Putting the “I” back in Alliances
The following list was imbedded in an article "putting the I back in Alliances" by Rosabeth Moss Canter, one of the better management thinkers around. It creates a simple list of things any successful alliance requires. Individual excellence: Both sides bring...
Too few marketers.
Brands take years, often decades of work, investment, and insight to develop, but they can be destroyed in the blink of an eye. In channels where there is an imbalance of power between links in the supply chain, such as FMCG retail, the retailers short term best...
Knowledge flow in demand chains
Technology has multiplied the potential for information flows through a value chain, but often human behavior hampers it as individuals use the available information to enhance their own position. This happens internally, but is even more prevalent in the interactions...
Marketing personnel productivity enhancement.
As a senior marketing executive in a previous life, in a business with a highly seasonal FMCG product range, I used to force the marketing department to spend substantial amounts of time in the field with our field sales force in the critical pre Christmas period. The...
The trouble with a “BHAG”
There is a growing trend, perhaps driven by the difficult times for management to set very big goals, the "Big Hairy Audacious Goals" proposed by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in their book "Built to last", and hope to create the focus necessary to achieve the BHAG...
Intuition & Instinct
That ability to make quick decisions that more often than not, turn out to the right choice is an envied and rare talent. How much is just pure talent, and how much is training, instinct, and experience? After 35 years of engagement with management, it appears to me...
Sales lead generation and qualification.
Every business has in some form a process for generating, qualifying, and allocating resources to sales leads. In many businesses, it is a very expensive, resource hungry exercise, so finding a way to short circuit the process, would be offer the potential for a major...
“Left brain: Right brain” and the status quo.
The usual interpretation of the function of the hemispheres of the brain is that left brain types become actuaries, and right brain types become artists. How then do you accommodate Albert Einstein, a great mathematician, and a great creative brain in one, Leonardo is...
“Revenge” behavior stalls alliance growth.
The impact of current behavior of all who are engaged in an alliance on the perceptions and expectations that will drive the evolution of the alliance into the future is pervasive. Success breeds expectations of more success, and failure breeds blame and retribution....
Piracy or obscurity?
Application of public technology in the past has been often seen as a means by which the state can exercise control, and as such has come under severe criticism from civil libertarians. Remember the howl that emerged with the "Australia Card" debate in the eighties....