May 28, 2014 | Alliance management, Collaboration, Leadership, Small business
Mojowire.net.au
Tonight is the first Origin game of 2014, and so I expect to hear lots of people using sporting analogies over the next few weeks, particularly football.
Sporting analogies abound in business, “A team of champions does not make a champion team”
How many time have you heard that?
As management layers are removed, and the management culture evolves rapidly towards recognising the value of teams in a commercial context, we often use the sporting team as the foundation of the commercial team .
Familiarity, known skills, interpersonal relationships, all that stuff gets considered as a team is put together. Sometimes of course, in the real world teams are put together with whoever is to hand, has some spare time, is at the water cooler too often.
We confuse this simplified sporting stuff, useful in its own context, with the key components of a commercial team faced with commercial challenges.
In that case, you need a range of technical and domain skills, a questioning mentality, and a willingness to try things, and usually some diversity, some new or unusual blood being injected to create a sense of discomfort that always precedes game changing ideas and insights.
Unlike sporting events, which last for a hour, more or less, commercial challenges are way longer term, when the micro interaction is important more as a learning event than a game breaker.
Nov 6, 2013 | Alliance management, Branding, Marketing, retail, Small business
The agricultural supply chain that has dominated the way we get our food has evolved as a fragmented, opaque series of transactions that occur to fill the gap between the producer and the consumer. Many of these transactions add no value to the consumer, rather, they serve to capture value for some link in the supply chain.
As they add no value, it is fair to ask “are they necessary”, and in many cases the answer will be “No”, in others it will be that whilst it may add no value, it is a necessary cost, like transport.
Were we to set out to re-engineer the supply chain with consumer value as the driving force, what would we change?
Well, a fair bit, much of it as a result of the communication and data transfer capabilities that have exploded in the last decade. There is now absolutely no reason a grower cannot see where his product goes, each transformational stage, every point at which it is moved, and the costs and margins involved.
Whilst there are sensitive commercial implications in all this, the technical capability is there, and using those capabilities to eliminate costs and margins that do not serve the consumer will increasingly become the focus of competitive activity and innovation.
Wool is the archetypal Australian commodity, and it is also representative of the worst of commodity “marketing” where each link in a very complicated operational chain is a set of strand-alone transactions. However, even in this conservative, institutionalised chain, there are rays of light, enterprises like WoolConnect that have evolved over a considerable period, to deliver a transparent, collaborative chain that has eliminated much of the cost that adds no consumer value, becoming far more productive in the process.
I am working with a small group of horticulture growers and specialist retailers in Sydney on a pilot, a transparent, demand driven chain that responds to consumers, not what growers have on the floor, or what wholesalers think they can squeeze a good margin out of, but real demand. It is a fascinating exercise, one that is hopefully successful and commercially scalable.
This will deliver tree ripened fruit to consumers the day after it has been picked, and similarly, veggies harvested this morning, on your plate tomorrow.
“Sydney Harvest” brand, get used to seeing it in your greengrocer.
Innovation in a horticulture supply chain, who would have thought??
Oct 28, 2013 | Alliance management, Communication, Management
A story on myself.
I am in the middle of a small project that requires considerable collaboration amongst people not used to collaborating. Always challenging.
In a conversation over the weekend with an old mate, wise in the ways of start-ups, he offered me a gentle shove by saying:
“Sometimes people spend huge amounts of time and energy getting their ducks in a row. Pity it does not really matter what they look like, it is what you do with the ducks that counts”.
Ouch.
What are you doing with your ducks?
Aug 30, 2011 | Alliance management, Collaboration, Innovation, Strategy
I was amazed to realise that the recent dog fight to buy Nortel, was really driven by the patents they had, rather than the value of the operational parts of the business.
After an opener bid by Google of $900mill, Nortel eventually was sold to a consortium that included Apple, Microsoft, (ironic partnership that) Ericcson and Sony for $4.5 billion, outbidding Google and Intel who had teamed up. The winners will share the patent bank of Nortel, some 30,000 of them covering all sorts of electronic ideas and gizmos. The Nortel sale then prompted the sale of Motorola to Google for 12.5 billion, as it put a value on their patent bank.
A new business has emerged from the development of the last 20 years, “patent troll” someone who buys up patents, and then launches litigation to extract royalties. Given the hazy boundaries of patents in the digital space, the ideas that patent applications address in the first instance often have potential applications in applications never dreamed of in the original form. Enter the patent troll, who chases the royalities, potentially ensuring innovation driven startups may make never get off the ground, as the threat of litigation is enough to smother the commercialisation process.
The giant of Patent Trolls appears to be Intellectual Ventures, started by Nathan Myhrvold, a brilliant bloke whose contribution to Microsoft was a key to their success, and who since has made heaps by effectively greenmailing tech companies with lawsuits and threats suits for patent infringement.
Long intro. This cost of insuring against greenmailing ends up in the cost of the stuff we buy, and virtually all of it is just risk management, avoiding the risk of litigation that adds no value to the innovation process at all. The patent process was developed to protect ideas in a simpler time, and seems to me to have lived beyond its useful life, at least in the digital arena. Ideas scale, they get better with use, and the evolution of patent trolling acts as a disincentive to use, a tax.
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.
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.
