Mar 28, 2013 | Governance, Innovation, Leadership, Operations, Small business
Manufacturing is not just an amalgam of industries, far more importantly, it is a capability, a way to capture imagination in a physical form.
In discussions about manufacturing, its slow demise in Australia, the level and type of support it should receive, its importance to long term prosperity, and the links between manufacturing and innovation, we leave one really important factor aside, one I suspect it is just not generally recognised. We define “industry” with the assumptions and words that came with the explosion of manufacturing in the last 100 years, the “food” industry, the “Auto” industry, the “Airline” industry, and so on. We do not seem to recognise that the capabilities are “cross industry” that the definitions we use no longer hold, if they ever did , beyond adding a bit of convenience to the language.
The lines are blurring further, rapidly and irrevocably.
Is Apple an electronics designer and manufacturer (Mac computers), a service provider (itunes) , or a product marketer (ipad)? My answer: They are all, and none of the above. Rather, Apple is a marketer that delivers its value proposition via a range of operational and sales channels that have nothing to do with the generally accepted definitions of industries. Certainly Apple has been able to leverage their collective imagination better than any other enterprise I can think of.
The next step is a truly scary one for many, the advent of 3-D printing.
Within a very short time, 3-D printers will be as available and cheap as desktop computers, all you need is a digital design file and a printer. We will be able to produce everything from simple household items to highly specified parts for our cars, produced in our kitchen.
The marvelous wind powered devices of designer Theo Jansen have been printed in miniature, and work just like the full sized ones, and dramatically make the point. If you can imagine it, you can now print it!
Manufacturing is about to go through a change as profound as that brought on by the steam engine.
20th century notions and boundaries to “manufacturing” are as outdated as a bow and arrow in a gunfight, so we must change the language and intellectual boundaries of the conversation if we are ever to make any sense of the dynamics at play.
Mar 18, 2013 | Innovation, Leadership, Management, Strategy
Well, they can’t, not without people. It is the people who think, then act to get stuff done via organisational processes. It does not matter if you are BHP, or a two person consultancy, it works the same way. Indeed, if you are a one man business, find others against whom you can test your individual thinking, and it will improve.
The essence of “thinking,” really teasing out the guts of a problem or situation is to make use of all the available data and opinions, not just those that agree with yours, not just those that rise from a similar set of assumptions, and certainly not those that lead to a semi-predetermined outcome.
People avoid conflict, it is uncomfortable, they avoid being on the outside of the crowd, but guess where all the really new stuff comes from, so the challenge in enabling organisations to think is to encourage conflict of the mind, to welcome ideas that challenge ours, and embrace the conflict.
The worst thing I have seen in 20 years of consulting on strategy, marketing and improvement is silence. It is always a strong indicator that the organisation is not thinking, but looking to the bosses to make the decisions, because they know best.
Bullshit I say, give me the friendly, heartfelt noise of active debate any time.
Feb 25, 2013 | Leadership
I am constantly struck by the so called “failure of leadership” displayed in all sorts of places from the top of our political, economic and social system, to the bottom. People who reach positions of power, positions that have as an inherent component that power to coerce, and who fail despite all the advantages.
On the other hand, we see people around us who inspire us into a course of action, who make us think, to make a commitment to course of action. Sometimes these people have no trappings of any office, but sometimes they do, but their powers of coercion are rarely used, they are not necessary.
There are leaders, and there are those who lead. Never has the difference between the two been so starkly highlighted as with the gaggle that currently inhabits our political corridors of power.
Feb 18, 2013 | Collaboration, Governance, Leadership, Personal Rant
It is wonderful to consider the impact the Prime Ministers “A Plan for Australian Jobs” announcement over the weekend has had, already, on Australian jobs.
-
- Multitudes of grateful bureaucrats have laboured mightily for months and months, crafting and re-crafting the words of the announcement to ensure it does not say anything that may attract any critical comment, and includes every existing program and hopeful announcement at least twice,
- Favoured consultants are rejoicing at the fees to date, and to come,
- Advertising and PR agencies wriggle to the bar to celebrate the coup of gaining “the account”,
- Engaged lawyers, consultants, bureaucrats, researchers, and grant trough dwellers, rejoice at the billion dollar bait now on the table.
But what about the rest of us, those who struggle to compete in the real world?
Lots of well meaning, multi-syllable words that ensure there is no accountability for anything, just continuous blather, platitudes and clichés. Oh, and the plan tells us they will spend a $billion of our money. It is after all, “our responsibility to assist in the structural adjustment process in the economy”. We, as obedient and loyal servants, should be grateful the Government has finally realised the parlous state of manufacturing in this country, and are doing something about it.
I read the plan, twice in fact because I thought I must have missed the important and insightful bit the first time through. You can save yourself a bit of time and read the summary, that is useful, but please consider the following whilst you do:
-
- Minister Combet says in his introduction that the plan is “Supporting Australian industry to increase exports and win more business abroad”. Call me pedantic, but I thought increasing exports and winning more business abroad were the same thing, and besides, what has Austrade been doing for the last 40 years?. Having run a real business on contract for a Federal department, set up with the express aim of increasing agricultural exports with a budget of 6 million over 3 years, which attracted the ire of the “You cannot subsidise exports” Nazi’s in Canberra, I can only wonder what a billion is doing for their collective blood pressure.
- There is a fair bit of verbiage about “fostering clusters” in the report. There is no doubt that clusters can become innovation hotbeds. Everyone with a pig in the race points to the tech miracle of Silicon Valley, and the medical cluster centered on Boston, amongst a few others, but forgets that they took decades to evolve, (a bit longer than the average election cycle in the first world) and the evolution of successful clusters has had nothing to do with public investment beyond the provision of high quality public infrastructure, schools, universities, transport, and power. Every investment (to my knowledge)by a Government in an overt effort to build a “cluster” around the world has failed, or is failing in the absence of a long term investment in infrastructure.
- Oh the joy of a good acronym! The plan is full of them, some new, some recycled, but the gold standard is a beauty: G.O.L.D. standing for “Growth Opportunities and Leadership Development”. Wonderful isn’t it, must have come from an orgasmic Eureka moment for someone. Clearly, I am just being petty.
- A headline objective of this plan is “Creating a stronger, fairer, and simpler tax and transfer system and reducing red tape” Great sentiment, but all through the plan is articulated the need for more legislation, regulation, and creation of various advisory and oversight bodies. When I was at school, these sorts of additions would consume added resources, add complication, and create demarcation squabbles amongst agencies. Not a lot of “simpler, fairer” in this lot that I can see.
- This is the last whinge, perhaps the best, so congratulations if you have got this far. There is a graph 5.1 on page 23 of the report that shows collaboration across a number of economies, which is presumably there to demonstrate the value of collaboration, which the government wants to (correctly in my view) foster. The figures show Australia at about 18% (of what is not really clear to me) next door to Germany, held up as a poster child of manufacturing excellence, at 19%, and China, at 19.5%. The field is lead by a Black Caviar like stretch by Britain at 69%, but the last time I looked, the British economy was a basket case. Perhaps the graph is a mistake, showing the opposite of the Governments argument, or perhaps the situation has changed because the data is so bloody old, or perhaps my simple old brain has been scrambled by the clichés and acronyms.
Australian manufacturing is in a hole, and rule 1 of my rules of holes says that “once you realise you are in a hole, stop digging”. There is little in this plan that actually throws away the shovel, it just burnishes it for more use. The real challenge is the endless duplication, commercial naivety, turf wars, lack of gumption, and the assumption that all problems can be legislated away that infests our elected bodies and their bureaucrats that is the greatest hurdle Australian manufacturing has to jump.
Header cartoon courtesy TomGauld.com
Feb 11, 2013 | Change, Governance, Leadership, Strategy
How often do we hear that we learn more from our failures than our successes, that if we do not fail sometimes, we have not done enough, and that an innovative, exciting culture embraces failure? Thomas Watson Senior, creator of IBM once said “the fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate.”
So how is it that we rarely see failure really celebrated if it is so productive? Such celebration is very rare in my experience.
An Canadian NGO, Engineers Without Borders has broken the mould, and published their “Failure Report” and attracted considerable attention, this article in the Guardian outlines the background.
How brave is that?
NGO’s depend for their funding from groups that you would expect to be pretty risk averse, they would hate to see their donations seemingly wasted, and admitting failure is on the surface at least, admitting to waste and potentially putting their funding at risk.
I wonder what would happen if Australia’s public companies were publish their own failure reports?
Rio Tinto’s foray into Aluminum , Harvey Norman missing the on line shopping revolution, Woolworths finally admitting Dick Smith had turned feral, James Hardie and asbestosis, Eddie and the Labor party, the list goes on. We get outside analysis, sometimes the entrails of failure are exhumed by legal processes, but never do we get the honest, gut-felt, reactions of those involved in the decision making examining their behavior, and taking responsibility for the failures. All we hear is the spin of the successes, and the message that the protagonists are all seeing, all knowing, who only act in the interests of others. Ducking of responsibility has become a management core capability, “I cannot recall” the last refuge of the villain.
How much better if we did as we say we should do, and celebrated failure as a part of the learning process, and that intelligent analysis of the reasons for failure, and the resetting expectations makes for a healthy culture.
Dec 11, 2012 | Change, Innovation, Leadership, Marketing
Web based A/B testing goes a long way towards eliminating dumb mistakes, making the best choice, creating a discipline around innovative activity, and encouraging change, and has been made far easier in a whole range of areas by the data collection capabilities of the net.
But what happens when you cannot test, when you are doing something so completely new that the frame of reference necessary for good test results does not exist?
Try testing the Model T in 1890, only a few would have seen the possibilities because the horse was the frame of reference, the early cubic paintings of Picasso, art that so broke the rules as to be outrageous, or the calculations of Copernicus demonstrating the earth was not the centre of the universe, something catholic church felt pretty strongly about.
At some point testing becomes a redundant tool, you simply cannot test everything, and you have to rely on the guts, instinct, and insight of the few outliers who see things differently to make meaningful change
