any process, if it can be measured against performance standards, improvements can be...
Category management and demand chains.
Demand chains are a representation of the drivers of "flow" through a supply chain, a concept familiar to those engaged in "lean" initiatives, when the motivator to the flow is demand rather than an ability to produce for inventory or against a forecast of sales....