Sep 21, 2010 | Change, Leadership, Personal Rant, Social Media
In Australia, we are considering the NBN, and the impact it will have, and argue about the best way to deliver it, cost effectively.
A further debate should be the impact of connecting the billions of people in the world not yet connected, and what that may mean to us, and others currently enjoying the benefits of living in a developed economy.
What will happen when Africa has access to the net, not just the knowledge, but the social tools, the ability to connect and do business across borders, absorb the cultural and economic differences they have with the developed world? With the resources base in Africa, the potential for development based on resources is huge, as with Siberian Russia, so long as the social institutions in those regions can evolve to the benefit of the majority, rather than breaking down into deadly squabbles over the potential spoils to the few.
The growth in Asia, low cost manufacturing based on low labor and institutional costs, has led to increased prosperity, increased education, a movement from the country to the cities, changes in traditional diets, will only accelerate and move to other areas in the world with increased connection, with huge flow on impacts.
Logically this also leads to consideration of the financial markets, as the developing world generates large trade surpluses, and investments in infrastructure funded by domestic saving further increasing their competitive advantage, how will the currently developed world repay the accumulated public debt? What will happen in those “developed” countries that slash public expenditure, and increase taxes to repay the debt rather than default?
We are in for a wild ride over the next few decades, but we seem to focus excessively on meaningless trivia, perhaps it is a coping mechanism.
Sep 1, 2010 | Communication, Management, Personal Rant
PowerPoint, the Microsoft program has become such a part of the daily regime of sharing information sharing that it has impacted on the way we communicate, and it has its detractors, of which I am one.
Some time ago, I was at a conference where a senior bureaucrat was presenting her departments position. The presentation was replete with animations, and the various tools in PPT to the point where she was prattling on about the great features of the program. What dross.
PowerPoint is the default position now in many situations, but is becoming a crutch, as illustrated in the NY times story.
The lessons are simple:
- Use minimum words on a slide,
- Dump most of the tricky features that just distract from your message,
- Use the opportunity to sell a simple proposition, not to do a “brain-dump” of everything you know,
- Watch and respond to the audience, connect with them,
- Use the program to illustrate your points, not just list them .
Aug 16, 2010 | Leadership, Personal Rant
Here is something that should scare the pants off any thinking Australian.
Into the last week of an election campaign notable by the lack of anything notable, apart perhaps from the diligent application to the pork barrel to marginal seats in Queensland, and a prominent economist in the US comes out with an analysis of the US economy that calls things as they are, rather than as the political comrades over the last 30 years would like Americans, (and by default, the rest of us) to believe.
The US is bankrupt, services are being cut across the board, and it is becoming clear that the baby-boomers starting to retire will drain anything that remains in the coffers, leaving a debt to their children too big and complex to have been attacked by those who caused it.
Back to Australia, we are not in the hole like our mates in the US, but only because we have been more lucky with the resources we have, and the numbers of people relative to the size of the resources prize , and perhaps the reforms of both parties, starting with the Hawke government, have been prepared to start to address the disease rather than just the symptoms, albeit not necessarily seeing it that way.
I see no discussion of anything I see as fundamental to the type of country we leave our children in the narrative of this current campaign, just spin around petty nonsense, with the occasional intrusion of something important being trivialised and reduced to populist slogans.
Aug 6, 2010 | Personal Rant
The accepted “cabinet” processes, where robust, non-personalised debate occurs in camera leading to a conclusion, hopefully based on a combination of qualitative and qualitative data, followed by all members supporting the final determination appears to be gone in our political sphere. It seems that both sides of politics, at all levels, leak like sieves, and sensible analysis and debate has been replaced by dumb, self serving, short term “policy” development.
What has gone wrong?
My view, the whole structure, both major parties and their support structures have allowed their sense of “mission” and “purpose” to erode. They no longer know why they do what they do, beyond the motivation to gain and hold power on both a party and personal level.
They say you get the politicians you deserve, and it would be easy to dismiss the whole lot as self-serving power hungry grubs, but that would in most cases be wrong. I am sure there are good people on both sides. It is the structures, processes and prevailing culture that prevents the delivery of a quality outcome to Australians, combined with a profound lack of leadership. If Australia was a business, shareholders would be clamouring for change, and the authorities would be calling in the corproate investigators.
It is up to us to demand the changes.
Jul 13, 2010 | Leadership, Personal Rant
Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE, the worlds largest manufacturing company recently made some unflattering remarks about the Chinese and US leadership, and has been widely pilloried.
What happened to freedom of speech?
We seem to have become immune to the facts, or one persons version of the facts, to the extent that when they are voiced, and we disagree, we are made sufficiently uncomfortable to attack the person, not the underlying assumptions that led to the view in the first place.
The words of public figures are so widely seen as spin, that we dismiss everything said publicly as tainted by self interest, but by muzzling the views of a bloke like Immelt, one of the most powerful, sensible, successful and outspoken figures in the commercial world, we risk losing a voice from which we can learn much.
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.
