Mar 24, 2011 | Change, Personal Rant
I am getting pretty sick of being told by blathering pollies and nuts from both sides that I am either:
1. An ignorant climate change skeptic, or
2. A proponent of a new tax that will the “roon of us all”
Both are wrong, I am neither, yet there appears to be no sensible middle ground in what passes for debate in this country. It seems that if you oppose the tax, by definition you do not accept climate change, and our part in it as fact, but equally, if you accept climate change, it seems you must by definition, be in favour of the tax. This either/or logic is fundamentally flawed, or more plainly, crap. It is not a game of mutual exclusion.
In fact I:
- Am a believer in the impact humans have had on the climate, and that we need to do something about it or our kids and grandkids will have a huge bill to pay. The weight of scientific opinion appears compelling, and
- I am an opponent of the carbon tax as it has been pronounced, as I see little value in adding more burden onto the already fragile part of the economy that is not mining by making them more uncompetitive by the addition of a further cost impost relative to their international competitors than they currently are.
Imposing a carbon tax knowing that it will do absolutely nothing for global warming, just export jobs and capital at an increasing rate seems to be a simple minded, shallow, and emotional response to what is really a fundamental and extremely serious challenge to Australia Pty Ltd, and we should treat it as such.
If we really want to take the lead to reduce carbon emissions from coal fired power stations, get serious and legislate to end coal mining, and subsidise the building of nuclear plants around the world contracted to use our uranium, offer free roof top units to all households (wouldn’t that make the pink batts rort look like Kindergarten time), and pour any money we have left into fuel cell, wind, and geothermal power innovation.
Such an extreme reaction is as dumb as what is being proposed, but just as simple.
Mar 20, 2011 | Leadership, Management, Personal Rant
An often heard claim, but leaders mean it, managers just mouth it.
Creating and nurturing a process of performance assessment should be a focal task of a leader, as it puts money in the bank over time. However, it is hard, confronting, and time consuming work, generally without a short term pay-off, and is virtually impossible to measure via the financial reports, still the default measurement for most.
There are a lot of frameworks out there, and lots of consultants ready to take your money to tell you how to do it, but without a determination to ensure future performance by investing in the capabilities of your employees, outsiders cannot really help.
However, two frameworks that may get you thinking.
The first is an essay by Marty Cagan, a successful venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Venture capitalists invest in ideas and people to deliver future returns, so being successful, Marty probably knows a thing or two about capability assessment.
The second approaches the challenge in a highly prescriptive manner, but curiously, if you look behind the avalanche of words, you see a similar approach to Marty’s, an analysis of the requirements to generate the required outcomes, analysis of the individual, and description of the gap. It is the Integrated Leadership System (ILS) that has evolved to provide a performance and assessment management framework for the Australian federal Public Service.
Between these two, there is enough to get a conversation started about the best way for your organisation to manage its “Greatest Asset” and hopefully lay the foundations for a system that reflects your needs and environment.
Mar 15, 2011 | Personal Rant, Social Media
Today, March 15 is the 26th birthday of the internet as we know it. The first domain name, Symbolics.com, was registered on March 15 1985, and still exists.
From this humble beginning, just a generation ago has risen the greatest force for change since people realised that steam could be used to drive machines, and that idea took 150 years to filter through the world.
Sitting on the train today coming back from a meeting in the CBD, it appeared that every second person was using a smartphone for a seemingly wide range of things that had little to do with talking on the phone, and there were a number of tablet computers and e-readers going. Just a generation ago, phones were large black things with rotary dials that enabled you to talk to only one person at a time, and most households had only one! Newspapers were the curators, editors and suppliers of the news, most peoples network of friends was limited to about 50 at most, divided ionto a couple of categories, school, work, and social (mostly met at the kids activities), the post was the only way to get documents from one place to another, and marketing was all about broadcast communication to a mass market, segmented only by demographics and geography.
How things have changed in 26 years, I cannot begin to conceive what it will all look like in another 26 years.
Mar 13, 2011 | Change, Leadership, Personal Rant
If Australia was a business, considering the challenge of what to do about of carbon emissions would have a couple of characteristics that would have engaged the country’s boardroom:
- It is pretty obvious that some legislative framework will emerge to address what is a generally accepted problem. Even in the absence of legislation, the drivers of commercial sustainability are changing under our feet, and so we need to change quicker than they are to provide returns to stakeholders that continue to attract capital and skills in a globally competitive environment.
- Nothing Australia can do on its own will have any real impact on global emissions
- Anything we do will increase costs, if we do more than others, our costs go up more than others, making us uncompetitive.
- We would acknowledge the necessity of making strategic investments to accommodate and benefit from the changes as they occur, rather than being behind the 8-ball. Simple risk management.
- We would have looked at the changed capabilities our business needed to innovate, project manage, and leverage the regulatory and “commercial environmental” changes as they occur.
Instead of this risk/resource/return type of planning and decision making we have:
- Liberals doing a “Canute” burying their heads in the sand.
- Greens using perhaps short term electoral leverage to get us all into hair shirts sitting around (plantation sourced)log fires holding hands singing kum-by-yah.
- The government on an electoral knife-edge trying to please whoever spoke last.
- Voters being disenfranchised, simply because there is no political group taking a position that approximates a sensible long term, common sense view of what we should be doing, and besides, we do not trust any of them.
Back to our business analysis, what should we be doing?
- Taking small experimental steps to determine the cost/benefit of various alternatives before we make “bet the farm” decisions. Politicians should by now be aware of how unintended consequences can really stuff up a good idea (remember home insulation, health care changes, public/private partnerships et al)
- Being both strategic and agile in the way we structure the systems. Setting a price on carbon in a vacuum is stupid, but setting a very modest price and being prepared to vary it to quantify outcomes, and combining carbon price with elements of an ETS, makes sense, despite the uncertainty of the final level of cost impost that would remain. Combine this with support for the development and testing of innovative technology (which means most of the initiatives will fail, poison to attracting Government support but essential in an innovative system) being immune to the bleating of special interest groups, and relooking at the “carpark” of existing ideas and technologies previously parked for various reasons, would create a policy mix that has some potential to deliver for stakeholders…. Us!.
Easy. Untangled.
Mar 8, 2011 | Leadership, Management, Personal Rant
If Australia’s management has been slow to pick up on the need for intensive and innovative energy management programs, is it little wonder, with the litany of indecision, populism, back-stabbing, and just plain lies eminating from Canberra.
The Howard government announced an ETS in 2008, then lost the election, putting the Rudd government in power, espousing a view about the “greatest moral challenge of our time” and delivering a white paper that outlined their CPRS to be implemented in 2010.
Then we had the spectacle of a legislative program being pushed prior to any chance of certainty that may have come out of the Copenhagen group hug, which then failed to deliver on expectations.
Meanwhile, the Liberals had rolled Malcolm Turnbull, a climate change believer who had negotiated a bi-partisan approach to carbon pollution reduction, (illogically to be implemented before Copenhagen)by one vote and taken its bat and ball back to the corner labeled “skeptics”. A bit later, Rudd as PM was convinced by a cabal including his deputy to backpedal on their carbon scheme, and was subsequently rolled.
Now we have a renewal of the Labor Party “determination” to bring in a scheme being championed by said deputy as PM after an unequivacal promise prior to the last election that it would not happen.
Monty Python would shake its head at this lot, which is just what business leaders have done. In the face of the total shambles and indecision, they have moved very cautiously, as outlined in this Business Spectator/Accenture CEO Pulse survey, but nowhere near fast enough to come anywhere near being able to deliver the bi-partisan commitment to a 5% reduction on 2000 emissions by 2020.
From whichever political and climate change perspective you view this debacle of the last 14 years since the Kyoto protocol adopted by the UN in December 1997 it cannot engender any confidence that our “leaders” will actually provide the one thing that business really needs, certainty of the regulatory framework within which they must work and invest for the future.
Mar 6, 2011 | Leadership, Management, Personal Rant
All sorts of changes are occurring in our working lives, but one that has huge potential to add to the economy, but is actively ignored, is the large pool of over 50’s (of which I am one) who are working at far less than their potential, and willingness to contribute.
This huge group are usually less than fully employed as a result of things beyond their control, often having been loyal and productive employees for many years find themselves on the scrap-heap after a merger, rationalisation of activities, or business failure, and sometimes simply personal chemistry, and they struggle to gain further employment.
Too old, too experienced or over-qualified. How can you have to much experience or qualification, and age is irrelevant? it is attitude that matters!!!!
Employers, often 15 or 20 years younger see them as a risk, particularly the airhead 30 year olds who seem to inhabit HR departments, and market based recruiters. They see the experienced over 50’s as too set in their ways, lacking in energy, just looking for a sinecure before retirement, or just easily bored by a job they may have done successfully in the past. Sometimes this may be true, but consider the other side, the experience, networks, work ethic and embedded knowledge that they can bring.
The waste represented by this “semi-grey” cohort of keen, experienced, but grossly under employed people is disgraceful. It should be an issue in any electoral conversation, and it never is. However, you can benefit when hiring if you view potential employee risk assessment just a little differently.
