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.
May 13, 2010 | Personal Rant
As we appear to be in a recovery, at least those industries that can benefit in any way from digging stuff up appear to be, what will happen to the underemployed?.
Yesterday, the unemployment numbers came out, 5.4% Australia wide, 5.8% in NSW, but what they really mean is that of those surveyed, 95.6% of those who want to work, did some work, which can mean a couple of hours, in the previous month. I normally do not follow the detail of the employment figures, the statistical and political games played with them just get the blood boiling, but you would have to be crazy not to believe there is a very considerable under-employment in the economy.
Usually we focus on the young, but what about the late middle aged, the plus 50’s (of which I am one) who sit around much of the time, under-employed.
There is a huge well of experience and wisdom that is being wasted. Many of these people do not want to retire, they are the baby-boomer generation, they get their kicks out of working, and many now cannot retire, the GFC has seen to that.
As organisations try to keep full time employment down to minimise costs, and many have a barrier about hiring someone 50-plus, this group who have much to contribute, are being shuffled aside ignored, and devalued.
Wake up Australia!
Apr 23, 2010 | Change, Personal Rant
It is a scary thought, but roughly 30% of our economy (Public sector expenditure) is subject to the disciplines of neither the market or democracy.
Bureaucracies are institutions that thrive on complexity, it is far easier to make an existing process more complex, than to take it apart and re-engineer it to make it more simple, and rarely is a process ditched, just leave it on the books in case it assists at some point, to frustrate somebody trying to do something useful that seeks to adjust the status quo.
This thought makes the addition of another bureaucratic process on to the management of the national health system, as agreed by our Federal and State pollies over the past week as a substitute for genuine reform of the system, even more scary.
None of the apparent root causes of the current mess have been addressed, they have just been moved around a bit, and political sweeteners (read, our tax dollars) have been added to provide the façade of improvement.
All that has happened is that a few more deckchairs have been added to the slippery sloping deck, and the colours have been mixed up a bit to make a better photograph.
Apr 19, 2010 | Management, OE, Operations, Personal Rant
All you hear about currently is the Australian “health debate” a debate the pollies have decided to have as a political exercise, are discussions about who gets to spend the money i.e. exercise the power, it has little to do with the health outcomes of Australians, that is just the excuse.
Cynical perhaps, but if it were otherwise, you would be hearing real discussions about the manner in which the billions were spent, not how just much, and by whom. We do need more to be spent, but more importantly in a society where health costs are increasing rapidly, and will continue to do so, we need debate, and importantly action, on the effectiveness of the spending, and the means by which that effectiveness, measured by patient outcomes, can be improved.
Applying proven process improvement, Lean, and Six Sigma commercial disciplines to public spending should be a priority, but perhaps that would impinge on vested interests a bit much, so we leave it alone.
The parody via the “Lean” hyperlink above has a scary resonance, and we leave discussion about the effectiveness of spending alone, to the great cost of to our community over the medium & long term.
Apr 17, 2010 | Leadership, Personal Rant
“The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.”
The Roman historian and thinker Cicero said these words in 55 BC, but it could be any one of our current crop of pollies, from either side, although the language may be a bit polished for some of them.
However, we now explicitly understand the notion of public investment, and the associated debt as a means to build productive infrastructure to benefit the commercial activity of the whole community. In Roman times it was a matter of “Romanising the Barbarians” as a means of subduing them, the economic activity was a fortunate offshoot. (The link is to a wonderful book that casts an entirely different light on the popular view of Roman history)
Our forbears understood this when they built the train lines, bridges, and the Snowy scheme, that we still use today, but we appear to have forgotten the value of long term investments, and need to justify every activity in the current electoral cycle
Nonsense.
Apr 6, 2010 | Personal Rant
It is a great pity to see Malcolm Turnbull pull the pin on politics, as he announced last night.
Whatever your persuasion, it would be hard not to agree that having someone in the Federal Parliament who knows how hard it is to make a dollar, what strategy, vision and purpose mean, understands the challenges of leading complex organizations to change, something about the costly friction added to the system by a focus on process rather than outcome, and simply someone who is smart, and doesn’t need the money, is a great boon to the country.
Now he will fade back into the commercial world, and the professional politicians will quietly rejoice, as there is nothing as dangerous as an outsider on the inside.
Turnbull never really fitted in, he said what he thought, and thought for himself, he bore no reverence for the status quo, and he wanted to make a difference. No wonder they could not stand him!
We are all poorer for his going, but just perhaps there will be a legacy of his short tenure, maybe someone in the joint will start to speak out in other than “polli-speak” as a result of his influence, we can always hope.
