Sep 30, 2011 | Change, Leadership, Management, Operations, Personal Rant, Small business
The news that Fosters will be sold to SA Miller Brewing represents almost the last Australian food and beverage business with a global brand has now disappeared. I say almost, as I can think of no other, but some may argue that a few sales in Fiji or NZ constitutes global. To my mind, it does not rate.
Why is it that we seem to be unable to build and sustain food businesses from this country?.
Australia is now a net importer of packaged food, according to the AFGC 2010 report, and yet we are an abundant producer, particularly of broadacre commodities, grain and meat. Most people when told we are a net importer go into a state of disbelief, and yet the march of imported food, and the decline of Australia’s manufacturing base has been happening slowly over a long period.
It’s pretty easy to blame the evolution of globalisation of supply chains, the domination of Woolworths and Coles, regulation imposing costs overseas competitors do not have, the geographic spread and relatively sparse population denying the economies of scale, but the reality is that it is a management failure. The failure is shared by boards and shareholders who have tolerated a complacent management, discouraged long term strategy in the chase for short term returns, and simply disengaged with the basic drivers of competitiveness over a long period.
The only hope left is that a few SME’s will emerge from the heavily culled pack that remains, but it seems to me that they have missed the boat, and the barriers that the businesses that existed 30 years ago, and should have breasted, are now simply too high for the small guys to tackle without the scale and capital resources necessary. Our one hope is that there is a processing breakthrough, technologies like the CSIRO High Pressure Processing technology offer some hope, but they are unlikely to be the savior by themselves.
Almost gone, down to the last gasp, what on earth will we do then? Or don’t we care?
Sep 27, 2011 | Change, Marketing, Personal Rant
Am I the only one, or are others getting as sick as I am of the shallow, cliché ridden utterances of both sides of this “debate”?
The government is pushing their carbon tax, which will become law on July 1 next year, making the fundamental mistake of calling it a “Tax”, thereby ensuring they have a marketing problem, while the Opposition is opposing, anything, everything, while quietly using a nonsense 5% reduction in emissions to be derived from “Direct Action” whatever that is.
Irrespective of the position you choose to take on the question of what we should do about global warming, if anything, it would be nice to have some facts as a basis for the debate.
It is pretty clear that the planet is warming, the facts show that over the last years, whether you want that definition to cover 20, 50, or a 100 years, the globe is warming.
Now we have a fact to use as the basis of the debate, lets be a bit sensible about how much emotionalism we employ to push any particular barrow, and straying from the facts should be greeted with howls of outrage by the taxpayers who will ultimately bear the costs of the implementation.
Oh, and this condemnation of the quality of the political debate, not just in this country, but in many countries is much wider than the question of climate change, just look at how effectively our elected leaders are grappling with the economic meltdown of the US and Europe. As Charles De Gaulle is reported to have said, ” I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians”.
Aug 31, 2011 | Innovation, Marketing, Personal Rant
The retirement of Steve Jobs last week has prompted a blizzard of comment, even a cartoon, from my favorite Tom Fishburne, and at the risk of just adding to it, it seems appropriate to simply state that a bloke I have never met, who has never even heard of me, about whom I know nothing more than has been published over the 30 years of his extraordinary career, has changed the way my life is lived. His commencement speech at Stanford is now one of the web classics, with millions of views.
We all have ipods, or their substitutes, connected phones have revolutionised the way we communicate, tablet computing has just been changed forever, and my kids insist on a Mac at double the price of a technically comparable PC, and that is not to mention the huge impact the original Toy Story movie had during Job’s forced sabbatical from Apple.
It will be truly fascinating to observe the transition of power at Apple, can the innovation and marketing machine he built survive in its current form without Jobs?
Jul 24, 2011 | Change, Personal Rant
Irrespective of your views on climate change, the carbon tax, global warming, and the need for change, the sight of all the spivs and carpetbaggers mixed amongst the crowd setting out to get their noses into the new troughs created by the Federal Governments clean energy funding initiatives should make the blood of taxpayers run cold.
The Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC)has been quick off the mark with the press releases, but short on all but the vital detail, $10 billion to be given away, kicking in 2015-16 fiscal, so plenty of time to plan, or if you happen to be a real company, struggle for finance to see you through. The really lovely part of this is that it will be run by those paragons of free enterprise and productivity, The Greens.
The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (AREA) has been set up to take the place of a mash-up of existing programs, guided by an “Independent board”, and will allocate and administer $3.2 billion, including the 1.7 billion unallocated under the current programs.
This is a monster party at which bureaucrats will again pick winners, a task at which they have demonstrated a remarkable lack of skill in the past, but if you practice enough with taxpayers money, it will be right on the night, trust me, I’m a politician!
Jul 21, 2011 | Change, Personal Rant
It seems to me that the carbon “debate” currently taking place fails on the most basic level of dealing with any of the facts. It is simply a political poop throwing contest, where the only success factor in either of the protagonists minds is the level of noise they can generate.
The science appears pretty clear, human activity is contributing substantially to climate change, carbon being the primary villain, but nevertheless just one of many, and whilst it is long term in the context of any individual life, it is reasonably clear that we are on borrowed time.
This is not to support either political position, nor to accept or deny the value of a Tax Vs an ETS Vs “Direct Action” but simply to acknowledge the need to take out some insurance, with a very long time frame, so perhaps out great great grand-children will thank us, or perhaps cash in the policy. Either way, they will be better off.
The question currently being asked is “how can we?” and there are many answers, none really addressing the range of challenges in the implementation. Perhaps a better question to start should add one tiny word: “how can we not…..”?
Jul 21, 2011 | Change, Collaboration, Leadership, Personal Rant
We all understand the “God Complex” the situation where someone proclaims their universal truth about a complex problem. My solution is the right one, no argument!.
Problem is that complex problems are really, well, complex, hard to understand, and there is rarely a single right answer, and even rarer that an individual stumbles across the solution first time, without trying many potential solutions and partial solutions, revising the bits that worked, dismissing those bits that proved to be useless. Sound familiar, its trial and error, continuous improvement, or to the Lean adherents amongst us, PDCA, or the scientific method, perhaps AAR, all variations to a theme about which I have written a bit.
In the case of the carbon tax in Australia, it may be a contributor to a solution to global warming, it may make enough difference to worth the pain, it may not, problem is we will not know until after the data is in, but by then the dice will be rolled, and we cannot unroll it.
Currently we have two political leaders proclaiming the rightness of their solution to a hugely complex problem. Neither knows the answer, that will be the outcome of a hugely complex set of assumptions and outcomes containing multiples of permutations of what may happen depending on decisions and actions over which neither pollie has any control at all.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have both of these silly wallies admit they do not know the right answer, that there certainly is not one “right” answer, but agree that the problem is real, as they have done in a tacit way by each “committing” to the 5% reduction. In a bi partisan manner, map out a program of experimental measures across a range of activities, with a view to refining over time the range of measures to be put in place to reduce our emissions, and encourage the “clean” economy through technology and changed practices. This stuff is important enough to our collective future that it requires genuine wide ranging collaboration to come up with an evolutionary and decade straddling program for there to be any hope of success.
Somebody, please tell me I’m dreamin’.
