Mar 24, 2010 | Personal Rant
Listening to the PM and Opposition leader the other day, “debating” the future of health care in this country, I felt a bit woozy.
One of the biggest items in the budget, and certainly the item of huge interest to most Australians, and what do we get, nothing but more of the same crap!
The PM’s scheme to take some greater control over expenditure is doomed to failure, even if he could get the states to agree, how can a pack of weenies in Canberra deliver hugely complicated system like health; would you like a pink bat with that?
The opposition is determined to be a policy free zone, OK, this tactic has won elections in the past, but health is too important to be a political pissing contest.
The real challenge is to go back to basics, strip away the layers of vested interest, from all in the game, and redesign it from the ground up, with the only objective to build an infrastructure to deliver patient outcomes into the long term.
Over time, the vested interests, bureaucracies & bureaucrats, doctors, nurses, private investors, equipment and consumables suppliers, employees and their unions, the list goes on, have all taken positions that have narrowed the options of sensible management of the system for patient outcomes, a bit like the plaque build-up in the arteries leading to the heart, and the heart of the system is in real trouble. Each action taken to protect a small bit of turf anywhere in the system reduces the opportunity of the whole system to grow and innovate, it is a sacrifice of the potential for greater good on the alter of self interest.
One bit at a time, the system has become narrow, brittle, inefficient, and ineffective, just like that artery with a bad case of sclerosis. We need a radical by-pass, it will be painful, dangerous, and require more practical skills, will, and vision than I suspect are currently available, but there is little alternative if we are to have a system that is effective, affordable, and equitable.
Mar 22, 2010 | Branding, Marketing, Personal Rant
Australia rode on the sheeps back in the 50’s, but in the 70’s & 80’s the sheep turned nasty, and we mostly got off, having lost our pricing power through the competitive growth of synthetics, and strategic stupidity.
When we dismounted, looking for an easier way, superfine wool was 19 microns, now, the leading edge of the few that left are approaching 11 microns, and there is now a substantial volume of wool in the 15-17 microns range, an astonishing achievement.
When Australia unwittingly “outsourced” the many processing stages in the wool value chain, largely to China and India, it was driven by the commodity pricing mentality, that still widely exists. Now, as we chase our tails to the bottom of the price curve, we are paying the price for that short sightedness, as we have no capability left in any stage of the value chain past —-growing the stuff, to leverage the leading position of the best growers, and to supply markets with a sustainable fibre with deep capabilities to meet and shape consumers needs .
Australian Wool Innovation, the current iteration of successive industry bodies charged with the responsibility to “market” the clip is in disarray again, as they try and treat symptoms they do not understand with medicine that did not work 40 years ago.
There is no point being on the leading research edge, unless you can commercialise the output and generate a return from it by reshaping demand, rather than just taking a small premium because you are marginally better at doing what everyone else does. AWI and its predecessors have done a good research job over the years, bit a very poor marketing job.
Mar 15, 2010 | Change, Marketing, Personal Rant, Social Media
From time to time we stumble across something that offers a “Eureka moment” an opportunity for insight that clears the haze, explains something in a way that makes such obvious sense, we wonder why it took so long.
Clay Shirky’s notion of “Cognitive surplus” is such a moment.
His central thesis is that we spend time, huge amounts of it, consuming various forms of media, and he concentrates on TV, but surely most magazines rate a mention, because we do not know what else to do with the surplus time, but when we wake up, and find an alternative, we embrace it, enter Wikipedia, open source software, facebook, and many more.
The wake-up is that we realise that rather than being passive receivers of stuff, we can create something ourselves using the tools of the web, and no matter how trivial it may be, it is more rewarding than sitting watching Desperate Housewives. This is a seismic shift in the way we live our lives, and our kids are going to have to deal with it, but what fun that will be, and how enriching it will be for their lives, so much better than dumbing out in front of Gilligans Island.
Mar 9, 2010 | Leadership, Personal Rant
National Womens day on Monday saw the leader of the opposition make an extraordinary promise.
Under a Coalition government, he is proposing to tax the big end of town a bit extra (presumably because he thinks they can afford it) in order to create a 6 month maternity leave right for all female employees, at their existing salary levels, I am unclear about the impact of the proposal on paternity leave.
Leaving aside the inequity, stupidity, and unique capacity to unite some unusual bed buddies, this proposal has three further profound failings:
- It clearly is a brain snap, not subjected to sensible costing and policy development disciplines, and therefore bound to be “binned” at some stage, so why go through the pain.
- Implementation would be a further huge distortion in the tax system, at a time when the system is breaking, if not broken, and with a major review about to be released to the public that has the objective of identifying, quantifying and removing the current huge inequities and distortions, where is the sense in adding another.
- Where is the evidence of a consistent set of values in the policy? Australians want to believe our politicians are leading us along a course that has at its foundation a philosophy, a set of values from which we can draw inspiration, and to which we can relate. Despite the evidence to the contrary, we appear prepared to give the politicians the benefit of the doubt in this regard. This policy proposal can only erode what little confidence we have in the foundation value system of the Liberal party, which is supposed to be about encouraging personal responsability, reward for effort, and the value of work, effort, risk, and personal integrity.
Abbott had been doing pretty well since becoming leader, his aggressive, no compromise style has injected some life into a listless opposition, but he has just shot the pooch with this nonsense.
Mar 2, 2010 | Leadership, Management, Personal Rant
“Training” has become the default position in many circumstances where employees are required to learn a new skill, revise an existing one, or become familiar with a new product or process. At the end of the process, most will retain little of the training.
By contrast, education is a process of developing the ability to think, ask questions, be critical without being personal, reflect on outcomes and find flaws in the hypothesis, or just join the dots differently.
It follows that education takes longer, is more challenging to the educator, is far more engaging for the “educatee”, and will pay greater dividends in the long run.
As Confucious is reported to have said;
“Tell me and I will forget,
Show me and I may remember,
Involve me and I will understand”
After all, you train dogs, you educate people.
Feb 25, 2010 | Change, Innovation, Personal Rant
It has been interesting listening to the “debates” over the last week or so on two different topics, the latest of the seemingly endless versions of a NSW transport plan, and the redevelopment of the area of Sydney harbour now called Barangaroo
On both issues, it seems if talkback radio is any indication, that everyone has an opinion, and wants everyone else to hear it.
It also appears that the conversations vary from loud opinions based on fluffy thinking at best, to sensible opinions based on a series of assumptions that even if you choose to disagree with the opinion, at least the assumptions upon which they are based are transparent. There appears to be some correlation between the level of noise and the ignorance of the mouth from which the noise emanates, particularly when responding to an opinion leading view expressed aggressively, as Paul Keating has done on Barangaroo.
It seems to me that if you are going to be taken seriously in a debate, any debate, about the changing of the status quo, you had better have some facts, transparent assumptions, and a vision of the preferred outcome in order to be taken seriously, and to have a useful role in the debate.
Making noise just distracts from the real work of driving change.
