Aug 16, 2009 | Innovation, Management, Operations
Over the last 10 years in the farming operations that make up a substantial portion of my client base, the foundations of the decisions being made have been radically altered by the rapidly increasing cost of water.
Water productivity is a now common term, coined to describe the relativity of the return per unit of water used to grow differing crops.
Water is now a capital item, traded independently of the farming operations to which it was originally attached.
Is it too long a stretch to consider other productive inputs in a similar light?.
Electricity is produced by coal burning power stations, and is used in a variety of ways from domestic lighting to powering industrial manufacturing. What would happen if we started to make decisions about the power usage in the same manner we make decisions about weather we grow rice or stone fruit, by the value of the output for a unit of productivity of the base input, power, or water.
Decisions would then be made about the relative value of lighting an office block at night, and making another container load of widgets. Simplistic, but you get the point.
It may be a dumb notion, to be considering the relative value of the output per unit of electrical power used, but 25 years ago, so was considering which crop to plant based on the relative value of the output per unit of water.
The current debate about the fmanagement of greenhouse gas production, the balance between its total environmental and economic costs of production and the value of its use, and how that is to be integrated into a sensible economic framework has a long way to go despite politically motivated noises of certainty emerging from Canberra. As with most unknowns, it should evolve with experiment, and we should be hoping that the rules put in place now to satisfy expediency do not have an adverse impact on that evolution.
However, water is still a political and economic mess, so expecting the carbon debate to be any better will be a very big ask indeed.
Aug 6, 2009 | Innovation, Management, Marketing, Sales
Every business has in some form a process for generating, qualifying, and allocating resources to sales leads. In many businesses, it is a very expensive, resource hungry exercise, so finding a way to short circuit the process, would be offer the potential for a major increase in productivity.
One Australian business, Cormack Packaging has evolved an Innovation Award over a number of years that is a collaboration between Cormack, and a number of universities offering design degrees. Cormack coordinates a competitive process judged by industry experts, that offers final year design students a project that carries a monetary prize, a commercial design assignment, and increasing prestige for those who do well, as well as royalties on anything that is commercialized. Cormack offers technical support, and access to its facilities to the students, providing valuable real world experience for the participants.
Importantly, for a modest investment, Cormack is creating a “bank” of ideas that address real world problems, and a forum for the ideas to be given a commercial airing. Apart from contributing to the “design gene pool” in a substantial manner, they are able to identify emerging design talent and harness it, as well as providing a reason for their customers and potential customers to shop with Cormack for solutions to their problems.
This is a massive short circuit of the lead generation and qualification processes their competitors engage in. How much better to engage with the decision-makers from existing and potential customers in a forum whose objective is the development of innovative solutions to a specific set of packaging challenges, rather than having reps cold call potential customers in an attempt to get an audience with someone who cares.
Aug 5, 2009 | Innovation, Management, Strategy
The usual interpretation of the function of the hemispheres of the brain is that left brain types become actuaries, and right brain types become artists. How then do you accommodate Albert Einstein, a great mathematician, and a great creative brain in one, Leonardo is another, we all know some, perhaps a bit less well known than those two.
Could it be that our accepted model is wrong? Perhaps left brain types are comfortable with the status quo, the way things are, whereas the right brain types are more likely to seek a different way of looking at things, are comfortable with ambiguity, and see things in ways others do not.
Innovation has at its core a restlessness with the status quo, and it is well accepted that “dissidents” in organizations are the ones who are the catalysts to change, they also suffer a higher than average corporate mortality rate, but without dissidents, nothing new gets done, so don’t just tolerate them, attract, encourage, and reward them.
Aug 4, 2009 | Demand chains, Innovation, Operations
The impact of current behavior of all who are engaged in an alliance on the perceptions and expectations that will drive the evolution of the alliance into the future is pervasive.
Success breeds expectations of more success, and failure breeds blame and retribution. Any alliance has its setbacks, so the latter influence often brings alliance development to a shuddering halt. Those engaged in addressing the challenges of alliance evolution for the first time often do so from the perspective of the types of assumptions made by economists and accountants, that of rational behavior.
Anyone who has spent any time dealing with a number of alliances has seen evidence that much of what goes on cannot be explained by using assumptions of rational behavior, it is far more influenced by what may be seen as irrational behavior, until a social psychologist becomes involved, then many actions become predictable as the vagaries of behavior are factored in.
I have previously noted the impact of an apparently irrational need for revenge demonstrated by Ernst Fehr an economist at the University of Zurich, in a game widely known as the “trust game with revenge” in which an apparently irrational need for what can be termed revenge, is demonstrated to be a hard-wired behavior.
This apparently irrational drive for revenge, in this context of alliance development is often just a minor bit of “pay-back,” for perceived slights and misbehavior, but it has brought many nacent alliances to an end.
Aug 3, 2009 | Innovation, Sales, Strategy
Application of public technology in the past has been often seen as a means by which the state can exercise control, and as such has come under severe criticism from civil libertarians. Remember the howl that emerged with the “Australia Card” debate in the eighties.
However, any reasonable view of the currently available technology would see that it has enormously added to the power of the individual to control their circumstances.
Anyone now can become a published author or photographer, a band need not contract to a record company to get its music heard, and the individual has access to vast amounts of information of all types.
The fact that some do not manage this new power has nothing to do with the technology, just about how people use it. Tim O’Reilly argues convincingly that an artists greatest problem now is not piracy, but obscurity, little has really changed, it is just the means to the end that has changed.
Aug 2, 2009 | Demand chains, Innovation, OE, Operations
Standard project management tools are designed to manage a sequential series of activities typified by a building project. They do this very well, as the work flows are dependent on the completion of previous work that is done to well understood, almost generic specifications.
They are far less useful when they are set up to manage processes that rely on the production of information for their success, where iteration between different activities are required, such as those in a product development project or a value chain development and improvement process.
This leads to the conclusion that when developing such a project that requires the production of information to be successful, spend a bit more time in the planning stage to map the flows of information, particularly where there are known dependencies, as well as the work flows. This added investment of time in the planning stages typically yields huge returns during the implementation.
A simple question, asked over and over, can help:
“What do I need to know from other tasks before I can complete this one?”
