Conformance and change
Most efforts to improve Operational Efficiency (OE) have at their core the elimination of variation in a process. It starts by setting standards, measuring the variations, and then progressively eliminating the causes of the variations, until you have a repeatable...
Efficiency and Agility.
Further to the earlier post, "An agile demand chain" that drew the distinction between agility and flexibility, consider the differences between efficiency and agility. In many plants, efficiency has been built at the expense of agility, as long runs of product...
Free stuff sells
Yesterday I went to a free concert in Darling Harbour in Sydney, and saw Jeff Lang who plays "my music" the blues, and must be one of the best lap slide players in the world. Point is, it was free, and he rocked the place, and judging by the reaction, he engaged with...
The Queen of Marketing.
Today is the Queens birthday long weekend holiday (it always falls on a Monday, strange that) in a couple of Australia's states, not all, and it is not even her real birthday. Obviously, someone failed to get the message about when the Queen was actually born, but...
The hard bit, and the glory bit.
Great, the big presentation nailed it, the sale is made, the goal achieved. When the cheering is over, and the empties from the celebration cleared away, perhaps a reflection on what really made the sale would be useful. The presentation did not make the sale, it was...
What Sol taught us.
The current debate in Australia about executive remuneration, kept alive recently by the departure of Sol Trujillo from Telstra, about who gets what, and how much is enough, is essentially a spurious debate about supply and demand for executive "talent" colored by...
Plan for the worst, hope for the best.
The CEO of a significant business in an industry I know well was walked very recently after the collapse of profitability over the last 6 months. From the outside, after looking at the public reports, a number of common misconceptions are evident: The expectation that...
The death of GM
Did we ever need a better illustration of the hubris caused by a concreted in status quo than the sight of General Motors, the former pin up of American manufacturing might going into chapter 11 yesterday? Ironically, over the past 25 years as GM struggled, it bought...
Who do you speak to?
The churn of employees in large companies often creates difficulties in retaining a continuity of relationship with customers. This particularly happens in situations where a buyer has substantial market power, such as a large retailer. How do you build a relationship...
What truly differentiates you?
In planning sessions, much time is usually spent defining target markets, reviewing sales histories and projections, new product schedules, what customers were doing with competitors, and so on. Sometimes there is discussion about what truly differentiates you from...