Brands are expressions of passion
The strongest brands are more like "movements" of like minded, usually passionate individuals, people to whom a brand has an emotional connection for some reason, it is much more personal than a demographic and socio-economic expression of "sameness" of the...
Parallel not sequential.
Supply or Value chains are essentially sequential, one activity logically follows the completion of the one prior, and in streamlining the timing and handover parts of a process, you can build great efficiency. However, great leaps in performance will not come from...
How do you measure customer profitability?
A vexed question, and managing customer profitability is as fundamental as managing the P&L, but possibly more complicated. It is usually unrealistic to measure the profitability of all customers, but most businesses live by the 80/20 rule, so concentrate on the...
Three basic questions for every business.
Making choices is the stock in trade of any manager, so following are a few questions you can reasonably ask yourself that will force you to consider some of the basic choices every business needs to ask itself. Which markets and products are we focused on? What is it...
Operational Efficiency Vs Productivity
These terms are often used interchangeably, often in my experience muddying the waters in situations where clarity is required. Efficiency is all about how well you use the status quo, productivity is more about how you leverage gains to be made from changing the...
The secret of being right.
No secret in being right, just be prepared to be wrong, and be prepared to accept the responsibility for being wrong, then learn from it. Thomas Watson Sr was spectacularly wrong when he said "there is a market for perhaps 6-8 computers in the world", but IBM went on...
Lean and six sigma
I am sometimes asked the differences between Lean and Six Sigma. The "toolboxes" for operational improvement represented by these two approaches contain substantial overlap, particularly at the relatively basic level where most improvement initiatives start. Lean...
Control in a supply chain.
Three things constitute the basis of decision making in most enterprises, Risk, Cost and Reward. Boiled down, this is what it is all about. In a supply chain, each participant does its own assessment and comes to a conclusion about the balance between RC&R in...
Incentive alignment in a chain.
One of the hidden challenges in most transformations of a supply chain to a demand chain, is the alignment of the incentives through the chain. For a demand chain to be successful, each point in the chain must see its own best interests best served by serving the best...
Through others eyes
When considering an important move, the range of possible reactions to the move by competitors often receives too little attention. Predicting competitive response to a move is of critical importance, and clear analysis should be done prior to committing resources. A...