Nov 11, 2010 | Collaboration, Innovation, Strategy
When all the verbiage is removed, there seems to be four great challenges to effective collaboration, irrespective in my experience of the specific environment in which the collaboration takes place.
- The need to be cross functional, which cuts across all the traditional management and control structures, and can be a threatening prospect to many individuals and existing structures, i.e., the status quo is under threat, and reacts predictably.
- The openness and transparency required for collaboration to contribute demands a culture of personal and group responsibility directed by data, not by personality.
- A recognition that Intellectual Property is leveraged by spreading and usage, anathema to the old model of filing a patent, and defending it in the courts. IP has been replaced in collaborative systems by the Intellectual Capital of the group, which is not static, but evolves with use.
- Any individual involved in a collaborative system needs to engage with, and be committed to the above three factors, failure to do so by any individual can wreck havoc on the effectiveness of the collaboration.
Get the above right, and your enterprise will flourish, but whilst it may sound easy, in reality figuring out how to make collaborative initiatives work in this increasingly connected world is the challenge of the 21st century.
Nov 9, 2010 | Collaboration, Innovation, Leadership, Strategy
“Skunk works” is a term most are familiar with, indeed, so familiar that the pros and cons, and the do’s and don’ts are debated endlessly. Weather a Skunk team separated from the main operations of an enterprise “delivers” or not is generally a function of the leadership, culture and resource allocation processes of the parent, not just of the excitement and freedom of the works.
Sometimes it is useful to go back to the original. The term “skunk works” emerged when the Allied war effort needed a very quick response to the threat posed by the German development of jet fighters in the latter stages of the second war, and Lockheed Martin won a contract to do the work against what was considered an impossible timetable.
To meet the demands, LM created a separate development unit, rapidly taking on the now familiar nomenclature, originally an in-joke where members of the team considered themselves as popular as a skunk in the halls of the existing parent company.
Creating skunk works is only one of many strategies that can be employed to rev up the innovation effort, and it is no more or less successful than others, it is all a matter of the context.
Nov 3, 2010 | Branding, Leadership, Personal Rant, Strategy
The new focus on Rural and regional Australia (R&RA) in the current parliament has great merit in ways hard to quantify.
The nature of “Brand Australia”, how we see ourselves, has always been about the wide brown land, the sunburnt country, the Akubra hatted drover gazing into the sunset, however much that sense is a myth, given the urban nature of the population, it nevertheless defined us.
Over the last 50 years a steady erosion of the rural population has occurred, and an erosion of the support infrastructure has followed, schools, hospitals, communities with insufficient size to be sustainable, coupled with the levels of immigrants who have no connection to the myth, and this has had, and will inevitably continue to have an impact on the psyche of the country.
How you put a value on this Australian psyche I have no idea, but I hope that the independents last long enough to make an impact that lasts, and that they do not become subsumed in the Canberra Politic” as I am sure that the value they can add to the sense of who we are will be greater than anything treasury can put a figure on.
Oct 26, 2010 | Leadership, Marketing, Strategy
The thing about market research is that it can only elicit responses to the questions that are asked from within the context of what they already know and understand.
Innovative solutions are rarely a result of asking a group, or committee, about what they would like. Henry Ford once quipped that if he has asked customers what they wanted before he developed the model T, they would have responded, “a faster horse” and this is proven true time after time.
Similarly, leadership is not about agreement, and gaining consensus all the time, it is about someone having the moral courage to stand by him/her self and say, that is wrong, or I disagree, here is what I think, this is what I am going to do!
When was the last time you saw a statue recognising the contribution of a committee?.
Oct 24, 2010 | Collaboration, Customers, Innovation, Leadership, Social Media, Strategy
Creating and managing a development portfolio is a critical factor in the success of most commercial enterprises, but one that is done poorly in many I have seen. Some recent with a client struggling with the challenge for his organization served to clarify my thoughts, and assisted his organisation to develop a portfolio discipline that appears to be working well.
Success is much more than just using a few tools, of which there are many, it is about how the enterprise at its core deals with ambiguity, trade-offs, and the challenge of being frustrated and wrong a lot of the time, whilst being sufficiently resilient to keep on batting, and batting hard. As Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favors the prepared mind” and nothing creates chance like persistence tempered with learning from each experience.
Below are some of the things that appear to me to be of importance
- Have a clear strategy. Without a clearly articulated business strategy that has commitment from those responsible for implementation, how can you possibly have a Product development and commercialization portfolio with any hope of success?
- Self awareness. Know what you do not know as well as what you do know, and where the knowledge about what you do not know may reside, particularly if it is with a competitor.
- Externalities. Understand the forces driving developments that may create opportunities in the industries you target, and the commercial and competitive imperatives that drive the decision making of individual customers and potential customers in those industries.
- People. Have access to great people, both internal and external in a variety of ways to extract a range of informed views and data upon which to build a case. Use the emerging communication tools to link these people and leverage their knowledge and experience
- Sponsorship. Ensure there is a senior level executive sponsor for each project that emerges from the pack. This person should have the passion, knowledge and position to carry the case for resource allocation, risk management, and strategic fit to the senior decision maker in the enterprise.
- Endless polishing. Keep polishing the portfolio, it will never be a completed exercise, it is a live entity always, and needs TLC. Part of the polishing is creation of a “carpark” which captures ideas, issues, technologies, and all the sometimes random stuff that can create that “Eureka” moment when things suddenly come together in a new way. Revisit the carpark regularly.
- PDCA. Be prepared to experiment, trial, look for insights, learn by doing, but be aggressive about performance, and relegation and promotion to and from the carpark, and further through the development process, and learn from all that experience.
- Customers. Engage customers as early and as often as possible, after all, they are the ones whose problems your product is supposed to solve, and they are usually full of problems and improvement ideas, some of which may be of value to you.
- Dare to be different. No successful new product did the job just the same as something that already exists, that is just a price-fight, differentiation is fundamental to success.
- NPD is everybody’s job. Product development and idea evolution happens holistically, not by functional line, and it must be a priority for every stakeholder in and around the enterprise, not just something that requires attendance by the marketing personnel at a meeting every second Tuesday at 10am .
There you go, sounds pretty easy!
Oct 21, 2010 | Collaboration, Communication, Leadership, Strategy
Achieving transparency is at the core of a lot of what I do in the fields of demand chain development, strategic alignment, and mentoring leaders. Transparency enables emerging problems and issues to be identified, and addressed quickly, efficiently, and with a minimum of waste in the process, and for opportunities to be grabbed.
However, the downside that sometimes evolves, particularly in closely defined cultures, is that it also enables blame to be pinned on an individual or team, and this is hugely counter productive.
Once transparency is used as a finger pointing exercise, it will not get a second chance, as people learn quickly that it will be counter productive to bring problems to the notice of others, when they run a risk of being the messenger that gets shot.
