Status quo defense as a profit detector.
Aggressive defense of the status quo by powerful firms, or a consortia of firms in some sort of industry lobby body often indicates a fat profit plum ripe for the plucking, or a closed shop that protects inefficiency. Perhaps they are the same thing. Look at the...
Lead from the rear.
Two meetings in two days that demonstrated to me one of the key attributes of a leader. The first, the group shut up until the leader said his piece, making sure everyone in the room knew he had a strongly held view. Everyone rushed to agree with him, despite the...
The other CV
Most people spend a lot of time polishing their CV's, particularly whe they are on the lookout for an alternative role. However, how relevent is the paper CV in the age of the cyber-presence? The first thing a prospective employer will do is google you, and hopefully...
Transaction and opportunity costs, 2 sides of the coin.
Transaction costs occur when you do something, opportunity costs, even harder to measure, occur when you do nothing. Transaction costs are well hidden inside the activities that take place in your business, and short of introducing activity costing, are usually hard...
Moore’s law finds other uses.
Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, used a graph 40 years ago to predict the rate of growth in IT capacity by stating his belief that the number of transistors that could be put onto a chip would double every two years. He was talking about computing power, a long way from...
Size and intimacy in a demand chain.
Power has shifted dramatically to consumers from the firms that inhabit the supply chains that serve them. Scale used to give market power that could be leveraged, but IT development has radically changed the location of the power towards the customer. Scale now just...
Innovation, or perhaps” Outovation”
The first syllable of the word "innovation", describes how most organizations see the process. Look inside the business for better processes, better science, better customer service practices, better product offerings. Problem is, that way you are always seeing the...
React…Respond….. Initiate.
Reacting to something takes little thought, it is easy. Responding to something is harder, it takes thought and usually some resources Initiating is really hard, it requires you to be prepared to be wrong! This is always hard, as it often leads to questions that...
The new “commons” of the 21st century
Then notion of "industrial commons" as a metaphor for the clustering of firms of a similar type in an area put forward by Gary Pisano of Harvard Business School is immediately attractive, as it easily explains things we have all seen, without recognising the...
Some thoughts on negotiation.
Negotiation is a daily activity of most managers, almost irrespective of the size of the organisation, and the industry it sits in. On many occasions, a conversation may not be seen as negotiation, as it lacks the adversarial background that highlights a negotiation...