Apr 11, 2014 | Change, Collaboration, Innovation, Small business
courtesy respectserendipity.com
At first sight, “Organised” and “Serendipity” are at opposite ends of the scale, almost mutually exclusive.
Serendipity occurs by chance, when the stars align, the unexpected happens and not by any organised process, or so we are led to believe. Organisation by contrast removes by its nature the chance occurrences, random relationships, and inconsistency that make serendipity possible.
As collaboration increases and we recognise and seek to harness the intellectual capital of individuals by what is often called loose/tight management, the opportunity for serendipity increases, simply because the processes that run our lives are looser, more inclusive rather than exclusive. The use of technology to facilitate collaboration and recording process has increased the opportunity for those serendipitous moments and insights that just used to occur at the water cooler, and in the lunch room.
It follow then that setting out to organise in such a way that the chances of serendipity are enhanced is both logical and indeed, is a competitive necessity. It is after all where the insights that lead to innovation and its rewards are born.
Are you organised for it?
Mar 12, 2014 | Collaboration, Communication
“You complete me” a really cheesy line, made famous by the Jerry Maguire movie, but relevant elsewhere.
Communication devices have exploded over the last decade, most of us now have multiple tools by which to communicate, but just how well are we doing it?
Pretty poorly by my count.
We spew stuff out, and sometimes some of it comes back on us, good and bad, but are we actually communicating?
Isn’t communication supposed to be a two way process, something that engages the parties, grows, informs, adds value ?
Tools are only useful when well used, communication devices by themselves are just objects, they need people, stories, and emotion to be of any value.
Communication tools need people to complete them.
Feb 25, 2014 | Branding, Change, Collaboration, Demand chains, Marketing, retail
A pilot program I have been recently involved with, setting out to assist the evolution of a” Sydney Harvest” brand of local produce has not delivered the results hoped for.
After years of agitation by produce growers in the Sydney basin, beset as they are by aggressive competition from the chain stores, lack of scale and high operating costs as a result of being in semi urban areas, governed by urban concerns, the pilot was created. It was a collaboration between a small number of Sydney basin growers, and specialist retailers aimed at delivering the freshest and best possible produce to those discerning and demanding customers who choose to shop at the specialist produce outlets.
The value proposition was simple : “You know it is fresh, because it come from down the road, you know the retailer, and here is the grower, guaranteeing product provenance and farming practice sustainability”.
In considering the reporting of the exercise, part of the shortcoming of the pilot was that there was little commitment beyond the verbal from the participants, even though the verbal commitment was strong. This is very common in the early stages of collaborative exercises, everyone says “yes” and waits for others to do the lifting. The emergence or otherwise of a “champion” someone who takes on the challenges at a visceral level, can be the main bellwether of success.
Watching a presentation by Seth Godin last night, he articulated just the situation we had.
There was no “connection” between the participants beyond the superficial, the human connection was not there.
Godin calls Connection “The asset of the future” and in a connected world, it would be hard to argue against this proposition. He further identified 4 pre-conditions of connection occurring.
- Co-Ordination. There was co-ordination in this pilot, but it was managed from the outside, by me, there was little skin in the co-ordination part of the game by participants.
- Trust. Trust evolves over time as a result of behaviour, it is never given, it has to be earned. In this case, we underestimated hugely the role to be played by trust, and the preconditions necessary for its evolution.
- Permission. Seth is talking about permission being given by the subject of a marketing effort, so this pilot is a different set of circumstances, nevertheless, whilst” permission” was given in the sense that all signed up to the pilot knowing exactly what was going to happen, and the role they were expected to play, when it went away, nobody missed it. The “permission” whilst given was nothing more than a superficial “OK”
- Exchange of ideas. In this case, whilst there was superficial buy in, the subsequent behaviour did not include interaction amongst the participants. They were too busy and pre-occupied with the normal business to put the time aside to exchange ideas, and get to know on a human level the other participants ,exchange ideas and experiences, and learn from each other.
This stuff is really, really, hard, and the only way we learn is by jumping in and having a go.
Dec 18, 2013 | Change, Collaboration, Leadership, Strategy
Years ago I worked in a small management group that was faced with the resurrection of a failed business. Problem was, the parent company was blissfully unaware, as the poor performance was hidden inside the operations and overhead recovery of the much larger parent entity.
When it was broken out as a separate division, I did the first P&L, in those days by hand on a 25 column ledger sheet, (any readers remember those?) and wondered what the hell I had done leaving my comfy corporate marketing job for this pile of smelly, baked-on crap.
Over a period of 6 years, this small group turned the business around. It was profitable, 5 times the size, and strategically well positioned. Then the MD of the parent woke up with a good idea in his hand and re-merged the division back into the larger business in an effort to capture some of the successful competitive DNA we had grown. You know what happened then.
Upon reflection, the core of our success was two things:
- Relentless focus on the things that mattered. We relentlessly identified problems and their root causes, and attacked them as a group, disregarding the superfluous, distracting, and often attractive alternative opportunities to spend our time.
- We worked together. The management group, a pretty standard functional arrangement argued, experimented, and engaged as many people as we could who may have something to contribute. People on the operational floor often had the solutions to problems before we had identified the problem adequately, no information was privileged, apart from salary levels, and every pair of eyeballs, and voice listened to, and encouraged. We just had to trust everyone, and it worked. By having many eyeballs on everything, we always had better outcomes.
I am reminded of all this, some 25 years later, with pride, some nostalgia, and sadness. One of that small group died last week, and many of those involved attended his funeral yesterday, it was a sad but joyful day.
Vale my friend and colleague George McDonald, St Peter better have a solid lock on the VB fridge.
Dec 11, 2013 | Branding, Change, Collaboration, Leadership, Marketing
In some circumstances, “collective clarity” may be a synonym for alignment, but in others it is an entirely different beast.
Currently I am involved in a project that aims to bring together a small group of specialist growers and retailers into a collaborative framework that delivers fresh Sydney basin produce to consumers, and contributes to the building of a brand. “Sydney Harvest“, if successful in pilot, offers the opportunity for commercial sustainability to both Sydney basin farmers and specialist retailers. In the process of developing this project, which seeks to re-engineer the supply chain in response to the economy wide trends that are placing huge pressure on the viability of agriculture in urban proximity, the differences have become stark.
Alignment is typically sought inside a commercial entity, all employees, and stakeholders having a clear understanding of the enterprises direction, priorities, and resources availabilities so each can see the bigger picture, beyond just their area of operation, and act accordingly.
Collective clarity, by contrast, is a term I have started to use to describe the necessity of having a common view of the end point of a collaborative project amongst all collaborators, as well as of the key project collaborative points along the way. This is external to any of the individual enterprises.
By its nature, a collaboration is not subject to the same management thinking that prevails in commercial enterprises, as collaborators are all independent, and sometimes competitive businesses. It therefore requires that they all recognize that their individual best interests are best served by serving the best interests of the collaboration, a big ask.
This Collective clarity is required amongst collaborators for a successful collaboration, alignment as commonly articulated as being internal, is not.
Each individual business will still be managed independently, in their own way. The processes that impact on the collective operations will usually be only a small part of the overall, and so will often require a different perspective, and explicit management, and leadership to be effective.
I would welcome feedback on this idea, as I have not seen it articulated before.
Oct 16, 2013 | Change, Collaboration, Marketing
Intelligent design is a huge discredited furphy perpetrated by Christian fundamentalists in the US on sections of the school system.
But, taking the notion of viewing something through an entirely different lens a bit further, intelligent re-design becomes a notion that offers the thought that business models can sometimes be, and often should be, turned on their heads as a way of evolving.
Often I find myself between things, having time to kill before the next commitment, and I sometimes spend that time in a café having a coffee, and reading, thinking, and generally just contemplating.
It occurred to me the other day whilst indulging in such a contemplation, that I was not buying a coffee, I was buying a pleasant location to spend time, the coffee was just the excuse.
In effect, I was paying for time, not buying a coffee.
In most cases, there is the apparent reason stuff happens, then when you scrape away, the real reason sometimes becomes apparent. People who buy expensive cars are not buying transport, they are buying an object that says something about them to others, just as my coffee is an excuse to sit quietly in a cafe.
It is the articulation of this “real reason”, difficult as it usually is to articulate, where great value can be created. The breakthrough over the last few years that is enabling much of the development is the two sided market capability enabled by the web. Participants in the so called “collaborative economy” a term popularised by Jerry Owyang are all busily re-designing business models all over the place.
