Jan 25, 2011 | Leadership, Personal Rant, Strategy
Amidst all the public utterances on Australia Day by elected representatives keen to be seen for a moment on the tele, in print, or lauded in the blogosphere, calling for a wiser, more compassionate, considerate, and outward thinking Australia, ….. (add your own platitude) it may be impertinent to list a few questions that will get no space, but from the perspective of this blogger require some consideration. This is where I show my colors as an unrepentant optimist, as I really think we can do more than just consider these things, we can do something useful, take action.
- Do we get value for the (roughly) 30% of GDP chewed up by the public sector? Do we really need three levels of Government to have the sort of communities we aspire to?
- Why are our kids graduating from University to no jobs, when we have been extolled to be a “clever country”? and why are we not training the builders, plumbers, electricians, and mechanics of tomorrow, rather we seem to be denigrating these skills compared to a university education.
- Why are the less fortunate than most of us not improving their lot, despite the $billions thrown at their problems? Perhaps it is because but so little gets through to where it is needed, as all the rent seekers clip the ticket on the way through to those who need it?
- Where has manufacturing in this country gone? Why? And what do we need to do to renew Australia’s position as an innovative creator of technology and then producing the products that result?
- How are we going to realistically maintain a standard of living as the baby boom generation retires, when the ratios of taxpayers to “taxconsumers” is reversed ?
- And while we are on baby boomers, why is it that many hundreds of thousands of experienced, talented, and motivated baby boomers cannot be employed fully?
- Why are we not having a fair dinkum debate about what sort of Australia we want to leave for our kids and grandchildren?
- Why can’t we see far enough ahead to recognise that the training we are giving our kids may have been good for last century, but no good for tomorrow?. We need to encourage creativity in all its forms, an understanding of personal responsibility and accountability, a willingness to have a go, not the structured, left brain dominated, narrow vision emphasis we seem to so value. Without these skills, our kids will struggle with a society profoundly altered over the course of their lifetimes. Consider, a child starting school in 2011 will retire around 2070. We cannot predict what the world will be in 5 years, let alone 55, so we must educate for creativity, action, and intellectual agility, not the rigid structures that may have served to date.
- Why have our elected representatives walked away for the “greatest moral issue of our time?”
I could go on, but you get the drift. Lets talk about things that are important, indeed vital to our long term prosperity and sustainability, but not necessarily going to bite us on the arse today, but if we do not do something now to start to address these long term challenges, the cost down the track will be huge.
Happy Australia day.
Jan 13, 2011 | Collaboration, Innovation, Leadership, Marketing, Strategy
Pixar is amongst the great “innovation factories” of recent decades, along with PARC, 3M, Apple, and a very few others. Part of what makes Pixar so effective is a question answered in this McKinsey interview with Brad Bird, the director who won two Oscars with “Ratatouille” and “The Incredibles” after joining when Pixar had achieved enormous breakthroughs with “Toy Story”, “Finding Nemo”, and other smash hits.
The core of his success has not been just the great people, but the environment created for them to work in, the processes evolved to manage the execution of creativity, and the restless curiosity and determination to be better, every time.
Jan 9, 2011 | Innovation, Leadership, Social Media
Ideo is an ideas factory, its stock in trade is ideas and the resulting products, that others commercialise. As such, it has been a lab or case study in how to innovate as they have grown. As a small business, they all knew each other, collaboration happened as a part of the DNA of the place, but growth and geographic spread made it increasingly difficult, so they set out to use themselves as the lab for themselves, evolving what they have called the “Tube” in which they mash up all the collaboration tools enabled by web 2.0 into a form that works for them.
Then, god bless them, they put it out there in the spirit of transparency and the collaborative energy that can be created, for us all to learn from.
Dec 21, 2010 | Change, Leadership, Management, Marketing, Operations, Social Media, Strategy
It is that time of year, when we look back and try and understand the forces that have driven our decisions and behavior in the past year, and that will continue to have a potentially disruptive influence in the coming year.
In the spirit of the time, following is my list of the emergent forces that are shaping our world, in no particular order.
- Touchy-feely. Suddenly, the electronic devices we became used to using with keyboards became touchy! The iphone started it, followed by everything “I” and all its imitators. I cannot but wonder if this is an electronic substitute for the human contact, the physicality of it, that we have lost. The fact that it makes all this stuff easier is a side benefit.
- Global retailing becomes more than a cliché. For years we have been talking about the retail revolution driven by the globalisation of retailers, and the “e-retail” phenomenon stated by Amazon, and pushed by E-bay and now thousands of others. Suddenly in this Christmas retail season, the box retailers have woken up to the impact of e-retailing in categories other than music and books, as consumers buy clothing and footwear, electronic devices, furniture, white goods, and huge ranges of knick-knacks over the net, overseas, avoiding the distribution margins and tax collection function of the box retailers. This has all been facilitated by the advances in supply chain management driven by product codes and GPS powered by the net, and increasing confidence in net security and integrity of e-tailers.
- Net advertising rules. Advertising on the net will have overtaken TV as the biggest type of advertising by the middle of 2011. Broadcast advertising replaced by tightly targeted, 2 way communication with the capacity to evolve based on the immediacy of the interaction response and potential to engage on a personal level will continue to profoundly change the way we interact with brands and their marketers.
- Social media comes of age. No longer is social media the province of the under 20’s, it has become mainstream as grandparents connect to face book to see their scattered grandchildren, professionals connect via linked-in, twitter takes over as the first source of news of interest, then goes on to follow where the news leads rather than becoming chip wrapper the following day. Whilst this phenomenon appears to continue to grow exponentially, it does bother me a bit that it appears to be a substitute for the humanity of individual contact for many, and what we surrender in privacy and the richness of relationships with the few in favor of being “friends” with the many we will only know with the benefit of hindsight.
- The cloud rolled in. Over the course of 2010, the newest iteration of web 2.0 in the shape of cloud computing appears to have rolled in. Enterprise computing has suddenly evolved from servers inside a business with all the attendant costs and investment requirements, to having the potential to put all that stuff on the web have somebody else manage the IT whilst you just pay for the service, and improve productivity of those using the applications. I think we are just at the beginning of the revolutions that the cloud will bring.
- Data mining. The huge pools of data that are being accumulated by businesses, organisations and institutions offer the opportunity to be mined for all sorts of information about us, our behavior, frustrations, successes, and locations in ways not previously considered possible. This mining is starting, our ability to understand and predict outcomes across a wide range of situations and simulations of behavior and outcomes are becoming more accurate, based on the huge amounts of data being collected and analysed using emerging applications and technology capabilities.
- Crowdsourcing. Again, web 2.0 has enabled a revolution in the way we go about accumulating and leveraging information to serve an objective. In the past, R&D occurred in the confines of the labs and commercial departments of businesses, but R&D is rapidly being replaced by “E&S “, Experiment and Scale. If you have an idea, a problem, a hypothesis, it can be put to the crowd for comment, ideas and unconsidered alternatives. Linux started the trend, but in the last short period, it has been picked up by many who are seeking to push the boundaries quickly, and worry less about the IP involved, simply because IP is really pretty “sticky” in the sense that it does not necessarily work outside its environment.
- Two speed Australia. It really bothers me that around the traps I see all the symptoms of a recession in the trading activity, whilst the official numbers tell us that not only is all well, but it is booming. The non economist in me says that the cash in the joint is a result of digging up stuff and selling it to China, reaping short term rewards as demand has outstripped supply, surely the economic equivalent of a one trick pony!. Supply of mined commodities will increase dramatically over the next few years from Africa and South America, and then the prices we get will come back to the historical trend line, and meanwhile, we will have pissed away the benefits from mining, and when the crunch comes, when the super-cash injections of mining prosperity are over, it will become nasty indeed, before the official figures suggest to the superannuated pollies and bureaucrats that something in their beloved economic models is stuffed.
- Climate change is a reality, prepare to deal with it. Typically, the political responses will be way behind the commercial ones, so there is both opportunity and risk for all, and the only certainty is increased costs. What is unknown is how much costs will increase, how will that compare to our international competitors, how will they react to the changes, and when .
- All of the above urging re-regulation. Certainty in our lives has been removed by all this new stuff, then along comes the disturbing visions of long term food and water security around the world, followed by the GFC, and suddenly we want some certainty back, so there is a groundswell in favor of re-regulation of the things that delivered us prosperity after their de-regulation in the 70’s and 80’s. When you consider at the same time the economic and social impact of the rise of China and India, the picture gets cloudier. China is not about to de-regulate any time soon, keeping its ability to direct resources without the political concerns of re-election, the huge bureaucracy of India fighting a rear guard action to maintain its power, and we have the elements of some considerable disruption and conflict emerging as the “developed economies” struggle with the debt incurred supporting recurrent expenditure .
To the few dedicated readers of my blog, I wish you a great Christmas, and a prosperous 2011. I hope that my ravings have given you some food for thought, a contrarian view, and an occasional smirk amongst the urge to have me certified. Thanks for your support, feedback, and honesty.
Allen Roberts.
Dec 20, 2010 | Demand chains, Leadership, Lean, OE, Operations, Strategy
The next time you hear an argument that justifies moving Australian manufacturing to a low cost country in order to compete, refer to this post on the Evolving Excellence blog describing the work practices in a Toyota’s Kyushu plant.
Labor is much more than a pair of hands doing a repetitive job, it is an opportunity to improve processes and identify and solve problems before they can impact on the customer, or even the next bay in the production line.
It may be hard to get to this point in Australia, but you will have no chance of making the changes necessary in a contract manufacturers plant in a “low cost” country. The accountants will generate their numbers, which can be pretty persuasive until you recognise that they do not account for the things that make a difference in the market, or count the wasted time, emotion and energy in their “productivity” calculations.
When an abundant country like Australia becomes a net importer of food, we have a real structural and strategic challenges in our demand chains that urgently need to be met, and the sooner we recognise the scale of it, and do a bit more than just mouth platitudes, the better.
Dec 14, 2010 | Leadership, Lean, Management, Operations
Measuring productivity involves a combination of hard and soft measures, the soft ones being both the critical ones and the ones that have most impact.
In 15 years of consulting across a range of businesses and industries, I have come to the conclusion that there are three factors that at a macro level positively influence the capacity of an enterprise to build productivity in a continuous manner.
- They are cross functional
- They are decentralised, with a loose/tight management culture
- They are connected to customers in a range of ways not associated with the immediacy of the next sale.
None of these are easy to achieve individually, but they seem to be mutually supporting, so setting out to support the evolution of all three over time pays dividends. To do so takes confident and inclusive leadership, and a long term view of the purpose of the organisation.
