May 27, 2010 | Innovation, Management
The formula for innovation success is different in each set of circumstances, but has some consistent themes: time, determination, patience, skill, top level support, collaboration, a combination of analytical and spatial skills, engaged participants, process discipline, and tolerance of failure.
The reasons not to innovate are far more creative, but have the common theme of finding an excuse not to stretch. The link is to a list of the 100 most common excuses, it is a bit of fun, but there would be few excuses lisited that we have not all heard at some time.
May 26, 2010 | Management, Marketing, Social Media
The brother of digital democracy is Analytical Insights. As more and more happens on the web, the opportunity to develop analytical techniques and resulting algorithms that are able to assist the prediction of behavior grows.
As every user of Amazon, and many others have noticed, the more you use it, the better it is at predicting, then offering you further purchases that focus on your interests. This is not a matter of “fries with that” or luck, it is a reflection of the deep analytical capacity to look at an individuals past behavior, and predict what they may like to do now.
Perhaps it is digital democracy’s big brother.
May 24, 2010 | Management, Personal Rant
What a wonderful, emotive description, courtesy of Seth Godin, of the sort of make work activity we all undertake to put off doing those difficult, risky, confronting jobs that can really add value.
It takes effort not to stomp on a roach when it crosses the floor, but stomping it is basically a useless, time wasting exercise, just like checking emails every 10 minutes, reading industry rags cover to cover, redoing a completed presentation in the hope of making it that 0.5% better, and the thousands of other things we dream up to keep us in out comfort zone.
Make a difference to your day, let the roach live, and do something useful with your time.
May 23, 2010 | Alliance management, Innovation, Leadership, Operations, Strategy
The momentum of innovation in the auto industry has picked up a notch, as a resurgent Toyota allies with Tesla to re-open the NUMMI plant closed earlier this year to produce a mass market electric car.
Toyota got the ball rolling 10 years ago with the Prius, and still leads by a mile in the eco car market, but the competition is emerging. This alliance with Tesla in the plant where Toyota allied with GM for its first plant outside Japan, demonstrating comprehensively that the quality of Japanese cars was not a function of some cultural phenomena peculiar to Japan, but simply a function of good management (a lesson GM never really got) may be just as significant.
It is reassuring to those of us who have watched Toyota transform the manufacturing mentality of the world over the last 30 years with their development and wide sharing of TPS, that after the recent stumble over quality, a stumble some predicted as the Toyota juggernaught seemed to be taking over the auto world, that they have been able to embrace the alliance, and return to the basic values that made them great.
With luck, they will be as open about the engineering and operational evolution of the JV electric car, and the lessons they learn from the alliance with Tesla, as they have been in the past. If so we will all learn a whole lot more.
May 19, 2010 | Leadership, Management, Strategy
One of the best leading indicators of commercial activity I know is the level of activity at 6.30am late in the trading week at the Flemington markets in Sydney. Whilst it is entirely qualitative, and covers retail activity in a single category, fresh produce, over a long period of observation it has nevertheless been a pretty potent macro forecasting mechanism.
Over the past few weeks I have been out there on a number of occasions, in the critical early hours. The standholders are all sounding worried, their sales are down, and the competition for the sales that are there is fierce, and there is even no real problem getting a park, and wheeling around a barrow.
You can show me all the macro economic models, spreadsheets, and learned forecasts you like, but none have the immediacy, intimacy, and sensitivity as a bit of time at the coal face.
My FMFM (Flemington Markets Forecast Model) developed view, is that we are in for a really tough time. In 6 months, coincidently when we are likely to be in the agonies of another federal election campaign, I will come back to this post, and see again, if the FMFM model is better than all the gumph spin, misinformation, and hubris coming out of our “leaders” in Canberra.
May 17, 2010 | Communication, Leadership, Management, Personal Rant
I watched Q&A last night, in the ultimately vain hope of getting some intelligent debate on the Federal budget, and its foundation proposal to change the manner in which the mining industry is taxed.
Should have known better.
What passed for debate was really just a moderated annunciation of political hyperbole and PR crafted phrases intended to play to the emotions, there was little presentation of the facts. How are we to form intelligent positions on issues where all we see is the spin? Are we the electorate, expected to be so compliant and thoughtless that we just accept the nonsense from whichever side of the political divide best suits our generic position.
There are strong arguments on both sides, lets hear them in a way that enables us to make a decision on how we feel, rather than being told how we should feel on the basis of spin.
Increasingly businesses I see are making real efforts to remove the verbiage, and present facts without the gloss and polish as a means to make sensible decisions, and engage the stakeholders in the process to the extent that even if they do not agree with the outcome, they are satisfied that there was due process, and therefore they can live with the outcome.
If our two “debaters” last night were sitting around the board table of anything more significant than the local tennis club, and expecting to get support for their respective positions, the chairman would be well within his rights to send them to the corner to share the pointed cap.
