Feb 24, 2012 | Leadership, Personal Rant
I spoke to a few people in Canberra yesterday, curious as to the impact of the Labor leadership cat-fight on the rest of the place.
Whilst I expected it to be the topic of the day, the consensus was that work in the bureaucracy, the implementers of policy, had come to a complete standstill over the last few weeks, and yesterday, started rolling backwards as individuals took the lead from their bosses, and started jockeying for post cat-fight, and probably post this current “government”, position.
If we ever needed a graphic example of the impact of indecision and conflict at the top, we need look no further.
The worse it has got at the top, the more the impact ripples through the ranks, stopping any sort of sensible conversation, let alone strategy (policy in their terms) implementation. Worse still, the ripples amplify the impact, so the recovery time will be substantial.
The impact of the profound lack of leadership that this power tussle has displayed will be felt for months, probably years. Problem is, we as taxpaying individuals and enterprises are paying through the nose for the privilege of watching this stupid game, as the main game gets totally ignored, and continues down the proverbial slot.
Jan 29, 2012 | Innovation, Personal Rant, Uncategorized
In the December 2011 quarter, Apple made $13 billion in profits, an extraordinary figure, 3 billion more than the revenue of Google in the quarter. Apple is an innovation machine, making it so is the legacy of Steve Jobs.
However, there is usually a flip side to the stories of huge success, Jobs was not the nicest person around, brilliant, magnetic, but a real genuine article prick, according to his biographer, and the woes of Apple contract manufacturers in China are well known.
But, who has heard of the mineral Tantalum? Apple uses it, as does every other producer of our electronic gadgets.
Talison, a company headquartered in Perth used to mine tantalum in Australia, a mineral extracted from an ore called Coltan, short for Columbite-tantalite, but no longer due to competitive price pressure coming from African supplies. Pity we lost another market.
Coltan is now one of the minerals being mined in West Africa, using primitive tools, and kids paid slave wages, sold so we can have the latest gadget, and the nasties in charge can buy more guns and anti-personnel mines, and fill their Swiss bank accounts.
This blog is usually about marketing, management, and the stuff that hopefully scratches my readers brains to facilitate improvement. However, from time to time, we need to think about the ethical base of what we do.
This almost unknown story of Coltan ore, and its derivatives should be on our agenda.
Jan 26, 2012 | Leadership, Personal Rant
It’s Australia day, a celebration of nationhood, opportunity for pollies to grandstand, excuse for a piss-up, whatever floats your boat.
Perhaps it should be a day for articulating our national challenges, in a manner that encourages rational debate based on data, whilst offering a real philosophical underpinning for decision making, rather than the current flatuant rhetoric and partisan maneuvering for short term political “advantage” .
That’s what I tell my clients to do, then often assist them through the exercise with mentoring and a set of readily available tools.
If it can be done for a business, is a basic discipline for survival, why can’t it be done for a country? Why shouldn’t we, as Australians, the shareholders in this Australia P/L demand it of our Board of Directors?.
So, my call for today, is to dismiss all the puffery, glad-handing, and mutual admiration, throw it in the bin, and replace it with an agenda for the evolution of an Australia we would like to live in.
I would be talking about education, real education that sets up our engineering, operational and manufacturing competitiveness for decades, the means by which we demonstrate our humanity, to our elderly, those who want to come and share this great country with us, and to our disadvantaged, how we strike a balance between the short term expediency, and long term sustainability in all sorts of areas, and how we relate to those with whom we share the world, and finally, how our society pays for itself.
Not a word about gay marriage, the machinations of political parties, who has the best looking dog, the latest shark attack, or nominations for an Academy award. All are irrelevant distractions, the detritus of life, ignore it, and consider something a bit more meaningful, and what you will do to push it, to put some meaning back into the day, and perhaps bit by bit, make the joint a better place.
Jan 20, 2012 | Change, Management, Personal Rant
The Federal Government is regularly blackmailed into providing assistance for the Australian car making industry, hundreds of millions on the basis that the industry is strategically important. The real reason is the political poison that closure of a plant causes, as suddenly lots of voters are unemployed, and the support and component suppliers (and their voting employees) are in trouble.
Kim Carr is just the latest in a long line (a conga line?) of Industry Ministers to go to Detroit, only to find that the captains of the car industry do not really care about a modest market and manufacturing outpost that has no real strategic place in the global supply chain, and therefore is expendable. If Australians want to keep them open, here is the price!
What a difference to the processed food industry.
It employs just as many, probably more, and does have a genuine strategic role, feeding ourselves seems pretty strategic to me, but is more fragmented and therefore unable to point to individual electorates and predict disaster, so we just let it rot.
Hypocrisy, perhaps blind stupidity, of the first order.
Jan 15, 2012 | Change, Leadership, Personal Rant
The wall I refer to is the Australian processed food industry. It is being torn down by the high $A, the strategies of the two retail gorillas who are stocking shelves with housebrands, global sourcing of product, and lack of will by Australian governments and institutions of various types that inhabit the fringes of the industry.
On January 6, Heinz closed its tomato sauce plant in Victoria, transferring manufacturing to NZ. This comes on top of the Heinz closure of the beetroot plant in Brisbane, and further closures in Wagga, and a very long list of other closures by many local and multinational businesses that have occurred over the last 10 years.
Not only are we becoming just a quarry for the world, flog our minerals, and import the manufactured product, the same thing is happening to the food industry. Export the farm commodities while we still can, at commodity prices, and import the processed product.
According to the Australian Food & Grocery Council State of the Nation 2011 report, Australia is now a net importer of processed food. Can you believe that?
What happens to our rural communities, manufacturing capabilities, and innovation DNA? Without manufacturing to work with, innovation slows, and a vicious cycle of price driven commoditisation takes hold.
There is a bit of bleating going on like this post, but little useful is being done.
So, here is a short list:
- Assemble and make available a detailed database of the food industry. It is astonishing that one does not exist. Instead, there are many partial lists assembled by various industry bodies, service providers and government agencies that together would offer some real statistics to enable decisions to be based on facts, not assertions and vested interests. The first step in improvement is to clearly understand what you currently have.
- Encourage, indeed demand, a collaboration between all the various Government, industry, and research bodies that serve the industry, and reduce the wasted resources by focussing on a few priorities that are bigger than the local, and special interest issues that currently dominate. We can do far better, and spend far less with a bit of sensible strategic management of collective resources. The Federal Government is in a position to make this demand, as ultimately, they control the flow of funding. It should grow some “cohunes” and exercise some leadership for a change.
- Direct the Productivity Commission to produce a detailed industry profile to quantify the current situation, and provide a base for filling the gaps, and encouraging growth, capability development, and ultimately commercial sustainability.
- Be prepared to support sensible innovation, capability, and industry building initiatives, ones with a commercial justification, not just a political one. For example:
- Revive the Regional Food processing grant program, but have it run by commercial people with a detailed industry background, and flexible guidelines, not Canberra bound bureaucrats who measure activity not outcomes but by box-ticking.
- Reinstate trade training at regional TAFE institutions in critical capabilities, fitters, welders, electrical trades, boilermaking, and mechanical engineering.
- Rebuild sagging infrastructure, particularly rail and road/rail hubs. Road transport costs are strangling many regional manufacturing centres after the widespread and almost indiscriminate closure of regional rail lines.
- Crash through all the stupid State/Federal demarcation and duplication that stymies all of the above, and have a national approach, after all, it is a national challenge, not a state one.
Send me your policy suggestions, maybe, just maybe we can get somebody to listen.
Jan 13, 2012 | Personal Rant, Social Media
Surely in this day and age of total and transparent communication, putting out a contrarian view, and having no-one respond is the greatest insult we can make.
Putting out a view that is deliberately contrarian takes guts, as you will attract criticism, sometimes unreasonable and even personal, so you need a thick skin, and to be in an environment where there are genuinely no repercussions to the venting of the view.
However, putting out a view you know runs against the conventional wisdom, and being ignored…… what an insult!
