Sep 16, 2013 | Change, Collaboration, Demand chains, Operations, Strategy
Most of the really great innovation that happens has as a core component, a re-definition of what the future should look like.
From Orville and Wilbur Wright, to Henry Ford, Martin Luther King and Steve Jobs, the words they used explained why they were doing something, and how they believed it would change the future.
They defined what the future would should look like, and the similarity to the present was only by exception. Then they got on with delivering.
On a more mundane level, lets consider the future of agriculture as a component of our modern lives. We have cities now that were unthinkable a generation ago, Tokyo’s urban area contains 37 million people, Jakarta 27 million, Seoul 23 million, and so on down the list.
Mans evolution seems to be grounded at the points where he first domesticated some animals to serve as hunters, food, and companions, then domesticated wild grains, and settled down to grow them rather than moving and harvesting as they went. A similarly monumental change is happening around us now, as we leave the land and cram into cities. Initially we fed ourselves with factory farming monocultures replacing natural environments, and we are only just starting to realise the ecological impact of this social change as a few experiments in “rewilding” progress.
This increasing disconnection from our roots I believe is being felt at a subconscious level, and we are reacting, demonstrated by the sudden popularity of cooking and gardening shows in the media, the growth of farmers markets, “pick your own” trails run by local farmers, the resurgence of specialist retailers who provide product provenance, and the nascent groundswell of interest in urban agriculture.
Degraded urban areas are being re-greened, and the thinkers amongst us are slowly recognising the extent and power of the changes, and reporting the changes, as with the” Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change” report.
So what next?
Technology will play a huge role in enabling “vertical” agriculture, a capital and technology intensive idea, but the bridging stage is to retain agriculture as an integral part of our urban landscape rather than removing it under the short term pressure for housing and industrial development.
The exciting part of all this is not just the revolutionary agricultural practices that will emerge, but the opportunities for the ancillary industries and services to evolve, providing jobs, education, and some reconnection with our evolutionary ancestors, whose DNA is hard-wired in us, but recently ignored to our social cost.
Sep 3, 2013 | Governance, Innovation, Marketing, Operations, Strategy
I have just been a part of a post investment review with a client, looking at what a significant investment in capital equipment has delivered, compared to the planned outcomes, that underpinned the Capex.
Not a pretty sight, and now they have to learn the lessons to avoid repeating the mistakes.
Over the course of the exercise, the marketing manager consistently blathered about the accountability of the engineering staff in the process, but when cornered on marketing accountability to the product and market specifications against which the investment was made, and the effectiveness of the launch, and post launch activity, he had nothing.
Marketers have cried forever that the money spent on marketing is an investment, not an expense, but often this has a hint of self preservation about it.
However, if we are fair dinkum (Aussie for honest with ourselves) we should also be prepared to undergo a rigorous process to measure the effectiveness of our marketing investment.
Marketing however, has substantial elements of the “qualitative” about it. Creativity, being different, a better approach, all of which are best measured in hindsight.
Having measured, and with the benefit of hindsight seen a better way, surely the gap could be termed a “Marketing Debt”, the amount pissed away because the idea, execution, CVP, or something else was not up to scratch.
If we figure out how to keep a running score, weighted by hindsight and the continuous improvement enabled by the analytics and A/B testing now possible, we might even convince the beanies that marketing really is an investment.
Jun 12, 2013 | Change, Customers, Lean, Operations, Sales
The sorts of customers you have play a significant role in defining who you are.
A former client had a customer base that valued the hands on, custom design, and short supply chain they offered on their packaging component items. That group of clients were not buying the high volume, commoditized products, but far smaller volumes for more specialised and bespoke products.
However, promises of large volumes can be seductive, so in the face of squeezed margins and a flat industry, they broadened their product base to include the low margin high volume items required by the large commodity product suppliers.
The equation was changed, no longer did they enjoy an intimate relationship with their largest customers, being engaged in their businesses at a detailed, technical and developmental level, they were just suppliers who could be replaced with product from China or the US.
The result is a flat revenue line over the last 5 years, with fragile margins despite great success in increasing the productivity of their asset base and employees, and a significant lowering of overheads.
It takes guts and vision to turn a customer away, but it often pays.
May 14, 2013 | Governance, Management, Operations, Uncategorized
I found myself in a heated debate last week with a headhunter about the value, and challenges of SME’s outsourcing the hiring of employees, particularly salespeople.
Her view: SME owners are so time constrained that anything not “core” to success should be outsourced, and left to professionals.
My view: If sales, or as I like to call it, Revenue generation, is not core to every SME, I do not know what is. Whilst it may be the product offering, that delivers the value, it is sales that delivers the opportunity to deliver that value, and therefore is the key role, and should warrant substantial attention. Picking those who will represent you with current and potential customers is much too important to be outsourced to “professionals” who get paid by delivering a body to a seat.
While there are exceptions at either end of the employee scale, casual factory workers are perhaps best outsourced, and it is probably sensible to have a headhunter exercise their skills and networks to find a group of people who fill demanding profile when seeking a new CEO, from which a board can make a choice.
However, this is not how it usually evolves. The usual is a harried, busy executive whose KPI’s have little to do with the quality of the team, and the individuals who make it up does not give adequate thought to the personal dynamics and capability requirements of the role, they just want a warm body that appears able to do the job in the seat ASAP.
Good salespeople make or break a business, the challenges in finding, keeping, and maximising their productivity are substantial, but are central to the success of the enterprise.
Apr 24, 2013 | Collaboration, Innovation, Operations
At a simple level, cognitive productivity is just using the brainpower at your disposal to deliver the optimum outcome, weather that brainpower be resident between your ears, or between the collective ears of many in a group.
However, it is also much deeper than that. The notion of cognitive overhead how much effort there is in understanding something comes from this post by David Demaree, a software engineer in Chicago, which was prompted by the early iterations of Google+. Cognitive Overhead — “how many logical connections or jumps your brain has to make in order to understand or contextualize the thing you’re looking at.”
As conceived, it applied to software engineering, and the resulting products, but it seems to me it has much wider application. All those remotes that run our “entertainment centers” are testament to that, what happened to the simple old TV remote, one device, did everything without a science degree?.
Clay Shirky talks about the notion of cognitive surplus. This idea proposes that people are motivated by the opportunity to create and share, no longer just by the command and control ideas of the hierarchical employer where money and power emanating from a position description are what counts. The real power in the new economy comes from individuals, and the power vested in them to create by the digital revolution. Even if that creation is just another silly cat picture posted on Instagram, it is nevertheless a creative action taken by someone who could not have done it just a few years ago
If you put the two notions of cognitive overhead and surplus together, you have a recipe for cognitive productivity. Leveraging the cognitive surplus in a manner that minimises cognitive overhead, to deliver greater and greater value to society.
That my friends, is the future!
Mar 28, 2013 | Governance, Innovation, Leadership, Operations, Small business
Manufacturing is not just an amalgam of industries, far more importantly, it is a capability, a way to capture imagination in a physical form.
In discussions about manufacturing, its slow demise in Australia, the level and type of support it should receive, its importance to long term prosperity, and the links between manufacturing and innovation, we leave one really important factor aside, one I suspect it is just not generally recognised. We define “industry” with the assumptions and words that came with the explosion of manufacturing in the last 100 years, the “food” industry, the “Auto” industry, the “Airline” industry, and so on. We do not seem to recognise that the capabilities are “cross industry” that the definitions we use no longer hold, if they ever did , beyond adding a bit of convenience to the language.
The lines are blurring further, rapidly and irrevocably.
Is Apple an electronics designer and manufacturer (Mac computers), a service provider (itunes) , or a product marketer (ipad)? My answer: They are all, and none of the above. Rather, Apple is a marketer that delivers its value proposition via a range of operational and sales channels that have nothing to do with the generally accepted definitions of industries. Certainly Apple has been able to leverage their collective imagination better than any other enterprise I can think of.
The next step is a truly scary one for many, the advent of 3-D printing.
Within a very short time, 3-D printers will be as available and cheap as desktop computers, all you need is a digital design file and a printer. We will be able to produce everything from simple household items to highly specified parts for our cars, produced in our kitchen.
The marvelous wind powered devices of designer Theo Jansen have been printed in miniature, and work just like the full sized ones, and dramatically make the point. If you can imagine it, you can now print it!
Manufacturing is about to go through a change as profound as that brought on by the steam engine.
20th century notions and boundaries to “manufacturing” are as outdated as a bow and arrow in a gunfight, so we must change the language and intellectual boundaries of the conversation if we are ever to make any sense of the dynamics at play.
