Sep 29, 2011 | Collaboration, Leadership, Strategy
Complexity is strangling us, paralysis by analysis has become pretty widespread, and the paradox is that we are all trying to do more with less.
In that context, creating an environment where everyone can contribute to the maximum of their capability seems like a pretty good idea.
To achieve that level of engagement irrespective of the size and complexity of an organisation, all it takes is one simple question”
“What do you think?”
The catch is that the hard part starts after the question, when the cultural environment needs to have evolved sufficiently to encourage people to tell it as they really see it, and then feel they have the power and authority to implement.
Sep 25, 2011 | Collaboration, Strategy
Thinking about they way organisations work, the “industrial” model of hierarchical functional management, expertise and knowledge hoarded, and little transparency of effort and outcomes is way past its use buy date.
We are social animals, who evolved in a village, usually not more than 150 people, where all the individuals made their contributions by way of what they were best at, and the group benefitted.
The age of the net 2.0 is bringing back the notion of the collaborative potential of the village as distinct from the hierarchical structure of the corporation.
This is a different way of organising ourselves. We need to be more adaptive and collaborative, the outcome of the whole system is the objective, not just the benefit that may accrue to an individual.
Sep 19, 2011 | Demand chains, Operations, Strategy
People routinely forecast optimistically, they under-forecast costs, and over-forecast outcomes. We have all seen it happen repeatedly in businesses and the public sector, most of us have seen it on personal level.
Demand planning is the core of effective operational optimisation, and differs from simply sales forecasting, in that it looks at the drivers of demand, rather than drivers of sales, often a big difference, and it is free of the bogy of just assuming the past will be repeated, even if massaged by some fancy algorithm.
Demand planning has been enhanced by the developments in what are in effect benchmarking of similar situations, collectively called Reference Class Forecasting by its Nobel prize winning proponents, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.
Demand planning is hard to do well, but most useful things are.
Sep 13, 2011 | Change, Innovation, Social Media, Strategy
Coles & Woolies are starting out to reduce the gap between their marketing practices and those of the trendsetter, Tesco in the UK.
I guess this is not surprising given they are both watching Tesco very closely, and Coles management is now dominated by ex Tesco personnel, but I wonder if Australia has the depth of Innovation capability to not just copy what others have done, but to create genuine innovation in this exploding digital space.
We appear to have taken the edge off our capability, Universities and research facilities are starved of funds, hobbled by any current political agenda, and standards do not appear to be sufficiently rigorous to test and train the very best minds we produce. This is a long term challenge, way beyond any political cycle, but in my view should be high on our agenda if we are serious as a nation about the role we play into the future. It is not just about the carbon tax (look at what Iceland is doing) or what to do with a few desperate people arriving in leaky boats, it is about how we set up our nation for the long term.
Insead Business School and the Confederation of Indian Industry have produced a credible report that ranks our performance in the all important “Innovation Stakes” at 18, better than Thailand, but behind New Zealand. Australia’s profile is on page 79.
Sep 5, 2011 | Innovation, Management, Operations, Strategy
Googles purchase of Motorola poses an interesting management challenge.
To date, Google has been a producer of software, an intellectually intensive activity that can be accomplished anywhere the brain is located.
Manufacturing is a different beast.
Suddenly you have factories, supply chains, unions, fragmented regulatory regimes covering OH&S, environment, waste, and a myriad of other stuff that sometimes seems designed to ensure you drown in red tape. What a difference!
This will stretch Google’s leadership and culture, as any manufacturing executive will tell you, it is not as easy as it looks.
Aug 30, 2011 | Alliance management, Collaboration, Innovation, Strategy
I was amazed to realise that the recent dog fight to buy Nortel, was really driven by the patents they had, rather than the value of the operational parts of the business.
After an opener bid by Google of $900mill, Nortel eventually was sold to a consortium that included Apple, Microsoft, (ironic partnership that) Ericcson and Sony for $4.5 billion, outbidding Google and Intel who had teamed up. The winners will share the patent bank of Nortel, some 30,000 of them covering all sorts of electronic ideas and gizmos. The Nortel sale then prompted the sale of Motorola to Google for 12.5 billion, as it put a value on their patent bank.
A new business has emerged from the development of the last 20 years, “patent troll” someone who buys up patents, and then launches litigation to extract royalties. Given the hazy boundaries of patents in the digital space, the ideas that patent applications address in the first instance often have potential applications in applications never dreamed of in the original form. Enter the patent troll, who chases the royalities, potentially ensuring innovation driven startups may make never get off the ground, as the threat of litigation is enough to smother the commercialisation process.
The giant of Patent Trolls appears to be Intellectual Ventures, started by Nathan Myhrvold, a brilliant bloke whose contribution to Microsoft was a key to their success, and who since has made heaps by effectively greenmailing tech companies with lawsuits and threats suits for patent infringement.
Long intro. This cost of insuring against greenmailing ends up in the cost of the stuff we buy, and virtually all of it is just risk management, avoiding the risk of litigation that adds no value to the innovation process at all. The patent process was developed to protect ideas in a simpler time, and seems to me to have lived beyond its useful life, at least in the digital arena. Ideas scale, they get better with use, and the evolution of patent trolling acts as a disincentive to use, a tax.
