Aug 15, 2011 | Alliance management, Collaboration, Marketing
An ongoing frustration of innovation projects is the apparently always moving goalposts. How often have you heard “wish marketing would make up their minds what they want”
This desire to have the end point articulated at the commencement is natural, it enables good milestone and resource management, feedback and accountability systems, all beloved of the bean counters. However, if the requirements of a marketplace are evolving quicker than the projects can be brought to the market, leaving the goalposts untouched is the same as ensuring you bring a redundant project to completion, not much value there.
The challenge is to know if marketing is just a bunch of seat shiners who cannot make up their minds, or a group so intimately connected to the market that they see the evolution as it happens. Sometimes it is pretty hard to tell the difference. Therefore, the only way to ensure the development groups are connected to the market, via marketing or otherwise, is to and hold them to a level of personal and development group responsibility for the outcomes.
Aug 9, 2011 | Collaboration, Communication, Management
Negotiation is usually difficult, that is the nature of things when two parties are setting out to maximise their outcome. Whilst it may not be a win/lose situation, where the parties set out to make the pie bigger, or different before cutting it up, it nevertheless is a confronting process for most.
Considering the negotiation therefore as just another difficult conversation has great merit. Do the background work, see it from the other parties perspective, and be prepared to work through the negotiation toolbox, but do not lose sight of the personal dynamics of a difficult conversation, and set out to manage them as a part of the process.
The nine mistakes articulated in the link above can form a framework for planning a difficult conversation, forewarned is forearmed.
Jul 31, 2011 | Collaboration
Collaboration is as much about planning and hands-on work down in the weeds as any other sort of work. It is very easy to see collaboration as the new panacea for many challenges, but it is as hard work as anything else that is successful.
It is also easy to read a library on collaboration, and not find reference to these 6 misconceptions noted by Richard Hackman in this blog post.
Jul 21, 2011 | Change, Collaboration, Leadership, Personal Rant
We all understand the “God Complex” the situation where someone proclaims their universal truth about a complex problem. My solution is the right one, no argument!.
Problem is that complex problems are really, well, complex, hard to understand, and there is rarely a single right answer, and even rarer that an individual stumbles across the solution first time, without trying many potential solutions and partial solutions, revising the bits that worked, dismissing those bits that proved to be useless. Sound familiar, its trial and error, continuous improvement, or to the Lean adherents amongst us, PDCA, or the scientific method, perhaps AAR, all variations to a theme about which I have written a bit.
In the case of the carbon tax in Australia, it may be a contributor to a solution to global warming, it may make enough difference to worth the pain, it may not, problem is we will not know until after the data is in, but by then the dice will be rolled, and we cannot unroll it.
Currently we have two political leaders proclaiming the rightness of their solution to a hugely complex problem. Neither knows the answer, that will be the outcome of a hugely complex set of assumptions and outcomes containing multiples of permutations of what may happen depending on decisions and actions over which neither pollie has any control at all.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have both of these silly wallies admit they do not know the right answer, that there certainly is not one “right” answer, but agree that the problem is real, as they have done in a tacit way by each “committing” to the 5% reduction. In a bi partisan manner, map out a program of experimental measures across a range of activities, with a view to refining over time the range of measures to be put in place to reduce our emissions, and encourage the “clean” economy through technology and changed practices. This stuff is important enough to our collective future that it requires genuine wide ranging collaboration to come up with an evolutionary and decade straddling program for there to be any hope of success.
Somebody, please tell me I’m dreamin’.
Jul 4, 2011 | Collaboration, Leadership
A great team is better than a team of greats, an oft quoted maxim, I suspect coming originally from Vince Lombardi, the legendary Green Bay packers coach and cliché source. We pretty much accept this, but what happens when there is an exceptional person, is his performance enhanced by putting him/her in a team with mediocre but competent people? Is the team performance enhanced, or is it averaged out?
I can see Gary Kasparov alone beating a team of pretty good chess players easily, and putting Kasparov into a team of chess players, subjecting his brilliance to the consensus processes of a team being terminal to him making a brilliant contribution, averaging performance. By contrast, Benji Marshall makes the Wests team, without him, they are pretty average.
I think it just comes down to the activity, some things are best done by an individual, and only an individual can be brilliant, I don’t recall Hemmingway collaborating on any of his books.
So next time you are putting a team together to tackle a complex task, ask yourself if it would be better to assign a gifted individual, rather than a team, and if there is to be a team, ensure the roles are very clear to avoid the brilliant individual having his contribution averaged.
Jun 21, 2011 | Alliance management, Collaboration, Communication, Customers, Personal Rant
Negotiation is a process of finding a solution to a question that is acceptable to all parties. It should go without saying that the first step is to actually communicate, setting out to find areas of compromise, and places of potential value not immediately obvious that occur in many disputes.
The alternative is standing back and throwing rocks, which can only be a winning strategy when you hold all the cards, but then it is not a negotiation, but a statement. However, when the power in a dispute is spread around, declining a seat at the table almost inevitably means you end up on the menu.
The unilateral banning of the live cattle trade to Indonesia was such a rock throwing exercise. Thank heavens the dills in Canberra appear to have woken up in time, and are at least communicating with stakeholders, hopefully with the intention of finding a solution, rather than just doing a post cock-up arse cover.
