Sep 23, 2010 | Leadership, Management
Much of the typical managers time is spent ensuring and managing compliance, ensuring the rules are followed, the standards and timetables are met.
This is all fine, and must happen, but where does the balance between compliance and engagement happen?
We are asking stakeholders, particularly employees, to bring their brains to work, but often ensuring they do not use them because there are rules in place that need to be followed.
It is becoming pretty clear that the old carrot and stick management methods do not work in an environment where creativity and the unorthodox is the priority, to be effective, you need engagement, you need the right side of peoples brains to be at work.
Constantly we are being called on to be innovative, creative, to think outside the box, to seek the differentiator, and participate in a “clever country” but our whole system of education from kindergarten to post graduate, our public administration, and our career planning is geared to conformity in order to get ahead.
There is a paradox here that the post industrial age economies need to come to grips with.
Sep 22, 2010 | Change, Communication, Innovation, Leadership, Social Media, Strategy
A Wall Street Journal op-ed by Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google argues that the demise of printed media, particularly newspapers and magazines is as much a result of their own hubris as it is the advent of new media, and that the opportunities for journalism have flourished rather than diminished.
Fairfax have just announced that the outcomes of a strategic review conducted by McKinsey will result in significant changes to their commercial profile over time, with greater emphasis on electronic media. About time they woke up, having lost huge slabs of classified advertising, their “Rivers of Gold” revenue streams, to specialist web sites like “Car Sales”, “Seek” and others. The tenor of the public announcements still smells of them seeing electronic publishing as a competitive force, rather than a very different but complementary one that will not go away.
Print has lost its immediacy over a long time, first to radio, then TV, more latterly the web, but the process has not been one that should have taken them by surprise, the challenge is to harness the fundamental two differences the web has enabled:
- Anyone can be a publisher now, in a variety of formats from print to photographic and video.
- The whole communication process is now 2 way, hugely networked and fragmented, no longer a one way broadcast, the source of Fairfax’s success last century.
My instinct is that it is too late for incremental change to their business model, even at a rapid rate, the game has moved on too far for them to recapture the fortunes of the past. Glad I am not a shareholder, although Fairfax chairman Roger Corbett has a track record in instituting rapid improvement that generates great returns.
Sep 21, 2010 | Change, Leadership, Personal Rant, Social Media
In Australia, we are considering the NBN, and the impact it will have, and argue about the best way to deliver it, cost effectively.
A further debate should be the impact of connecting the billions of people in the world not yet connected, and what that may mean to us, and others currently enjoying the benefits of living in a developed economy.
What will happen when Africa has access to the net, not just the knowledge, but the social tools, the ability to connect and do business across borders, absorb the cultural and economic differences they have with the developed world? With the resources base in Africa, the potential for development based on resources is huge, as with Siberian Russia, so long as the social institutions in those regions can evolve to the benefit of the majority, rather than breaking down into deadly squabbles over the potential spoils to the few.
The growth in Asia, low cost manufacturing based on low labor and institutional costs, has led to increased prosperity, increased education, a movement from the country to the cities, changes in traditional diets, will only accelerate and move to other areas in the world with increased connection, with huge flow on impacts.
Logically this also leads to consideration of the financial markets, as the developing world generates large trade surpluses, and investments in infrastructure funded by domestic saving further increasing their competitive advantage, how will the currently developed world repay the accumulated public debt? What will happen in those “developed” countries that slash public expenditure, and increase taxes to repay the debt rather than default?
We are in for a wild ride over the next few decades, but we seem to focus excessively on meaningless trivia, perhaps it is a coping mechanism.
Sep 13, 2010 | Collaboration, Communication, Leadership
It occurred to me that during the recent election campaign, and subsequent “Phony Government” that both sides over-used the term “Social Capital“, as well as mis-using it. Whilst it was not one of the hollow slogans of the campaign, it got a pretty fair run as each side tried to give their “policies” substance.
Social capital is created when a person contributes without any expectation of reward, it is just the right thing to do for the group, and for that sense of well being that individuals feel but do not often articulate. This giving creates a sense of mutual obligation, which is the glue that holds social groups together.
The same dynamic is at work in collaborative systems, if you put in, the sense of obligation is created, and others join the effort. Commercial collaboration has at its heart making a bob, but the social aspects of the collaboration process are ignored or under-estimated at the peril of the collaborative project.
For a number of years I have looked after the grass courts at my local tennis club. It takes some time, it is entirely voluntary, and I do it simply because I enjoy playing the game on grass, the costs of professional maintenance are way beyond the capacity of a small club to fund, and once the grass is replaced or let go to become a cow paddock, it will never come back, and few would want that to happen. In this case, perhaps the mutual bit comes in when other club members are still prepared to play with me in my tennis dotage, which is sometimes a bit closer than I would like.
Aug 31, 2010 | Change, Leadership, Strategy
This almost completed Federal election was about a lot of things, many of them contradictory, and beyond the wisdom of the bulk of the electorate to distinguish the rhetoric and spin from the facts. Does the sad view of the crumbling social and economic infrastructure taken by Paul Krugman in the NY Times apply as much to Australia as it does to the US?
Take the NBN broadband “debate” for instance. Depending on which commentator you read, or listen to, the answer is different, a 45 billion dollar bet on technology and a future need for the 100mps speeds to be delivered, or a 6 billion dollar patch up that will allow markets and technological developments to deliver a satisfactory outcome. All the other debates in this election, health, education, infrastructure, and the rest (apart from the localised pork-barreling, everyone knows what that is for) are in the same boat, long on words, and promises, short on anything resembling a responsible analysis of the things we know, and assumptions underpinning those we do not know much about, but that may emerge.
One thing I believe, is that unless we have some sort of vision about where we need to be, and what we need to do to get there, together with the long term investments that need to be made, the institutions we currently have will erode further, as is apparently happening in the US.
As a start, lets find a way to bring back some of the manufacturing capability that has been exported over the last 20 years, as it is pretty clear now that actually making stuff is far better in the long run for the whole economy than just managing the transactions.
Aug 29, 2010 | Alliance management, Leadership
This hung election has generated a tsunami of comment, but nothing I have seen on the mechanics of collaboration, a key factor in any lasting resolution to the impasse I would have thought.
The idea of a “party” is simply an expression of the need for group action to get anything done. In the case of the two major parties the early collaboration around an idea has long been replaced by the institutional battle for survival, the original reason for the formation of the party forgotten.
By contrast, consider the Greens. They evolved from a protest group coalesing around opposition to the Franklin dam in Tasmania, through to political group with the power to protest in a wider forum of proportionally elected houses state upper houses, (Federal senate, NSW Legislative Council) from which all we expected was protest, to a party that now carries a veto over all legislation, which is a far wider remit than a one issue protest.
This last step is a game changer, one the Democrats failed. But what of the three independents in the house of Reps? Almost by accident they have the power of veto if they act collaboratively, but it seems to be emerging that consistent collaborative action may fail them just because the rallying point around which they can coalesce is far more ambiguous than the Greens “save the Franklin” and the Democrats “keep the bastards honest” and therefore the collaboration lacks some of the “glue” essential to a collaborative effort, and they lack the institutional organisation that is the alternative.
It will be interesting to watch, and I suspect that there will be an agreement that sees the “Mad Monk” as PM with the nominal support of the three independents, which will become very fragile as the next full moon impacts on Bob.
