Nov 18, 2010 | Alliance management, Collaboration, Innovation, OE, Strategy
Only in physics, in personal relationships we seek common ground, people who under stand instinctively what we are saying and thinking, and who work the way we do.
Collaborative teams and alliances of many types often fail from the start because those who join, or are “volunteered” are similar, whereas in a collaborative team with a problem to solve, you need all types, and the processes to assist the management of the group need to be a part of the consideration.
You need at least one of each of the four behavioral extremes;
- Someone who is creative, out there, not too concerned with convention and how it has been done before
- Someone who is numbers and data driven, analytical, who seeks quantitative foundations for hypotheses and ideas
- Someone who just has to complete, they like to plan, and then work the plan to the end
- Someone who builds bridges, and can assist the relationships, both internally and with outsiders
These four types will not often come together without assistance, as they are very different, they see thing in conflicting ways, but to solve a problem, or make an alliance really work and create value for all, that’s just what you need, it is just harder to manage.
Oct 20, 2010 | Management, Operations, Personal Rant
If you ever needed a lesson in the pitfalls of negotiating under pressure, take a look at the mess created by the agreement of the terms of the revised Mining Resources Rent Tax between the large miners, and the Federal government . If it wasn’t so serious, it would be funny.
In simple terms, the deal which set MRRT rates was with the Federal government, but the states own the resources, and already do, and will continue to levy, a royalty payment on tonnes extracted.
The miners thought the MRRT rate was inclusive of any increase by the states in Royalties, so they had a reliable ceiling on the total tax paid, the Feds say no such condition was agreed, and the states are cash strapped, and looking for revenue, where better than the miners in a boom.
All parties stuffed up royally by making assumptions in a pressure cooker negotiation, and not articulating them in the discussions, and written agreement.
This is easy to do under pressure, but these guys are supposed to be experts, so it is unbelievable that such a basic oversight occurred. The lesson is that whatever you do, take some time away from the scramble and pressure of “completing” a negotiation before an agreement is executed to ensure all the bases are covered.
Oct 19, 2010 | Customers, Leadership, Management, Marketing
The scary thing about competition is that someone always loses, even if it is only an opportunity. Many would like to believe that we should all be friends together to save the pain, but outside the public sector, it does not happen like that.
Successfully competing is down to delivering superior value to customers at a cost less than the customers best alternative. To do that in this connected world where transaction costs are disappearing the whole enterprise needs to be focused on what it is that the customer values.
Sounds pretty simple, but how rarely I see it
Oct 18, 2010 | Management
The corporate obsession with planning, appropriate in principal often becomes just an exercise in managed optimism.
Many times I have witnessed, and been party to budgeting and planning sessions that are driven by a notion that all the bad stuff that has happened this year will not happen next year, and that the stars are at last aligned to a give us a “big one”, the bad stuff is behind us. This may sometimes be right, but other bad stuff usually takes the place of last years bad stuff, but we seem to be able to often tell ourselves that it won’t.
We often spend so much unproductive time planning — read kidding ourselves, that we get nothing useful done. A mate of mine, Tony Cassone has a truism he has been shouting for as long as I have known him, “son, you get one out of 10 for talking, the other 9 is for doing”
Once again, Tom Fishburne nails this tendency to corporate rose colored glasses with his biting “waterfall planning” cartoon.
Oct 13, 2010 | Alliance management, Collaboration
It is a pretty simple observation that for a group to act collectively, there must be a strong central reason for them to do so. The larger the group, the more difficult it becomes to maintain this sense of collaborative security, and more and more dissention to individual decisions occurs.
For this reason, for large groups to be successful there must be a very strong purpose into which all members “buy” and that has the effect of enabling them to deal with the individual decisions they may not like for the sake of the central purpose, so long as there has been due process exercised in the decision making process.
Consider the difference between the disregard generally apparent towards our political parties, and the high regard we have for the ideals of a group like the Salvation Army, irrespective of what we may think about their position on spirituality, and the music they play on the corner on Saturday morning.
Oct 10, 2010 | Leadership, Management, Strategy
This is a term I commonly use to describe a management style that I believe delivers the best results to any enterprise.
In one sense, central management is loose, against a clearly articulated and understood strategic purpose, it allows line management to make decisions, determine activity priorities, encourages mistakes by enabling calculated risk taking, experimentation, and just getting things done that delivers value to customers.
On the other hand, management is very tight, there is a rigorous planning and risk management regime that does not weed out risk, but exposes it to scrutiny, there is a culture of quantification, but equally, recognising not everything, particularly new stuff can be easily quantified, and there is a deep commitment to continuous improvement, and all its associated disciplines.
In these circumstances, creativity will flouish without losing sight of the main game, but it calls for the enterprise leadership to give up a key attraction for many leaders, using the office to get people to do whay you say on a daily basis.
