Mar 11, 2026 | Collaboration
You just came out of a meeting. Five executives, forty-five minutes consumed, in total three and three quarters hours of management time.
Calculate the direct cost, and consider the opportunity cost of that meeting and ask yourself:
What decision did we make?
Who is accountable for resulting action?
Too often meetings become social and political timewasters, a huge millstone on productivity that enables posturing, offers an echo-chamber for the noisy ones, and wastes time and money.
There is plenty of great information about how to run meetings on the web.
Have minutes of the previous, have an agenda, nominated begin and finish times, ensuring everyone has the chance to speak up, and so on.
The following is none of that.
Most meetings are, or should be, for the making a decision, ensuring alignment, and allocation of accountability. Some have a legitimate purpose of creating community, generating, and clarifying a common objective, but they can be subjected to the same following three step process I have found to be a useful tool.
- Articulate the decision, or purpose, the meeting has been called to make.
- Examine the pros and cons of the decision, with particular reference to examining the worst case if the choice made is wrong, and the steps that eventuality might necessitate.
- Ensure that everyone in the meeting knows who ‘owns’ the decision, and is accountable for implementation, feedback, and recommending and deploying any necessary adjustments.
Meeting for the sake of meeting may be the greatest productivity killer I have ever seen.
Header credit: Tom Gauld in New Scientist magazine.
Aug 30, 2024 | Collaboration, Marketing, Small business, Strategy
Identifying, building, defending and leveraging competitive advantage has been, and will remain, the foundation of successful marketing.
It is also the essence of strategy: making choices with incomplete information that serve to shape the future to your benefit as it arrives.
The challenge is, the location of competitive advantage has moved, and many, if not most, have failed to pick the move.
Think about it.
Until the early 2020’s, competitive advantage was still all about brand, scale, control of supply chains, access to capital, and the ‘old boys network’. To use Charlie Mungers description, they constituted the ‘Moats’ around successful businesses. Kodak, Xerox, GE, GM, Exxon, IBM, Wal-Mart, P&G, and the banks and insurance companies ran the world on the basis of wide and deep moats built on these 5 factors.
Suddenly, the world moved on.
We watched as a raft of new businesses leveraging the capabilities of the internet took over. Along with the obvious Amazon, Facebook, Alibaba, Google, Uber, Air BnB, eBay, Netflix, Salesforce, and others that are pure internet plays, you had Apple, Microsoft, and more recently Tesla, combining the connectivity of the net with the ‘old school marketing moats’ in whole new ways.
What made the difference?
Each of the newbies benefitted from network effects.
Those that dropped out of sight did not.
Even some of the tech giants of the very early 2000’s, such as Yahoo and Alta Vista have dropped out of sight because they failed to recognise the potential value they had in their hands. They did not leverage the potential network effects.
Those network effects have two differing core types:
- An ecosystem of complementary, and often partially competitive enterprises that support each other’s efforts. This occurs particularly often in R&D, early-stage commercial development and in logistics and supply chain management.
- Double sided markets, such as eBay, Facebook, and Air BnB, where the value of the offering increases with the number of people connected to it.
The answer to the question posed in the header: in your networks!
On a simple scale you see it all the time in retail. The specialist shoe shop in the mall collaborating and cross promoting with the fashion dress shop.
Your networks will build as you create value for others greater than the cost of being a part of the network.
Aug 22, 2024 | Collaboration, Communication, Governance
Throughout history, humans have existed in small groups, tribes, and clans. We have worked together for the common good of the small tribe, and often, perhaps most often, been at odds with the tribe across the river.
British anthropologist Robin Dunbar introduced his theory that humans can maintain stable social relationships with no more than 150 people. This is a theory now so well accepted that ‘Dunbar’s number‘ has almost become a cliché.
The phrase ‘Stable Social Relationships’ has particular relevance in the age of social media platforms. How many friends do you have on Facebook, connections on LinkedIn, followers on Instagram?? For many, it is way beyond 150, often into the many hundreds, and often thousands.
How do you maintain Stable Social Relationships’ with that number of people?
Answer: you cannot.
Social media gets the blame for all sorts of things, rightly so, but it is not the fault of the platforms, it is the fault of evolution.
Our application of technology has run way ahead of our evolutionary capacity to manage it and retain the relationships that made us the most successful species ever.
It seems to me that the growth of private messaging, reversion to personalised even hand written notes, and emotional engagement of ‘Local’ things is a response to the ‘platformisation’ of our social relationships.
I think it is a trend that will continue and grow.
The power of social media platforms will slowly erode as more one to one enablers incrementally retake the ground lost. In the process, we humans will build up ‘evolutionary resistance’ to their power.
I do however see some hurdles in the way, the dark side of social media is as powerful as ever, and Dr Dunbar has little advice on that score.
Header cartoon credit. Lynch. (I have no idea where I found it)
May 14, 2024 | Collaboration, Leadership
Special purpose teams are generally formed to solve a problem.
However, it seems that ‘collaboration’ has become so integral to many corporate cultures, that every problem becomes an opportunity to ‘collaborate’. Teams are often formed without sufficient reference to the experience and capabilities required to define and address the problem.
When you want a problem assessed, and a resulting action to remove it, you must hold somebody accountable for the outcome.
A process or task that is not attached to a person’s name will rarely be optimised.
Often when an ad hoc team is formed in response to a perceived problem, the performance of that team becomes marginal, simply because it is always somebody else’s job to be accountable for all or part of the solution.
The task of a team is to:
- Define a problem by looking at the blockage from many perspectives provided by the individuals in the team. This is why the choice of personnel is critical. Do not make the common mistake of allocating personnel who seem to have the time to a team. Allocate personnel by expertise and leadership styles.
- Generate possible solutions, and then:
- Pick one possible solution, perhaps after some initial experimentation, and then:
- Allocate an individual to be accountable for the execution of the chosen course of action.
- Rinse and repeat.
Do that, and the team will deliver results when members have been selected by the capabilities necessary, assuming you also give them the resources needed to do the job being asked of them.
Failure to assemble a team carefully, which requires leadership, will ensure little more than a gabfest.
Header cartoon credit: Tom Fishburne at www.Marketoonist.com.
Mar 21, 2024 | Collaboration, Governance, Marketing, retail, Strategy
Collaboration between competitors is illegal, but tough to prove. It is also the natural state of affairs in an oligopoly.
When a competitive market evolves over time into an oligopoly, the focus of management attention of the remaining oligopolists moves from the customer to the competitor. With the resources available to an oligopolist in any decent sized market, they will know in considerable detail the strategies, internal processes, pricing, and resource allocation choices made by their competitors almost as quickly as they happen.
Supermarket competition in Australia has evolved in this manner. It has turned from ruthless competition for customers 40 years ago, to ruthless collaboration between the two major players now.
Collaboration is illegal, and I am sure that the leaders of the two supermarket gorillas are not setting prices together, or collaborating in other ways that would be contrary to the competition laws in this country. However, given there are only two of them, and they have the resources to watch the other very carefully, there is a sort of quasi co-operation that emerges.
It is driven by the commonality of their activities: The need for shareholder returns, driven by market share acquisition costs, both fixed and variable. They work aggressively on both, and if they did not, the senior management would be fired. In addition, directors have legislated fiduciary responsibilities under the Corporations act in relation to shareholder interests and importantly, returns.
We must also remember that via our superannuation funds, we are all shareholders in Coles and Woolworths.
Once again, just like the ‘housing crisis’, we have short term populist press release driven band-aids being suggested. They are touted as the remedy for long term strategic choices made in the past that to some, have turned sour.
The time for institutional concern about the increasing power of supermarket chains was when they were assembling the scale they now have. All of the take-overs and mergers that have happened have been waved through by the ACCC. This is despite commentary at the time about the impact of the lessening of competition for the consumers dollar.
Now it is too late, other remedies must be found, which do not include a forced break-up. Apart from the immorality of retrospectively applying new rules to the conduct of business, there is no logical or practical way to break apart either of the supermarket chains.
We should stop bleating, and get on with life, while ensuring we do not make the same mistake again.
Header credit: Gapinvoid.com. The cartoon put a huge amount of meaning into a simple graphical form. Thanks Hugh!!
Jan 15, 2024 | Collaboration, Leadership
‘Do not ever patronise me again.’
Those words are seared onto my brain, coming from the mouth of a new boss many years ago.
I had not long been employed and wanted to make an impression. Therefore, every conversation was a combative one, a conversation I set out to win, seeing that as a way to impress.
As the conversation which took place in my office ended, the new boss for whom I had quickly built a strong regard, stood up and walked out. He turned around just outside the door, and walked back a couple of paces, and uttered those words.
‘Do not ever patronise me again’.
He then turned on his heel, and walked out.
I was both astonished, and very concerned. It was only after a painful re-run and examination of the conversation that I realised he was right.
I had, completely unwittingly, patronised him.
What had driven that destructive behaviour?
It took a while for me to understand my own behavioural characteristics. In those days I went into every similar conversation with a point of view that I was prepared to defend aggressively. While I was always prepared to adjust my position in the face of good arguments, this was deeply hidden. In addition, I failed the most significant test of a good debater.
I failed to listen.
My ‘tin-ear’ did not hear a word that was said in any context other than: ‘with me or against me’.
No such thing as active listening, understanding the basis of a differing view, or reflecting on the quality of the foundations of my own.
Later that day I did go into the boss’s office and apologise, acknowledging my mistake, and thanking him for bringing it so painfully to my attention.
We worked together very productively for a decade after that incident in two different companies. We had many debates, and rarely was the outcome black and white, right, and wrong. It proved absolutely that two heads are always better than one, assuming the heads are aligned to the same objective.
Header acknowledgement. My thanks to Dilbert and Scott Adams.
