Jun 27, 2016 | Governance, Leadership, Personal Rant
Over the weekend I was talking to my 32 year old son about the coming election.
I thought I was the quintessential cynical old buggar, while being politically engaged, but I had nothing on my formerly optimistic son.
He is not just a cynical young buggar, he is so disengaged that in the long term, it can only be bad for our economic and social life if he is any way representative of his demographic cohort, and I fear he is.
As he said ‘Problem is that the gap between what the pollies say, and what they do is so wide, they have lost any sort of credibility and moral authority’.
Sadly I agree with his analysis, but the core of the problem seems to me that they claim control over things they cannot control, while ignoring, misrepresenting or pork-barrelling the things they can.
It is the same in business.
Those that promise the world do not have any credibility at all, while those that demonstrate the performance and value of what they can control earn our loyalty and respect.
There is a lot those in businesses can control, and should strive to improve.
You can control the way you spend your time. Every job, even those on a manufacturing line has some level of flexibility in the way the time is spent. In management roles of any type, the discretion is significant. You can choose to do what may be apparently urgent, but is unimportant, or those things that may not be urgent, but are important. It is those who elect the latter route that will prosper in the long run.
You control the way you behave. Those who say one thing and do another, or worse, demand behaviour of others they are unwilling to demand of themselves will be judged failed leaders.
You control your attitude. An optimistic person has an effect on those around them, infecting them with your optimism and enthusiasm
You control your leadership style. Dictatorial, aggressively demanding results without consideration of the personal toll that may take, or you can be a coach and mentor, seeking to improve the results by improving those around you.
You control the way you see opportunities. Often opportunities are in the problems being faced, but if all you see are the problems, the opportunities will pass on by.
You can choose where credit/recriminations are levelled. The best leaders I have seen have a common characteristic: they give credit to others, even when the credit is largely due to themselves, and they take absolute responsibility for the performance within their span of control, never seeking to allocate blame elsewhere.
You can choose to have a clear and unambiguous moral compass, or purpose in your life. Having a purpose, and living to that purpose is empowering for individuals and the groups they interact with. Even when others disagree with you the simple presence of a foundation of beliefs that drive your behaviour will get you considerable credit, loyalty and an ability to get things done.
When you think about it, politicians have exactly the same choices we in business have.
Perhaps it is their collective failure to adhere to the basic tenets of leadership that has us so disillusioned with them all.
I predict that come next Sunday, there will be a narrow Coalition win, but the outstanding feature will be the percentage of the first preference votes that go to other than the two major parties, particularly amongst those under 30 whose expectations have been shaped by different factors to those that shaped their parents. This group will also exercise their compulsory obligation to vote by deliberately voting informal. This will not be a ‘donkey’ vote, it will be a vote against what these youngsters see as the irrelevance, hubris and self interest of the political class. It will be fascinating to watch the spin the major parties put on this disaffection, assuming that both, somebody does the analysis and I am right.
Jun 22, 2016 | Marketing, Personal Rant, Strategy
In a world of abundance, we are desperately in need of depth.
Skating across the surface of the ice is fine for a while, but at some point you need to be able to recognise the weak spots, and figure out how to avoid them before you drop through and drown, just after you freeze.
A book does that for me in a way that an e-book does not, neither does a blog post, or a tweet, they are not physical, they have no intellectual or physical weight somehow. A ‘real’ book still does it.
The other thing is that when you find a book that ‘speaks’ to you, it is easy to walk into someone’s home or office, and plonk it on the desk, and say, ‘read this, it will change your life’ or even be just interesting.
A mate of mine who makes his living researching and writing complicated tenders for large projects, also writes a blog on words, their use and misuse, origins, and various meanings. One day he will assemble it all into a book, as he has done with an collection of illustrated verse he wrote for his kids, personal stuff that he has shared with them, now in a tattered book they have all loved.
It is hard to love an e-book in the same way.
I love books, perhaps scarcity is just making me realise how much.
May 4, 2015 | Change, Governance, Personal Rant
FEATURES: DT FEATURES – Warren Wed illo, 11.05.11.
A business that does not make money will not be around for long. While money is just the mechanism to count success, or failure, the lack of it is terminal in every case.
Well, every case but one.
Government.
They just keep on putting it on the national credit card, building debt to garner approval and votes.
As we approach the 2015/16 budget the blathering goes on from both sides of parliament, with occasional irritating rejoinders from the peanut gallery.
It is easy to poke fun at the pollies, and to be utterly cynical about their motives. Their collective and often individual behavior and demeanor make that cynicism almost mandatory, and it seems to make us feel better. However, it rarely adds any value, as the real issues become clouded by rhetoric, blathering, bullshit, and outright, bald faced lies.
Where are the facts, the data to support the various notions put by various interest groups?
We call ourselves the lucky country, as we are.
Supported as we have been particularly in the last 30 years by continuous growth, which we largely put down to the luck we had in being in a place well stocked with resources, but the worm seems to be turning, and we have little wriggle room.
Unlike a business, where the sustainability of the business relies on commercial decisions, and the impact collectively they have on their budgets, the sustainability of the Australian budget seems to rely on our political sustainability.
Up until the last few years we have a pretty good record, but the last few, powered by the fragmentation of the media and increasing ability of individuals to have a say and gather tribes of like minded people to their cause has changed all that.
I am concerned at the level of political unsustainability that seems too be evolving, and driven by that lack of a solid foundation, the sustainability of the national budget.
Roll on the May 12 crunch and hopefully after the debacle last year, there will be some sensible debate that adds to the political sustainability as well as to that of Australian small businesses, upon which the sustainability of the national budget relies.
Sorry, I have reverted to my Don Quixote mode, the chances of any of that must be almost zero.
Feb 27, 2015 | Governance, Management, Operations, Personal Rant, Small business
Times are tough, success is hard to come by, even for businesses that have been around for a long time, well and truly beating the hoodoo that stalks new businesses, 9/10 failing in the first few years.
Somebody I have known for a long time, who has run a small businesses delivering a range of very good products to consumers via FMCG retailers is about to go to the wall. 25 years of effort and commitment about to slide down the dunney leaving him with nothing, not even his house, left to him by his parents.
Worse than sad. Tragic.
Many things factor in the eventual failure of this business, but one stands out starkly.
Poor management of his cash.
There are two sides to the challenge of managing cash.
The first is the cash itself.
In this case, from week to week even day to day, he knew how much was in the bank, but when the big bills came in, it has been a real struggle to pay them, because he was not adequately forecasting the flow of cash, giving him the opportunity to adjust activity as necessary. His bank has been unsympathetic, creditors demanding, and debtors increasingly reluctant to part with their cash, even in this current super low interest rate environment. Meanwhile costs have increased inexorably, way out of line with his ability to extract a corresponding increase in the prices he can charge in the marketplace.
Not pretty, and all too common.
The second is how the cash you have is used, the level of productivity you extract from it. Cash by itself is worthless, its value is in what you do with it. Purchase inventory, pay staff, provide a factory and all the other stuff we call the costs of being in business. After all that is done, most want some reward for the long hours and stress of being in a small business, and then to have some left over to go towards that world trip on retirement.
The productivity of the cash is not measured by the amount you spend, but by what you get for it, and small businesses rarely spend enough time considering ways to increase the productivity of their cash, concentrating on the absolute amounts coming in and going out. Challenge is that there is no explicit measure for cash productivity, and it is not a notion recognised in the accounting packages everyone uses, the accounting standards, or most peoples mindsets. Best we usually seem to do is have a few ratios like the “Quick” ratio which measures current assets over current liabilities, which are not regularly tracked performance measures, and have room for interpretation and thus manipulation.
Stock turn, debtors days Vs creditors days, Sales or Gross margin/employee, product value produced/realisable value of a piece of machinery, production value/production employee, time taken/task, and many others. There are thousands of ways to measure the productivity of the cash tied up in any business, and every business will be different. However, there will be a few measures for each that capture the essential nature of the business, where an improvement will deliver measurable financial results.
You should be seeking and using these key measures of cash productivity in your business.
Back to the case of my acquaintance.
He did not manage his cash flow well enough. Failure to adequately forecast and thus manage the ebbs and flows of cash into and out of his business, and as a result having to put in place very expensive short term funding in one way or another meant he was always chasing his cash-tail. He also did not measure, almost at all, the productivity of his cash, allowing the ” hidden” costs of poor cash productivity to kill him. Despite his Income statement, often called the Profit and Loss statement, telling him he was making a modest profit, he has hit the wall.
A sad but unfortunately common story, one I hope you are not seeing first hand.
Jan 25, 2015 | Governance, Leadership, Personal Rant
Australia day 2015
On Australia day for the last few years, I have made a point of reflecting on the place we live.
The post on January 26 2012, called for a mature debate on the challenges we face as a nation, the real, long term issues, rather than the diet of puffery and bullshit we normally are asked to digest. Quaint idea that, asking for a national debate on real issues.
In 2013, I asked what it was we wanted the place to look like in another generation, and I guess some degree of pessimism came through the words, again nothing.
Last year, 2014, I focussed on what I thought would be the defining trend that would drive our decision making, individually and for the nation, Data, and the essential truths that data can convey. This turned out to be absolutely wrong, about as wrong as anyone can be, and is again a salient lesson to those with a crystal ball hidden somewhere. Small businesses have not embraced data, Governments continue to hide it, and politicians use it to distort, mislead, and often fabricate, and we still take it on the snout, in relatively good humour.
So much for the transparency to be delivered by the internet.
This year, 2015, I will not be so grandiose or presumptuous.
Nick Kyrgios has just fought his way into the Aussie Open semi-final comprehensively replacing Tomic the tank as our favourite tennis player, the Canberra shuffle is back in full swing, educating our kids seems to be on the hands of kids, the boom of the last few years is comprehensively over and the lack if intelligent and bi-partisan comment and policy development that would enable the economy to weather the coming storm is supplanted by another call from the opposition leader for a debate on the coming republic.
For heavens sake, can we be adult about this?
Australia is the greatest country in the world, our economy is for reasons of luck and good management 20 years ago in pretty good shape relatively, but we are still failing to recognise that the piper needs to be paid now if the prosperity we have enjoyed will be handed to our children, some farsighted decisions need to be made irrespective of the political cycle.
I guess I am asking too much, pass the bottle, please.
May 10, 2014 | Governance, Leadership, Personal Rant
Courtesy http://mockingwords.blogspot.com.au
As great an advocate of analytics as I am, it remains a truth that data without a context is useless.
It is in the articulation of the context that data is given meaning, and it is at this point that the context can be articulated to change the meaning of the data.
“Spin” is so common we almost do not mind any more, it is so woven into our daily media consumption, that it is normal, and each person applies their own cogitative filtering system to what they are bombarded with every day.
Spin is no more than selecting a combination of data and context to deliver an argument that suits a predetermined outcome. Question is when does the modest spin with perhaps the best of intentions become a lie based on manipulation of data and context.
I cannot wait for Tuesday nights budget, if nothing else it should be a lesson in context management.
PS. A week post budget.
Well it seems they really blew this one!
We thought the previous residents of the Lodge were too smart by half, trying to manage both the data and the context, and failing at both, but the current Prime Minister and his Treasurer have set new standards.
Irrespective of your political inclinations, and view of the logic of the budget, it is hard to argue that the sell job has been just crap, the only thing worse has been the packaging of the product.
Mr Shorten cannot believe his luck, and how quickly we forget. Perhaps our limited memory is what the PM is relying on, I wish him luck, but where is the bookie when you need him.
