Jan 25, 2011 | Leadership, Personal Rant, Strategy
Amidst all the public utterances on Australia Day by elected representatives keen to be seen for a moment on the tele, in print, or lauded in the blogosphere, calling for a wiser, more compassionate, considerate, and outward thinking Australia, ….. (add your own platitude) it may be impertinent to list a few questions that will get no space, but from the perspective of this blogger require some consideration. This is where I show my colors as an unrepentant optimist, as I really think we can do more than just consider these things, we can do something useful, take action.
- Do we get value for the (roughly) 30% of GDP chewed up by the public sector? Do we really need three levels of Government to have the sort of communities we aspire to?
- Why are our kids graduating from University to no jobs, when we have been extolled to be a “clever country”? and why are we not training the builders, plumbers, electricians, and mechanics of tomorrow, rather we seem to be denigrating these skills compared to a university education.
- Why are the less fortunate than most of us not improving their lot, despite the $billions thrown at their problems? Perhaps it is because but so little gets through to where it is needed, as all the rent seekers clip the ticket on the way through to those who need it?
- Where has manufacturing in this country gone? Why? And what do we need to do to renew Australia’s position as an innovative creator of technology and then producing the products that result?
- How are we going to realistically maintain a standard of living as the baby boom generation retires, when the ratios of taxpayers to “taxconsumers” is reversed ?
- And while we are on baby boomers, why is it that many hundreds of thousands of experienced, talented, and motivated baby boomers cannot be employed fully?
- Why are we not having a fair dinkum debate about what sort of Australia we want to leave for our kids and grandchildren?
- Why can’t we see far enough ahead to recognise that the training we are giving our kids may have been good for last century, but no good for tomorrow?. We need to encourage creativity in all its forms, an understanding of personal responsibility and accountability, a willingness to have a go, not the structured, left brain dominated, narrow vision emphasis we seem to so value. Without these skills, our kids will struggle with a society profoundly altered over the course of their lifetimes. Consider, a child starting school in 2011 will retire around 2070. We cannot predict what the world will be in 5 years, let alone 55, so we must educate for creativity, action, and intellectual agility, not the rigid structures that may have served to date.
- Why have our elected representatives walked away for the “greatest moral issue of our time?”
I could go on, but you get the drift. Lets talk about things that are important, indeed vital to our long term prosperity and sustainability, but not necessarily going to bite us on the arse today, but if we do not do something now to start to address these long term challenges, the cost down the track will be huge.
Happy Australia day.
Jan 20, 2011 | Demand chains, Management, OE, Operations, Strategy
Some time ago I mused that perhaps the worm was slowing if not turning, in relation to local manufacturing, rather than buying in from China as the default option.
The crisis in the US, far worse than anything in this country, had to lead to structural change in the US economy, as the sort of structural change necessary usually only ever occurs when there is little option but to change, as continuing on is simply not an option.
It seems the swallows are appearing in the US, the early trendsetters are thinking twice about the downside of “offshoring”. Loss of IP control, sovereign risk, long and inflexible supply chains, transaction costs in the supply chain and management, and so on.
It makes economic and social sense to manufacture amongst the network of services and capabilities required to be sustainably successful, rather than taking the short term apparent cost reduction that really ends up costing more.
With China suffering increased inflationary pressure, their western export markets tightening wallets, an undervalued currency, and increasing domestic pressures around human rights, pollution, and the distribution of the new wealth, something has to break, somewhere. Wise businesses appear to be weighing the costs and benefits of offshoring, Vs building local capability, considering the long term benefits of development of clusters of innovation and service providers, and lean operations including shortened supply chains, and coming to the conclusion that some things are better done locally.
It will take a long time for the tide to turn, and it will turn very selectively, as many commodity, low value, low technology items will always be cheaper from a low cost environment, but the manufacturing that adds real value will start to trickle home.
Jan 20, 2011 | Innovation, Marketing, Strategy
Often these two terms are used interchangeably, as synonyms, but that are not.
Creativity is a part of the process of innovation, an integral and key part, but nevertheless, just a part. It is, as Sir Ken Robinson so memorably said in his great TED talk, “Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value” .
By contrast, innovation is to my mind the process of taking the output of the creative process and putting in place the steps to extract and leverage the implicit value of the creativity, making it explicit. Thomas Edison, perhaps the most celebrated inventor of all time, certainly the individual with more patents to his name than anyone else, before or since, famously said “Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration” recognising the distinction between the creative spark, and the hard work necessary to turn the idea into a product, service, or process.
For enterprises to flourish in today’s competitive world, they need to encourage a culture of creativity, again as stated by Sir Ken in the TED presentation “If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original” and back that creativity with a management culture that gives the creativity life.
Jan 17, 2011 | Branding, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
There are lots of people flogging various digitally sophisticated SEO techniques, and they appear to be making a living. However, it seems to me that after all this time most key words worth having, have been taken, registered, and everyone is following similar SEO strategies, so your generic term will not get you to the prized No.1 spot in Google, probably not into the top 10 pages.
Try putting in “Electrician Sydney” as I did recently needing someone to do some work in my house, and there were 4880 entries, taking Google’s suggestion and adding “inner west” where I live, there were 297,000 entries. Not much use, unless you happen to be the .00001% who lucks the No.1 spot, but many keep trying, and paying.
By contrast, if you invent a word , something unique, you have a better chance of coming up on the first page. The downside is that you need to make your target market aware of the word by other means, a challenge .
When you put “Strategyaudit” into Google, this blog comes up No.1, and has done so pretty much for the whole time it has been written, although Google still checks if it is a spelling mistake. My task is therefore to make the specific audience who may be interested in what I write to be aware of the name, then it is easy to find, as all they do is put the word “strategyaudit” into Google, and there its is.
No complicated SEO strategy, simply a strategy to “own” a space of my own making, and being different, the challenge to be relevant to an audience that returns to the blog remains, no SEO can do that for me.
Jan 13, 2011 | Collaboration, Innovation, Leadership, Marketing, Strategy
Pixar is amongst the great “innovation factories” of recent decades, along with PARC, 3M, Apple, and a very few others. Part of what makes Pixar so effective is a question answered in this McKinsey interview with Brad Bird, the director who won two Oscars with “Ratatouille” and “The Incredibles” after joining when Pixar had achieved enormous breakthroughs with “Toy Story”, “Finding Nemo”, and other smash hits.
The core of his success has not been just the great people, but the environment created for them to work in, the processes evolved to manage the execution of creativity, and the restless curiosity and determination to be better, every time.
Jan 11, 2011 | Customers, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
If I were managing a business in financial services, I would be asking myself if I had missed the second wave of the “net-boat” that is rapidly becoming a force in financial services.
Banks and other financial institutions have reduced their costs enormously by leveraging the capabilities of the net to receive and process payments electronically in developed countries, but even there, PayPal has carved a growing share of transactions, but more importantly, opened relationships with millions of customers who use the web for shopping. Just as the retailers missed the potential of consumers to use the web to seek the best prices, banks have allowed PayPal to build a customer base to pay for them.
In the developing world, millions are not serviced by the financial infrastructure of the developed world. predictably, alternatives are emerging, powered again by the web, and businesses that have no existing financial services infrastructure to protect, are able to move quickly to provide a cost effective and easy to use service to customers and potential customers not serviced by banks.
It is unlikely in my view that banks will become the recording companies of the early 2000’s and ignore the competitive threat until it is almost too late, but their influence, particularly in the developing world will be substantially diminished from what it could have been.
