Aug 17, 2010 | Communication, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
The word curator brings to mind an old bloke (mostly) running a museum, deciding what is displayed, and how, what gets bought or created, what gets thrown out, and what gets saved for another day.
The job of an editor in the one-way media (print, radio, TV) is effectively as a curator, making those same decisions. But the world has changed, now the web is a two way street, those decisions no longer have to be made, now everything can be published, by anyone, so in effect, the role of curator has lost most of its power. But there is a wrinkle, there is so much stuff out there, that a curating role is emerging to trawl the web for items of value, and to create and edit material that goes to a specific set of interests.
One of the best is the Eureka Report, run by a group of Australia’s most credible business journalists and commentators, who have created a conversation with the “tribe” whose interests are around business, politics, and wealth creation in Australia.
It is the newspaper of the future.
Aug 15, 2010 | Branding, Customers, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media
How do you compare prices in a range of stores when standing in the aisle of your local supermarket?
The easy answer now, is “on your iphone“. A crowd called Red Laser have an app that scans the code, compares the product/price to others scanned (presumably there is a data base somewhere out in the cloud) and using google maps is able to compare prices in your general location.
This development has the potential to re-write the equation between brands, the value of things like location and parking, and price in the retail space, and with effectively an FMCG retail duopoly in Australia, it will consume some headspace in Co-op castle in Melbourne, and the Taj in Sydney.
It is a “pity” we wasted millions on a “Grocery Watch” white elephant, a technology/populist bet in the early days of the Rudd government, when a couple of years down the track, a similar thing can be done better on your phone. We now have the same sort of thinking making a 45 billion dollar bet on the NBN, a bet that will impact on generations. Hope they get it right this time!
Aug 9, 2010 | Change, Innovation, Marketing, Strategy
Perhaps I am dreaming, but there appears to be a “nudge” (not yet a trend) amongst the manufacturing firms I talk to towards a review of the cost/benefit of overseas sourcing of manufactured products.
At the end of the spectrum where ownership of IP, and innovation are important, firms appear to be reconsidering the value of “off-shoring” recognising that keeping the processes that create value closer to home, where they can be developed, and leveraged with a more sensitive hand over the long term is better than taking a short term cost benefit.
This is not to say that there is any real future for commodity manufacturing in a high cost environment like Australia, apart from the very few areas where we should have a natural advantage, wool processing for instance, but there is a rich future for the development of sophisticated, market sensitive, innovation led manufacturing, so long as we are able to grasp the drivers of that success.
Jul 22, 2010 | Branding, Communication, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media
It will be fascinating to watch how Apple, the masters of digital marketing, handle the latest hiccup with the antenna problems on the iPhone4.
Apple has now stumbled twice in a short time, the first was the furore over the wages paid to employees at Foxconn, one of their major suppliers factories in China, leading to an unusually high suicide level, and now the dodgy antenna story, furiously being stirred by Apples grateful competitors.
The speed that such problems emerge and are all over the user communities has outstripped the response times of even the most sensitive and paranoid of businesses, and now it appears that Apple is going in to defiant mode by using Steve Jobs to front the problem and say, in effect, “all smart phones suffer from the same problem, we are no worse than the others.”
Apple has grown in an extraordinary way for the last decade, tapping in to the mindset of the early adopters to become apostles for their brand and products, and by being consistently first out there with a product that delivers a highly differentiated proposition. The Apple brand is now a very tall poppy indeed, and attracts attention, so they had better be careful that the legions of fans who have fed the myth do not turn around and bite it, because their hero shows themselves to be fallible, and therefore not worthy of being their hero, in fact, it becomes a source of satirical comment that speeds the process of brand erosion.
Such loyalty scorned can turn nasty very quickly.
Jul 13, 2010 | Communication, Innovation, Leadership
Straying from my usual “beat” I read the Rolling Stone article that caused the downfall of General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan.
It seems to me that he was fired, not because he was insubordinate, but because he failed to manage the politics surrounding the adventure in Afghanistan.
The article is a revealing, and fascinating narrative of an innovative, unconventional manager who got things done by ignoring the weight of the status quo, and its proponents. The parallels in management are everywhere, to be different, take closely considered risks, apply the unconventional, take information from the “front line” and argue with authority, all are traits necessary in a leader who is successful, and particularly successful at implementing innovative solutions to seemingly intractable problems.
Afghanistan has been a problem for every army since Alexander that has sought to place its stamp on the place, the US is no different. Engagement there screams for the unconventional, as the conventional has never worked, but conventional leaders cannot deliver unconventional solutions.
Many more will die, and more billions spent before the US and its “allies” including Australia wake up, but it is hard to admit you are wrong.
Jul 7, 2010 | Innovation, OE, Strategy
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.
