Aug 1, 2010 | Alliance management, Leadership, Management, Social Media, Strategy
Knowledge Management is all about collaboration, making the 3 + 3 equal > 6, but the challenge has always been how do you codify the knowledge for dissemination and re-use, implying the existence of both strategy, and a management mechanism for the knowledge.
By comparison, social networking is largely uncontrolled, and lacks a strategy beyond “to connect”, but it nevertheless has become a source of knowledge management.
Social networking brings to the table two factors not usually prominent in KM systems:
- Humanity, people connecting and interacting for the personal value, not monetary value, it reminds of the notion of “commons” where groups assemble because they can leverage off the social, intellectual and commercial base of the “common”
- Social networking offers the opportunity not just to form horizontal connections as happens in managed KM systems, but for the vertical, and oblique connections that offer the opportunity for insights and capabilities in an organic manner, rather like the organic metaphor for innovation.
It appears to me that an application for social networking techniques that will evolve quite rapidly will be as a new and powerful tool that will enable the rich and varied collaboration so crucial for the innovation process.
Jul 29, 2010 | Alliance management, Communication, Leadership
Contracts are the point of last resort, they define the exit, should it become necessary.
Believing a written contract that details how the dynamics of an evolving relationship will be managed is as dumb as believing the lady in the tent can tell the future with any accuracy.
Relationships are about leadership, collaboration, honesty, and a mutual respect, and a reversion to the clauses in a contract are a clear pointer to the failure of the relationship and the leadership.
A while ago, a business I have had intermittent contact with over a long period set about outsourcing their IT function. It is only a modest business, short of resources, and took the view that the IT people were the experts, and that they should know all there was to know about how to approach their problems, and that the resources freed up could be better used elsewhere. Problem was, they had not adequately defined their processes and expectations, and the vendor saw it as a small sale, perhaps not worth their best efforts.
There were some tough lessons in the exercise, and at their most basic broke down to the simple fact that nobody could know their business as well as they did, and a generic set of solutions sold to a modest business were never going to be successful.
The vendor failed in their duty to meet their needs, once the sales contract was signed, they “moved on” and the company failed badly in the implementation, and the whole exercise ended very badly.
The simple fact is that the “solution” could have, and should have worked, the company’s logic was sound, and the solution had all the fundamentals to deliver a great service, but the relationship failed. Rather than leveraging the skills and experience of both parties to arrive at a successful outcome, they took the easy way out and just fought over who would carry the can. Really dumb!
Jul 27, 2010 | Customers, Management, Sales
Independent produce retailers appear to be resurgent, based on the quality of their offer to consumers.
For years anybody who has been involved with FMCG has known about the challenge of the “last 10 yards“, the distance between a supermarkets back dock and the selling face. Retailers talk about out of stocks, and lost sales, suppliers struggle with short lead times, demanding delivery schedules and the lack of accurate and collaborative forecasting.
Added to these are these challenges presented by fresh food, perishability, appearance, consumers determination to handle and “cherry-pick” the produce, and the nightly put-away. The major supermarkets would appear to be losing share to resurgent independents, as they have responded to the supply chain challenges with greener fruit, more resistant to damage, and offering a longer period to maximise the opportunities for sale. Downside is that green fruit is not much good to eat.
Produce is a difficult category where training and product knowledge is more important than in any dry grocery category by a mile. Why then are there casuals in produce? Last week I saw, not for the first time, a seventeen year old tipping a box of tomatoes onto a display like they were Lego bricks, surely some training would be useful? In this case, it was the last 10 inches that stuffed the tomato.
No wonder specialists who know their business, and can manage the challenges particular to a category are doing a better job than generalists, and consumers are responding.
Jul 8, 2010 | Management, Personal Rant
A statistical analysis should give a black and white answer, and it does, but the answer is only as good as the information that is used, and the manner in which it is used.
It follows then that the application of analytical tools should be in the context of a way of thinking through problems, evolving and testing solutions, and connecting the resulting processes in such a way that they deliver repeatable solutions that deliver positive outcomes.
Statistics are not very useful with out the support provided by creative and insightful thinking, and such thinking is uninformed without the benefit of the analytical foundations of statistics.
Sometimes it all gets too stupid, as was the case during the resources tax debate prior to the removal of Kevin Rudd. Formerly reputable KPMG had done two studies on the tax, one for each of the protagonists, and ho, ho, who could guess, comes up with two opposing answers that just happen to support the opposing views of those who commissioned the studies.
This laughable tale highlights the paucity of real thought that went into the debate and the nonsense value of financial modeling without the supporting rigor of thought, and it goes on. The deal now done reduces the tax take on paper far more than the number put out by the government, the numbers simply do not add up, and it is easy to assume that there has been some more creative assumptions built in to alleviate the political heat associated with another “back-flip”.
Who would ever believe “financial modeling” again.
Jun 30, 2010 | Leadership, Management, OE, Operations
Many businesses offer cash for suggestions, put a suggestion box near the canteen, and wonder why most of the suggestions are physically impossible, morally debatable, and often both.
In the end, successful suggestion programs offer the reward of personal satisfaction and recognition to those making them, any financial incentive is usually secondary. The $50 in the paypacket for a successful suggestion is nice, usually appreciated, but not the reason the suggestion was made.
People who are members of a “community” and a workplace is a community, normally want to contribute to that community, unless it is dysfunctional in some fundamental way, and those contributions build connections and mutual obligations, that are the glue of any community.
Many suggestions will be worthless, but offering recognition and feedback to all offerings creates a sense of personal connection. Create that, and the suggestions will increase in value progressively, and ultimately, very few will have anything to do with deviant behavior, and you will quickly be able to do away with the anonymous box, and have the feedback directly, person to person.
Jun 28, 2010 | Management, Personal Rant, Strategy
Now there is an explanation for the common situation where a person fails to see what to others appears to be blindingly obvious.
The Dunning-Kruger effect provides the psychological evidence supporting what most of us see often, and that is that our (and others) incompetence in an area masks our ability to recognise that incompetence. The “we don’t know what we don’t know” effect at work.
When you think about it, the absence of the skills we need to recognise a right answer when we see it, are the same as the skills required to produce a right answer in the first place. This makes sense when you read it twice.
Our exertions as we consider complex issues, from the future of the financial depredations of the GFC on the economy, to climate change, what to do about our involvement in Afghanistan, to the personal questions we all face, are all about making decisions today on the basis of our understanding of the best information we have available, but often misunderstood, misinterpreted, and often misused or ignored.
We therefore most often make those decisions in relative ignorance, seeking easy, saleable “solutions” to problems where we are ignorant, but unaware of it, or unable to concede it.
How scary is that?
