Sep 27, 2009 | Change, Leadership, Management
A short while ago I found myself in a fairly robust debate about the merits or otherwise of the various industry “marketing & R&D” bodies that have inhabited Australian agriculture for decades.
Dairy, meat, Horticulture, grains, all have, or have had, a range or bodies regulating and collecting levies for the so-called collective good of the “industry” .
It struck me towards the end of the conversation, which was getting a bit heated, particularly about the recent removal of the single wheat marketing desk, that the positions we were all taking bore the hallmarks of an argument that had happened many times, the various pros & cons recited almost by habit by all concerned.
Whilst they were expressed as considered views, informed by facts, what they really were, on all sides, were recitations of a view expressed many times by rote from within the boundaries of a point of view that was unlikely to change under almost any circumstances.
Next time you find yourself reciting a mantra, go back to the basic facts, consider who benefits, look at the location of margin and profit, and then think about the view you are comfortable with, genuinely informed by the facts.
Sep 24, 2009 | Innovation, Management, Marketing
Seth Godin is once again ahead of the wave with the launch of Brands In Public.
The logic is simple, today, you cannot control the conversations that occur about your brand or business, they happen across the myriad of access points to the web, so the next best thing is to assemble the conversations at a common point, and give yourself the opportunity to participate.
Brands in public gathers the conversations, and offers a point of intersection between these conversations and the brand owner. At least, you then have a place at the table to counter the nonsense, put forward the facts, and perhaps add a bit of steerage to the process.
Wonderful idea, so obvious with hindsight, executed with simplicity.
Sep 22, 2009 | Management
Seth Godin a short time ago wrote a post on priorities, goes to the heart of the dilemma we all face, sorting our own version of The priority list .
Then Tom Fishburne reflects Seths observations in one picture.
What more needs to be said, or drawn?
Sep 20, 2009 | Management, Marketing, Strategy
Modeling scenarios has become a pretty big business, but notice that you often get only the numbers out of the end of the model, rarely the assumptions that drive the outcomes, and rarely a range of options.
This has been brought home again as I read the “strategic plan” completed at great expense on behalf of an industry body that covers a wide range of individual sub industries, each with their own characteristics and issues, albeit with some common drivers such as water availability, labour availability and capital generation.
Consultants at great expense produced a model that churned out numbers supposed to show the way forward, but which common sense says has a lot of dodgy assumptions going in, because what is coming out is unusable by any of the individual enterprises in the industries, or the industry bodies supposed to assist them.
Most commercial models I see set out to prove a point of view, and that point of view usually aligns with some preconceived notion of what the outcome should be. In this above case, the outcome was driven by the consultants need to tell the industry body what they wanted, not necessarily what they needed to know.
Scientific method by contrast works in the opposite way, it sets out to disprove a hypothesis, and by that means, advance our knowledge a bit, as you reconsider the hypotheses on the basis on one more thing you know does not work.
Bit more time consuming, but outcomes that are untainted by an existing perspective.
Numbers are only as good as the assumptions that drive them, so next time you are given an argument backed by numbers, don’t look at the numbers, have someone explain and debate the assumptions that have driven them.
Sep 15, 2009 | Leadership, Management
Two meetings in two days that demonstrated to me one of the key attributes of a leader.
The first, the group shut up until the leader said his piece, making sure everyone in the room knew he had a strongly held view. Everyone rushed to agree with him, despite the fairly obvious contradiction contained in his diatribe.
The following day, another meeting, another client. The boss made sure that everyone had spoken before he did, and he acknowledged where there were differences, and went out of his way to ensure that just because a view was different to his, did not make it any less valid. After a time, a consensus emerged through dialogue, and it was clear that the group would work its tail off individually and collectively to ensure implementation, in contrast the previous day, when any implementation would only have been achieved as a result of aggressive follow up by the CEO.
Real leaders often lead from the rear, the best are usually not the ones who provide what they see as the solution, but those who facilitate arrival at a solution.
Sep 10, 2009 | Change, Management, Uncategorized
Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, used a graph 40 years ago to predict the rate of growth in IT capacity by stating his belief that the number of transistors that could be put onto a chip would double every two years.
He was talking about computing power, a long way from the environmental debates raging around us currently.
On the radio a day or two ago, I heard a credible source observe that he was astonished to note the rate of carbon being released to the atmosphere was roughly double estimations made just a couple of years ago.
This comment brought to mind Moore’s law, and started me wondering if it perhaps applied to the climate change debate. A recent Newsweek article also observed the rates of carbon emissions were well up on estimates, and that the rates were increasing, significantly because the rate of change was feeding on itself, creating a sort of multiplier effect, Moore’s law at work.
The unedifying sight of Australia’s two political parties taking opposite sides of the debate, simply because that was their allocated role, and apparently refusing to allow the facts to get in the way of a good argument smacks of Monty Python, not the serious debate that is required to start to address the scientific, commercial and social issues surrounding reality, or otherwise, of human induced climate change.
If Moore’s law holds true in the rate of release of carbon into the atmosphere, and the release of carbon is indeed a cause of global warming, we will need to move very quickly indeed to prevent, or perhaps at best mitigate, a catastrophe.
