Four strategic questions raised by Manufacturing Week and CeBIT

Four strategic questions raised by Manufacturing Week and CeBIT

May 16, 2018 | Collaboration, Governance, Marketing, Strategy

 

The juxtaposition of two trade shows, Manufacturing week last week, and the current CeBIT, have raised some questions in my mind about the road on which we are travelling.

I spent the best part of two days at Manufacturing week, and yesterday at CeBIT, talking, observing, getting caffeinated, and  generally trying to question the preconceptions that seem to be driving the activity I saw. I arrived at a small number of questions that I think  need to be addressed.

How do we overcome the myth of Silicon valley?

Simply put, it seems that the general view is that an ‘App’ or digitisation of something will be the panacea. The VC’s will emerge from their caves and fund the next big thing that will solve all the problems, despite much of the stuff I saw looking a bit like an App in search of a problem to solve, particularly at CeBIT.

There needs to be, in my humble view, more focus and understanding that the improvements in manufacturing will come more from the improvements in material science and engineering than from a  VC funded miracle cure.

The developments that make a real difference are long term ones, basic science that bounces around often for decades before a commercial application is found, a timeframe that requires public funding, as the VC’s will not be interested. A case in point is the development by CSIRO scientists of the wireless LAN technology we all now use every day.

Where do we find the skills to compete?

We are a small country, so graduate numbers in STEM subjects are low by international comparisons, but apparently dropping as a proportion of graduations. Numbers vary, as do definitions, but to be globally competitive we need to increase the number of quality graduates, ensure their funding, and focus their activities on areas where Australia has some sort of competitive advantage. Logically the first two should be an outcome of government policy, sadly lacking, and the latter an outcome of commercial forces over time. Currently we import a substantial percentage of STEM employees and entrepreneurs, a fact demonstrated clearly, albeit qualitatively, at the two trade shows.

How do we build genuine collaboration between Government, Academia and Industry?

This collaboration gets a lot of air time and ‘polly-speak’ but seems lacking. There are a lot of government programs around to assist industry, but most are not well understood, are hard to access, and have demanding guidelines that alienate time poor manufacturing management. To be fair, we all want to see out taxes spent sensibly, but sometimes you have to take a leap of faith, and make the funding more accessible, and not so risk sensitive to the bureaucratic, risk averse funding bodies. This requires additional expert, non  bureaucratic resources at the early stages of project development and assessment.

The problem with academia holding IP remains a huge stumbling block. I delivered a session at a University recently, for free, on the understanding that I would be given a recording of the session. I put a lot of work into the session, the Professor concerned assured me that the recording would be forthcoming, but it is tangled up in the Universities IP policy, and I have not got it. Next time they ask for help the answer may be different, and this was just a simple exercise of me passing on the wisdom of my experience, not leveraging the IP of some advanced research project in which the University had a hand.

How do we participate meaningfully in the next wave?

Forget today, it is already too late. However, the next wave of development, artificial intelligence, IOT, human/machine interfaces, in short, industry 4.0, the combination of advanced manufacturing and digital technology, is just around the corner.  Australian of the year Professor Michelle Simmons leads a world class quantum physics team,  but I wonder if there is the supporting infrastructure and political longevity of will to leverage the break-throughs that appear to be coming. In addition, there is really only the one team, competing against the world, as well as collaborating with it, and I suspect both are insufficient.

 

As a final observation, and this is a ‘groan’ from a marketing bloke. The quality of thought that has gone into the leveraging of the investment made by the organisations of all sizes with stands at both exhibitions is rubbish.  After Fine Foods last year I penned this post that outlined 18 strategies to leverage the substantial investment required to be present at a trade show. I was astonished, particularly at CEBIT yesterday, the digital tech show,  at the number of times I was allowed to move on after a conversation without the stand staff getting any of my details, even in instances where there was obvious genuine interest, and therefore some potential value in a follow up.

Photo credit: CeBIT via Flikr

 

 

 

How do you measure culture?

How do you measure culture?

May 14, 2018 | Change, Governance, Management

With an increasing regularity, ‘Culture’ emerges as an item to be ‘managed’. I fully expect it to be front and centre before the end of the current Royal Commission into the financial sector, as most of the poor practises we have seen , immoral, unethical, and some down-right illegal, stem from a poor culture, lack of leadership in the true sense of the word, and a failure of governance.

Culture pervades every organisation of more than  1 person. It is how we interact, behave, collaborate, and deal with other people in the pursuit of whatever objectives, personal, and commercial that are front of mind, but mostly is just about how the job gets done.

Mundane as that is, culture is the determining factor.

It truly bothers me that an outcome of the Royal Commission may be that a legislated  regime be put into place to regulate culture.  The boffins in Canberra have no idea what it is, and how to define it, but that may  not stop them regulating for it.

It is also a fact that ‘culture’ is an outcome, like a brand, of a host of small  behaviours, interactions, and processes over time that added together deliver an outcome we call ‘culture’. It is not an item to be managed as you would an expense item  in the P&L.

To my mind, culture is grown from the inside, but it responds to the outside environment. Growing a culture is not dissimilar to the Japanese art of ‘Bonsai’, the cultivation of dwarf plants, grown into all sorts of intricate shapes.

The bonsai gardener starts with the raw material of the plant, and the environment in which it will be growing, then over time, it encourages the characteristics they want, and cuts off those that do not want before they can take shape and become an integral part of the plants physiology, disfiguring the outcome. A leader who acts as a bonsai gardener for the growing evolving culture, will fertilise the behaviours that add to the development of the envisaged end result, while nipping in the bud those that do not add to the end result, all the time training others in the art of bonsai.

 

Making a commitment to the cultural style that suits the strategic and competitive choices being made is a first step.

What culture do you want? It seems to me that the starting point should be envisioning where you want to end up. No different from setting any other objective, as it provides a consistent framework for making those difficult trade-offs and compromises that become necessary. Therefore decide what sort of culture you want, one obsessed with customer service, innovation, operational productivity, attention to detail, whatever it may be, and behave accordingly. All will have elements of each of the others in them, but there should be an overriding objective.

Are you committed for the long term? Culture is not something you erect in a financial year, it is an incremental process, built over time and very dependent on the CEO. It is the boss who makes the running with the culture that prevails, and the boss must simply walk the talk, every single day, in every way. This can be painful, and the board of a business that has the wrong boss needs to make a choice about the culture it wants and recruit accordingly.

What measurement tools do you want to use? There are a lot of choices out there, a simple google search may lead you to the conclusion that this is a task that can be outsourced to a fancy consulting firm with pretty measurement tools. Those that in my experience try and either ignore or outsource ‘culture,’ end up with at best a neutral result, and usually a poor one. Most of the tools used are pretty simple when pared back to their essential elements.

However, the common element is that they are subjective, and only really relevant as a measure of change over time. Treating a measurement of ‘culture’ as an objective measure of performance at a point in time as you would with a P&L to measure profitability will be misleading. It is the trends that really count, not the quantum of any measurement you might take.

Measuring ‘Culture’ like most things can be, and should be, made as simple as possible. This is itself is a challenging notion. Much easier to have a series of complicated dashboards that measure all sorts of things, but are really there just to make those in authority feel better.

Employee referrals and sales leads.  An employee is hardly likely to refer their own networks to the business if they are unhappy.

Customer complaint responses. Timeliness and follow through are always good indications of a customer facing culture. Every business needs customers, and dealing with problems that arise should be a first order task.

Employee turnover, and rehires. A turnover of people is natural, and I would regard as healthy. The tipping point is around the point where they are leaving because they are tired, bored and not learning anything, and where they have acquired new skills and are keen to test them in new challenges. Similarly, capable people who wish to return is a good indicator. Large businesses can also track the internal movement of employees across functions and geographies for the same reasons.

Employee exit surveys. Understanding why employees leave can be a vital piece of information about the culture, and existing management. At exit, employees are often more likely to ‘tell all’ than under other circumstances. Such an interview should be routine, friendly and constructive, and not conducted by the exiting employees line manager, and certainly not  by the HR intern, but by someone of stature in the business.

Employee Survey.  Regular employee surveys  can deliver quantitative data across a range of cultural variables that makes measurement of changes over time possible. It is always better that they are anonymous and done by a third party.  It is usually the truth that you get when you engage with the operating level employees, those on the production line, the truckies, warehouse hands, they see and suffer from the impacts of poor practises every day.

Customer survey, as above.

Supplier survey, as above, and even more important that they be done by an external party, and certainly not by the sales force, or including only those recommended for interview by the sales force. Suppliers are often in a position to give great insights into cultural drivers.

Employee Net promoter Score. NPS is now an established measure amongst customers, there is  no reason  I can see  not to use it amongst employees. It is a more complicated version of employee surveys.

The ‘carpark’ test. If it is a race to get out at 5.00, it is a sign of employee disengagement, a poor cultural outcome, and easily assessed rather than measured simply by being there and watching.  The behaviour being exhibited by operational staff is the ultimate test of ‘culture’, and you can and should observe that in many ways.  How many smiles and greetings does the ‘Boss’ get during a factory walk-through, how happy are staff to interact with senior staff on matters trivial as well as important, how well do senior staff listen to and provide feedback to operational staff, and so on. While I call it the carpark test, it is really just being respectful  of others, building their their sense of personal value, irrespective of their role.

 

As a final point, we all talk about culture as if it was a ‘thing’. It is not, it is as noted, the gradual, incremental outcome of thousands of individual interactions. You can dictate culture all you like, but it will have no effect. It is only when you change the individual interactions, one by one, that the evolved culture will slowly emerge.

Photo credit: Dave Gammon via Flikr

How will the banks ever recover our trust?

How will the banks ever recover our trust?

May 7, 2018 | Customers, Governance, Leadership

Over the last decade, banks, and other financial institutions have spent billions, I have no idea how many, but guess multiples,  on telling us they are our friends, there for us, reliable, trustworthy, yada, yada, yada.

That investment has gone.

Poof.

Billions gone in a puff of Royal Commission smoke.

Then the stinky smell of the smoke is intensified by the APRA report into the CBA, released on April 30th, which is critical of the internal management and governance of the CBA.  While the CBA has been in APRA’s gun, there is now no reason to believe that the others are not similarly tainted. Just look at that doyen of financial rectitude, AMP for evidence of that.

I am not sure how much we all knew before all this came about, as most of us seemed to know at some level we were being screwed by the financial institutions, but the extent has come as a surprise, even to the most cynical amongst us.

If the boards of all financial institutions are not deeply concerned with these issues, they should be, in fact I would contend they are not doing their job if they are not.

Which opens two key questions:

  1.  How they can possibly recover the trust of their customers and the community?
  2.  In the absence of that trust, what alternatives do we as customers have?

So what is it that the financial institutions need to do to earn back our trust, and once earned, keep it. Trust has to be earned, it is never just given.

  • Transparency. Until we are able to see all the squalid details of the financial business model, be able to make informed choices, and have the current bunch of directors acknowledge their individual and collective failures, we will never trust them again. Probably the only way forward is increased regulation, or perhaps a more meaningful application of the existing regulations. A change to mandatory fee for service rather than commissions throughout the industry would remove the cause of much of the dishonesty at an operating level. Trust is impossible without transparency.

 

  • Communicate relentlessly. Having something of value to say, and saying it consistently, in many different ways is essential. This does not mean more fluffy advertising, and competitive product pitches attacking us from every angle. It means that we, the customers, have to be able to understand the value that is added by our financial institutions, and the cost of that value.

 

  • Measure the right things. Every business has financial objectives to meet, but confusing those financial objectives with the behaviour that delivers them is a bad mistake. In the end, the financial results are the outcome of a whole range of activity and behaviour, which when right will deliver the results. The old adage that you get what you measure almost always applies, and the financial institutions have been measuring the wrong things.

 

  • Manage behaviour and build a new culture of service.  Ensuring that behaviour is consistent with a revised set of values that will apply is essential. These should evolve from the Royal Commission report and the need for every business to be able to define its purpose. The boards have a big task in front of them to change the cultural norms that drive behaviour.

 

  • Be prepared to  be wrong. When a mistake is made, and we all make them, admit it openly, while adding what you have learnt from the experience, and what you will do in the future as a result. The sight of various board members setting out to absolve themselves of responsibility is a very bad ‘look’ and should not be tolerated by us as consumers, or the regulators.

 

  • Take responsibility. Responsibility and accountability seem to be sadly lacking at present, and this needs to be reversed. Hopefully, it will evolve as part of the cultural renewal I optimistically forecast.

 

  • Be human. The pace of change has outrun our collective ability to absorb it. Automation in the name of efficiency is fine, until the automation removes people from the equation. People deal with people they know like and trust, so there is a real challenge for  the banks. Be known, liked and trusted again.

 

One of the structural problems the industry has to face is a very human one. We all want something for nothing, and nothing usually means we would rather pay more, but not see the payment to avoid feeling the pain. The result of this is the generation of hidden commissions, and sliding scale charges, rather than fee for service.  Commissions wherever I see them change behaviour, create a short term financial incentive, that is their purpose, and usually become a part of the status quo. In most cases, and certainly in the financial services industry, this practice is not in the best interests of  those who ultimately fund the commissions. The whole financial services business model is based on commissions, which is like building a skyscraper on quicksand, bound to unravel at some point.

Oops, I think it is unravelling!!

To the second question, the options we have as consumers: currently none. There are many alternatives, many touted differentiators, but in essence they are pretty much the same, it is just the details of the business models that vary a bit. However, malfeasance such as we are seeing has a way of adding fuel to the innovation fire, and I suspect there will be options opening up very quickly that deliver some if not all of the characteristics that will build trust from outside the traditional financial services industry. This will certainly give the regulators a headache, and boards something beyond their current horizons to think about.

I wonder if many of the legacy businesses will still be around in their current form in a decade? I doubt it very much. However, the point should also be made that it is the people who run and govern these businesses that are to blame, not the institutions themselves. The financial institutions play a vital role in our economic and social lives, and are indispensable, unlike those running them, many of whom should be dispensed with forthwith, without any form of golden handshake.  Indeed, many should be thankful they will not be measured for striped suit and a modestly furnished suite at Silverwater.

 

Cartoon credit once again to the great Hugh McLeod at Gapingvoid.com

6 essential questions from the devil

6 essential questions from the devil

May 4, 2018 | Governance, Leadership, Management

Having a ‘devils advocate’ around you is one of the most productive relationships you can have in a complicated enterprise. Such a relationship enables the stripping of any position held back to its core, removing the bias, preconceptions, and power of the status quo, but leaving room for intuition born of domain knowledge, experience, and most importantly, data.

You should seek out and nurture such relationships.

The most successful commercial relationship I have had was with a bloke to whom I reported for a long time, in two different businesses. Vigorous ‘conversations’ took place as a natural part of determining the best course of action to take, the best allocation of limited resources, with each testing the positions taken by the other.

The eventual outcome was more often than not, one that would not have emerged without such a process, although we both knew who held the power of veto, and from time to time, it was used.

I was reminded of this relationship recently in a conversation with a client who had reached a conclusion I thought was absolutely wrong. It was based on flimsy information, the opinion of someone whose opinion in this matter was in my view skewed by some unfortunate and irrelevant bias, and a reverence for the status quo which appears to me to be destructive.

I went through my standard list of  ‘Devils questions’ to no avail. Tell me what questions I should have asked on top of those below in an effort to help him consider the real merits of the decision he was about to make.

  • What is the source of the data you are quoting? Without a reliable, robust and repeatable data source that stands up to scrutiny, an ‘insight’ based on it is just another opinion.
  • How did you get from the ‘data’ quoted to the ‘insight’ you appear committed to? I like to see logic chains, definable cause and effect, when gathering insights from data, and am wary of leaps of faith that do not have the authority of logic and experience.
  • What biases have you have built in from your background and experience? Nobody is immune from some level of built in bias, a good devils advocate holds up a mirror to them.
  • What other options could there be based on the same data? In most situations, there is more than one way to interpret and leverage data, opinion, experience, and outside knowledge. Playing the ‘options game’ as a part of a conversation is a very useful tool.
  • How do we test the insight without betting the farm? These days the ability to test has been multiplied a thousand fold by the digitisation of everything, it is no longer wise (if it ever was) to bet the farm. The scientific method rules!
  • What will you do if you are wrong? Learning from mistakes, and applying the learning is the basis of improvement, and without an inclination to learn from mistakes, you will be destined to repeat  them, usually for  the same reason they were made in the first place.  In addition, answering this question almost inevitably opens up other options for consideration that may not have been adequately considered, or completely missed in the conversation.

Devils can be very helpful when used well, but they also have the power to be destructive, so be careful with whom you dance.

 

A marketers explanation of the difference between an ‘Intangible Asset’ and ‘Goodwill’

A marketers explanation of the difference between an ‘Intangible Asset’ and ‘Goodwill’

Apr 30, 2018 | Change, Governance, Strategy

When you look at a balance sheet, the intangible elements of it are either the outcome of ‘boilerplate’ accounting standards that bear little resemblance to reality, or are the function of a management narrative. Neither is of much use, and both can be destructive.

For example: under the accounting standards, intangible assets are listed on a company’s balance sheet only if they are acquired, and therefore have an identifiable cost, and usually lifespan that can be amortised. Assets developed internally have no place on a balance sheet.

Of course, neither goodwill or intangible assets as recorded have little ’cause and effect’ connection with the share market valuation, which is all about future cash flows.

The Coca Cola logo is generally ‘valued’ in the billions, but does not appear in the balance sheet because it was built internally, rather than acquired. Were a company to acquire Coca Cola, there would then be a value that could be pinned to the logo, which would then appear on their balance sheet. The caveat is that there are mechanisms to place a value on an intangible asset that can be recorded, usually involving independent valuations, but these valuations come with a grain of salt.

A further example. When developing a new product, the outcomes of that effort may be seen as an intangible asset, but it appears nowhere except the P&L, as development expenses. Assume the product is a pharmaceutical product, years in the development, and very expensive, this is a drain on cash flow in the hope that there will be a pay-off. Prior to commercial launch, it has been patented, the efficacy proven, then the patent becomes a tangible asset, as a dollar value can be attached, and the patent is tradeable. The brand name of the new product will become a new intangible asset, not reflected anywhere beyond an implied connection to the value of the patent. Over time if the product is a market success, the value of the patent will increase to reflect the future cash flows that will result from ownership, to a peak, after which the cash flows will be subjected to competition from generic products that will become available as the patent period runs out, so the value is reduced. The brand name has no value in the books, until it is sold, perhaps along with the patent,

The key distinction between goodwill and intangible assets is that the goodwill has been purchased, so has a market defined value. Google paid $12.5 Billion in 2011 for Motorola Mobility, entirely  for the patent library they owned. At the time, Motorola was close to broke, their products which had led the mobile phone market had suddenly become irrelevant when they missed the smart phone revolution. The patents were transferred to Google, who then sold the remaining  hardware business to Lenovo for $3 billion, without the key software patents. On paper, Google took a $8.5 billion loss, but retained the patent library and intellectual capital associated with the Motorola development labs. This gave them greater leverage with the users of Android mobile software, predominantly Samsung, and protection against the relentless patent wars with Apple. A great deal.

Lenovo would have an item on their balance sheet that values their purchases from Google, but there is nothing on Googles balance sheet beyond the  ‘loss’ they incurred in the transaction, which fails to reflect the future value they will derive from the ownership of the patent library.

However, there is a sea change going on. According to research company Ocean Tomo, the proportion of US Fortune 500 companies stock market valuations represented by intangible assets has gone from 17% in 1975 to 87% in 2015.

The lesson here is that the world has changed, so called ‘soft’ assets are now more valuable than the physical assets that accounting systems were designed to track.  Focussing effort on building those soft assets will pay long term dividends, which cannot be readily accounted for in the monthly financial reports.

For most of my client base, the notion of intangible assets is far-fetched, until they come to valuing their business, when a primary asset becomes the relationship they have with their major customers, and how ‘sticky’ they might be seen post a sales transaction. It is this ‘stickiness’ that is a primary driver for the acquiring company to keep the key personnel employed on a pay-out contract based on a period of time and key KPI’s, to better manage the smooth transfer of the relationships.

Header from http://www.oceantomo.com/2015/03/04/2015-intangible-asset-market-value-study/

Is marketing’s greatest failure in the boardroom?

Is marketing’s greatest failure in the boardroom?

Apr 23, 2018 | Change, Governance, Leadership

There have been libraries written about strategy, and particularly marketing strategy. There are now multitudes of tools and templates available to develop and implement, but the gap between the development and successful implementation of marketing strategy is huge, and hard to navigate.

Marketing is a functional silo on an organisation chart, as is Sales, Operations, Finance, HR, but unlike the others, marketing deals with unknowns, the future, whereas all the other functions deal with the past, or what is immediately in front of them.

Marketing is about the future, long term commercial sustainability, and its effectiveness is really hard to measure, other than in hindsight. There are lots of measures for things that have happened, which are the result of often many combinations of actions taken some time ago, so the measures are unable to change anything, just give insights to what worked and what did not.

As the senior marketing person in a very large business 30 years ago, I found myself often talking about advertising, segmentation, positioning, graphic design, and all the rest, around the board table, which either put others to sleep, or elicited opinions, usually uninformed, about the detail. However, when I talked revenue I had their attention.

Marketing is all about revenue, particularly future revenue. The other stuff is the paddling under the surface that enables the generation of the revenue, but the real measure of marketing effectiveness is revenue and margins over time.

In every business I have ever had anything to do with, marketing expenditure is treated as an item in the P&L. By definition, items in the P&L are expenses or past sales revenue. This is inconsistent with the notion of marketing being about building the foundations of future revenue.

The closest analogy is a piece of capital equipment, they are always purchased to fill one of two roles, sometimes both:

  • Increase the volumes available too be sold,
  • Increase the productivity of the processes.

Those purchases are recorded in the journals, posted to the appropriate ledger account and reported in the cash flow statements, and the balance sheet, not the P&L. The greater irony is that capital items are depreciating assets, whereas marketing  investments, when done well are appreciating assets, unrecorded anywhere except the P&L as an expense until the business is sold, when the accountants start talking about ‘Goodwill’ being the difference between the realisable value of the physical assets, and the liabilities on the books.

There is a structural paradox here. We treat a potentially appreciating asset differently to one that can only depreciate, just because it is hard to measure.

This challenge of measurement is the biggest one marketing people have to hurdle. The turnover of marketers in senior roles is the fastest amongst the functional heads in large corporations because we generally do not recognise the essential long term business building nature of marketing investments. We treat it as an expense to be cut at the slightest cloud on the profitability horizon, and the marketing people with it.

One of the challenges here is that to achieve these long term outcomes, marketing requires the co-operation and  collaboration of all the other functions, without the organisational authority to direct. The CMO has to be a leader across functions. He/she has to build the respect and co-operation of other functional leaders, often at odds with their short term function specific performance measures.

25 years ago, I and my marketing team, failed to convince the board of the then Dairy Farmers Co-Operative to invest the required capital in new equipment to launch a new brand of flavoured milk. It was to be packaged in plastic bottles, with a screw cap, to be sold at a very considerable premium to the products then only available in the gable top cartons, and we proposed to sell it to different consumers. Nobody had done this before, we were banking on tapping into a market completely under-serviced by existing packaging and branding. The Operations Manager at the time believed in the project, and put his neck on the line by committing  his R&M budget to refurbish some older gear in the absence of capital approval, and I ‘stole’ the required advertising funds from another brand.  We launched Dare Flavoured milk, and it delivered the fastest return on investment I have ever seen, and 25 years later, it is still going strong, delivering revenue and margins to the now overseas owners of the business.

If marketers started talking about revenue generation, rather than the more common ‘marketing-speak’ like positioning, segmentation, and all the insider jargon generated by digital, they will be taken much more seriously around the board table. Building support amongst other functions to acknowledge the long term impacts of intelligent marketing, is necessary for long term prosperity, and the only real measure of marketing effectiveness.

The management task is all about getting the most out of the assets and capabilities of your business, and it is marketing management that carries the usually unarticulated responsibility to drive the collaboration necessary to achieve the best outcomes.

This task has four dimensions:

Operational management, strategic management, Financial management, and performance ,management.

Strategic management is all about the manner in which you address your market opportunities and challenges, and has a long term focus on commercial sustainability.

Operational management is the manner in which you deploy and utilise the assets of the business on a day to day basis to add value that customers are prepared to pay for.

The financial management of a business provides the basis for the assessment of success, or failure. It is a scorecard that is capable of comparison, across activities, business functions and timeframes.

Lack of a good financial management framework is a bit like walking blindfolded into a minefield, you might be lucky for a while, but eventually you get blown up.

Financial management is far more than just running the numbers, and ensuring compliance with the tax and corporate rules, it is about being in a position to make the choices that need to be made across the business every day, that shape not just today, but build the resilience necessary for commercial longevity. Understanding the numbers is a core part of every management job, not just of the financial people.

Performance management. Performance management is all about getting the most out of the assets and capabilities your business has, and can purchase in, maximising the productivity of the assets of all types you have deployed.

Manufacturing is the backbone of the economy, and is not taken sufficiently seriously by current national leadership. While we migrate to an economy whose GDP is less dependent on ‘hard’ assets, to one that emphasises ‘services’ we fail to adequately factor in the foundations that manufacturing delivers. In our age of ‘digitisation’ the value coming from increasing productivity is ill defined by the measures employed in the past. We need a new suite of measures, based on the old, but adapted to reflect the reality of a changed world. This is particularly as it is now an international race, without the protection of geography, and less of the artificial protection of regulation, despite the regular hiccups that result from populist politics, and just keeping up requires a substantial effort and investment.