Nov 29, 2010 | Leadership
On the “Insiders” show on Sunday, there was a review of the current Parliament, and how it had responded to the challenges of being ‘hung”.
Notable was the interview of the Labor leader of the house, Anthony Albanese, and the clips of his review speech on the last sitting day. He listed the achievements of the Government by reading out a list of the bills passed, 53 from memory, but who cares?
The purpose of Parliament is to make our society and individual lives better, not to pass bills, but that appears to be the metric used, and he also used the phrase “Government 53, Opposition Nil”. What in heavens name did he expect? for the opposition to be passing bills? That would really raise some comment!
How long would a MD of a commercial organisation last if he measured his performance by the number of memos written, but that is the sort of meaningless metric that the our elected representatives use to measure their performance, at least when questioned about their performance.
Irrelevent, meaningless, theatrical crap, and an absolute lack of leadership!
Nov 25, 2010 | Customers, Innovation, Leadership, Management
Innovation programs always throw up the word “adjacency” and it has lots of interpretations, depending on who is doing the talking. So here is my two bobs worth.
Measure each of the following parameters on a 1-5 scale, (or 1-10 for a more nuanced outcome) 1 being the same as current, 5 being completely different, requiring new processes and infrastructure. Have a debate about the scores, collect more data, seek council of those with a different perspective, as it is generally a qualitative score rather than one that can be easily quantified.
- Channels to market
- Current sales force knowledge and relationships in the adjacent market
- Behavior of potential customers, the factors that drive their business model
- Existing potential customer relationships and the barriers to entry/exit in the market
- The nature of the competitive environment. (A “Porter” type analysis often assists here)
- The strength of your value proposition
Nov 9, 2010 | Collaboration, Innovation, Leadership, Strategy
“Skunk works” is a term most are familiar with, indeed, so familiar that the pros and cons, and the do’s and don’ts are debated endlessly. Weather a Skunk team separated from the main operations of an enterprise “delivers” or not is generally a function of the leadership, culture and resource allocation processes of the parent, not just of the excitement and freedom of the works.
Sometimes it is useful to go back to the original. The term “skunk works” emerged when the Allied war effort needed a very quick response to the threat posed by the German development of jet fighters in the latter stages of the second war, and Lockheed Martin won a contract to do the work against what was considered an impossible timetable.
To meet the demands, LM created a separate development unit, rapidly taking on the now familiar nomenclature, originally an in-joke where members of the team considered themselves as popular as a skunk in the halls of the existing parent company.
Creating skunk works is only one of many strategies that can be employed to rev up the innovation effort, and it is no more or less successful than others, it is all a matter of the context.
Nov 7, 2010 | Collaboration, Leadership, Operations
What a nice term to describe the process of improvement that can occur in a voluntary manner, where the reward is not monetary, but the recognition of peers that you made a contribution to a worthwhile outcome. The value of “I did that”!!
Linux and Wikipedia are both examples of peer production that have changed the way the world works, but there are many others. The core of successful continuous improvement is the willingness of people to take individual responsibility and do something better than it was done yesterday, not because they have been told to do so, or paid to do so, but because it is worth doing.
In operational situations management often tries to encourage the evolution of these systems, but most fail, simply because they are “managed” rather than led.
Leading means facilitating the culture that nurtures the undirected and common accountability necessary, rather than thinking they can direct the processes and outcomes.
Nov 3, 2010 | Branding, Leadership, Personal Rant, Strategy
The new focus on Rural and regional Australia (R&RA) in the current parliament has great merit in ways hard to quantify.
The nature of “Brand Australia”, how we see ourselves, has always been about the wide brown land, the sunburnt country, the Akubra hatted drover gazing into the sunset, however much that sense is a myth, given the urban nature of the population, it nevertheless defined us.
Over the last 50 years a steady erosion of the rural population has occurred, and an erosion of the support infrastructure has followed, schools, hospitals, communities with insufficient size to be sustainable, coupled with the levels of immigrants who have no connection to the myth, and this has had, and will inevitably continue to have an impact on the psyche of the country.
How you put a value on this Australian psyche I have no idea, but I hope that the independents last long enough to make an impact that lasts, and that they do not become subsumed in the Canberra Politic” as I am sure that the value they can add to the sense of who we are will be greater than anything treasury can put a figure on.
Oct 26, 2010 | Leadership, Marketing, Strategy
The thing about market research is that it can only elicit responses to the questions that are asked from within the context of what they already know and understand.
Innovative solutions are rarely a result of asking a group, or committee, about what they would like. Henry Ford once quipped that if he has asked customers what they wanted before he developed the model T, they would have responded, “a faster horse” and this is proven true time after time.
Similarly, leadership is not about agreement, and gaining consensus all the time, it is about someone having the moral courage to stand by him/her self and say, that is wrong, or I disagree, here is what I think, this is what I am going to do!
When was the last time you saw a statue recognising the contribution of a committee?.
