Obviously not, but you would be surprised at how often the obvious is ignored.
A carefully crafted vision statement is agreed at an annual senior executive retreat, and out away until the review next year. Nonsense.
You need to live it, create alignment, and ensure the activites that occur spring from a set of core values that dictate the way you, and those around you, behave, and all contribute to the journey articulated.
In the last federal budget there was money allocated to the task of digitising health records allocated, and there was some pretty unedifying comment on the amount, the progress to date, and the implications on privacy.
What dross.
Australian health costs are huge currently, and rising at a far greater rate than the economy expanding, creating a substantial emerging “hole”. Digitising this data, and making it available for improvement initiatives across our health services is imperative.
It is accepted that data is the first step on the road to improvement, without data, everything is speculation. Here is one of the greatest tests of public policy for the future, and we hide away from the blindingly obvious benefits that can flow from process improvement and innovation to protect existing vested interests, and unrealistic, unsustainable concerns about increasing the degree of transparency.
If the public sector was a business with a bottom line, and there was a competitive need to improve and change in order to survive, instead of a monolithic testament to the past, the efficiency of our current expenditure would be increased by probably 50%. Sounds unrealistic, but businesses that have effectively implemented real Lean principals into their operations and demand chains have found 50% is readily achievable.
Note that I have specifically indicated that the efficiency would increase 50%, and not that costs would be reduced 50%, although cost reduction is the corollory. There is a real difference, and the difference is the one that appears to separate the successful Lean implementations from the unsuccessful, because success in Lean is about behaviour change and productivity improvement, not slash and burn cost reduction. Reduction in unit cost comes about only when extra capacity, freed up by the elimination of waste, is used, and is effectively for free, as the piper had already been paid.
The easier it is to quantify, the less it will be worth. This appears to be a pretty harsh judgment, but the reality is that if you can quantify and standardise something, it can be copied.
This is the case, until you consider the value created by subtle differences, particularly in consumer products, and original creations, a painting, poem, piece of music , new gadget, a new expression, or a new use for a staple product
An original Van Gough is worth tens of millions, but a copy it would take an expert to pick, done by very capable technicians in China, can be had for a modest amount. It is not that the copy is a lesser painting technically, it is just not the original.
Seeking the original is the core of innovation and commercial sustainability, as the alternative is to chase the cost curve to the bottom, where in the long run, the best return possible for the lowest cost producer is around the cost of capital.
Now there is an explanation for the common situation where a person fails to see what to others appears to be blindingly obvious.
The Dunning-Kruger effect provides the psychological evidence supporting what most of us see often, and that is that our (and others) incompetence in an area masks our ability to recognise that incompetence. The “we don’t know what we don’t know” effect at work.
When you think about it, the absence of the skills we need to recognise a right answer when we see it, are the same as the skills required to produce a right answer in the first place. This makes sense when you read it twice.
Our exertions as we consider complex issues, from the future of the financial depredations of the GFC on the economy, to climate change, what to do about our involvement in Afghanistan, to the personal questions we all face, are all about making decisions today on the basis of our understanding of the best information we have available, but often misunderstood, misinterpreted, and often misused or ignored.
We therefore most often make those decisions in relative ignorance, seeking easy, saleable “solutions” to problems where we are ignorant, but unaware of it, or unable to concede it.
How scary is that?
As the web makes the marginal cost of anything that can be delivered electronically too close to zero to measure, the world of marketing changes. Convincing the boss that the capacity of the rack of servers he has just shelled out for should be given away is often a challenge, but the reality is that the world is chasing itself down to free, and many businesses need to figure out how to make money in different ways. The solution still escapes most in the music industry (although Radiohead have done OK) but it is early days, or is it?
The original “free” product was the safety razor blade, given away by King Gillette in a whole array of ways, but a blade is not much good without the razor, and an industry was born, so this dilemma is not new, just different, and far more pervasive.
Will the iPad and Kindle do to books what has happened to music? You have to believe they will. At the moment, it is the early adopters who are looking for books electronically, but it should not take too long to become mainstream.
It would be silly for publishers to become resisters rather than figuring ways to embrace the change that will happen, drive it, and thereby build a sustainable new business model. The core to that success will be the “ownership of the relationship” with the readers. Currently that is via the publisher who has control of the channel, apart from the few “big name” authors who have their own following, built after a publisher has invested in them.
The new e-readers offer a disintermediation opportunity for authors, one they will grab, so the role of the publisher is about to change, but how many of them see that?
Thinking about the potential for e-marketing of books also puts a gun to the head of the dumb restrictive publishing rules that exist in this country. I cannot buy a book published in the US in Australia unless a local publisher, or off-shoot of a British one, has chosen to publish here, adding another margin that has absolutely no value to me. Until recently, I did not have an option, then Amazon popped up, then the Kindle arrived, and now the iPad. Now there is a new set of rules emerging from the marketplace, and the existing regulations no longer have the control, so have become irrelevant.
Can somebody please tell the publishers and their cronies in the government, and I wouild not be too keen to buy shares in a book retailer wedded to the expensive shop front in Westfield.