Apr 25, 2024 | Culture, Leadership
‘Resilience’ is a word we are hearing a lot these days and will hear more today.
On this ANZAC day 2024, there will be a lot of words sprayed around that amount to acknowledgement of the resilience of ANZAC troops.
They clung to the cliffs on the Gallipoli peninsular, died in the mud of Passchendaele, slogged across the Owen Stanleys a couple of times, and lived under rocks in the seaside splendour of Tobruk.
It is used to describe both the personal characteristics required of the individual, and the culture of organisations.
The dictionary definition leaves a bit to be desired, referring to the ability of a person or organisation to return to a previous state. ‘Elasticity’ is a common simile.
How do we measure resilience? If we cannot measure it, as the saying goes, we cannot improve it.
What is the measure of resilience shown by the ANZACS in those meat grinders? Indeed, how do we measure the resilience of those at home, watching as the casualty lists were posted?
In a commercial context, resilience implies the degree to which an enterprise is able to absorb and adjust to the unexpected. Usually, it refers to the short term from the decisions made by others that drive an unexpected outcome that changes the status quo. Substantial competitive moves, new products that deliver new value, or the emergence of something that could be classed to some degree as ‘disruptive’.
Measuring by financial outcomes is misleading. Financial outcomes are the result of other decisions taken on the inputs to the business. Do that well, and you become financially secure, do it poorly and you go out of business.
The allied high command on the Western Front measured the outcomes of their initiatives by two things: the ground gained, and the casualties incurred. Of the two, the first was the more important to them. Field Marshall Haig never got close enough to the lines to understand the resilience required to ‘jump the bags’, again. The linkage and enormous gap between his orders, written in the splendour of the Château de Beaurepaire, and the squalor and death on the front lines that was the outcome, was never meaningfully acknowledged.
Measuring outcomes is always easier than measuring the inputs, then allocating cause and effect to the decisions but is rarely useful. Just as measuring your weight every morning will not assist you to lose weight in the absence of resulting reduction in calories, throwing yourself at a machine gun nest will not win ground.
It does however require resilience, courage, and dedication to both those beside you, the wider objective, and willingness to ‘do the work’.
In our modern world, despite the continuous marketing of the silver bullet products promising the contrary, there is no substitute for domain knowledge, planning, optimised resource allocation, and the sheer resilience to stick at it in the face of adversity.
It comes down to the culture at the micro level. How the individual behaves, and how that behaviour translates to the immediate group.
It has always be so.
It is a lovely autumn day in Sydney, as we reflect on those that gave us the opportunity to enjoy the freedoms we take for granted. It is also my beautiful daughters 38th birthday. Happy birthday Jenn!
How time flies.
The header is an arial photo of the gorge, hidden in the Wollemi State Forest, after the fires of 2019-20. The green spine is made up of the only stand left of Wollemi Pines. They have survived since the dinosaurs roamed the area. Resilience.
Feb 19, 2024 | Uncategorized
AI can put words in the mouth of any public figure and make it virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. It can create pictures that even experts cannot pick as digital facsimiles.
How can we trust anything we see or hear?
To date we have been able to pick the fakes by a range of tiny details. Spelling mistakes, poor grammar, or inconsistent details in a ‘photo’, but those days are now gone.
What will they be replaced by?
Trust?
How do you build trust on a base of quicksand?
Slowly. Carefully. Piece by piece. Showing up routinely and being consistent in the messaging by whatever means those messages are delivered. Always being both totally transparent and sometimes painfully honest, and always humble.
Beware, the blaring trumpet of confirmation bias will be blasting our senses from here on. Somehow, we must build an immunity and antidote, or we will be lost as a cohesive community.
The header of this post is the AI generated ‘photo’ by Boris Eldagsen that won the creative category at the Sony World Photography Awards in 2023.
While it was ‘early days’ in the public life of AI, the fact that experts failed to pick the ‘fake’ is disturbing. How are so called average people expected to be able to pick between the real speeches, transcripts, and photos of public figures when the experts make massive blues like this?
The experts disagree. Who knew?
AGI, or ‘Artificial General Intelligence’ is the point at which the magic of circuits has the ability to learn and respond to something for which it has not been taught. In short, it can think. It is a field of science that is being funded in the billions, weekly, and is a huge step forward from where we are now, with what is becoming ‘normal’ AI.
AGI pundits think AGI by 2030 is not just achievable, but a lay down misère, while the other camp think ‘probably never’.
Whichever camp emerges the winner, AI is with us, and is not going anywhere, except further into the corners of our lives.
Get used to it!
Oct 6, 2023 | Culture, Innovation, Leadership
Metrics increasingly drive our commercial lives.
We need the metrics to ensure that we are focused on the outcome, it drives the resource allocation choices that must be made.
Usually, we face a series of binary choices, do A or B, then X or Y. This is comfortable for us, our brains are triggered by binary, friend or foe, run towards or run away, is it a stick or a snake? Evolutionary psychology at work.
In the short/medium term this works well, it ensures focus on what is deemed currently to be important. However, it actively excludes stuff that is ‘interesting’ but not necessarily useful now. Those require us to accept risk, experiment, be comfortable with failure, all the things that our evolutionary psychology has bred out of us. Next time you want to spend some resources on something because it is ‘interesting’ but outside the plan, good luck getting that formally approved. You will have to be prepared to be an outlier, renegade, argue against what has gone before, and you know what happens to many of those who do that.
Breakthroughs only occur when someone forges a path towards the unknown because it is for some reason, interesting to them. It will always be inconsistent with the status quo, it will always be out in the fringes, messy, usually unseen by most, but that is where the breakthrough gold hides.
To see these outlier factors requires critical thinking, a disapproval of the safe optimised way forged by the status quo. By definition, you cannot plan for the unexpected. However, you can create a culture where critical thinking is encouraged, and fed into the processes that together can become a renewed status quo.
These interesting things do not comply with the way we create plans and budgets. They are long term; they do not accommodate the plans associated with most of the daily activities we undertake. They are the source of long-term breakthrough; they are often the result of serendipity. Penicillin was not developed because Fleming had an objective to develop an antibiotic. The product category ‘antibiotic’ did not exist. Serendipity took place, then it took 15 years and a war to become commercialised.
How many breakthroughs can you think of that emerged from a plan? They always come through long experimental slog, underpinned by critical thinking.
My conclusion is That critical Thinking and planning are not mutually exclusive, but are uncomfortable bed-mates. in the absence of the encouragement and culture that makes uncomfortable relationships possible, they will not survive together.
Header credit: It is a reproduction by Hugh McLeod of the wonderful copy written by the creative team at Chiat Day advertising for Apple after Steve Jobs returned.
Apr 5, 2023 | Change, Culture, Innovation
Never before has the need for creativity been more critical.
Never before have set about crushing creativity before it has a chance to bloom more than we do now.
My nephew is dyslectic, always had trouble at school, with teachers, sitting still, and anything that required him to read and write. In a parent-teacher interview when he was about 12, my sister was distraught and angry to hear that her son, who had by then built a computer from bits and pieces, powered by a cobbled together solar panel on the roof, would be lucky to progress beyond being a day labourer.
He was lucky. After scraping into a regional university with a practical focus, he earned a masters degree in electrical engineering, got bored, and went back and did medicine. He is now an ophthalmic surgeon, restoring sight in the footsteps of Fred Hollows.
Had his practical talent not been recognised by an academic with a long life of non-academic experience behind him, my nephew may have continued tinkering in the garage while making his living on a production line. What a waste that would have been.
How many like him have we wasted?
How many like him will we continue to waste as we dose up the kids who cannot sit still in school, or colour between the lines, with Ritalin?
Back in 2008 an executive coach named Wayne Burkin wrote a book called ‘Wide Angle Vision: beat your competition by focussing on Fringe suppliers, Lost customers, and Rogue employees’. The title says it all.
Creativity and the resulting change does not come from those who can colour between the lines, always behave in a disciplined manner, are prepared to do as they are told at all times. It comes from the outliers, the originals, the rebels, as Steve Jobs noted, those who ‘Think Different’.
Seth Godin’s remarkable essay introducing us to the ‘Purple Cow’ resonates even more now than when it was written back in 2003. Paragraphs 5 and 6 should be reproduced and stuck on every wall of every room that ever has a student of any kind in it, and every office of anyone seeking to be a leader.
Never have we needed those who think different to have their hands on the wheel of the companies and institutions that together make up the economy, and will shape our kids futures more than we do currently.
Header cartoon courtesy of gapinvoid.com
Feb 27, 2023 | Uncategorized
It seems over the last year or two, I see MG’s everywhere. Not the snappy sports cars of my youth, MGB, and MGA, nor the MGTC or TF of my youthful fantasies, but boxy little SUV’s that look pretty much like every other boxy little SUV on the road.
The thought was prompted by a conversation with a friend ‘consulting’ his son as he considered buying his first car. Dads first choice was a Toyota Camry, reputed to be ‘bullet-proof’ but boring. Perfect he thought, until told there was a 2-year waiting list. Besides, his son would not want his friends to see him in a Camry.
The wait for a new MG was 3-4 weeks. Tempting, but MG? Built in China, owned by an anonymous Chinese conglomerate. Does a little Chinese SUV deserve the MG moniker?
MG has a long and storied history.
It started as a promotional item for the Morris dealership in Oxford in the 1920’s, which is where the name came from: Morris Garages. MG bounced around the dissolution of the British motor industry, being successively owned by BMC, British Leyland, and the MG Rover Group until that final entity went to the scrapheap in 2005. The Nanjing Auto group bought it from the receiver, which later merged with the Chinese conglomerate Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation, SAIC. The first models from SAIC carrying the MG badge emerged in 2011, after a very large engineering and production investment.
My sense that MG’s were everywhere was not wrong. The trend in sales is up, strongly. In December 2022, MG sold more new cars in Australia than both Mitsubishi and Hyundai. 5,194 to Mitsubishi’s 4,927, and Hyundai’s 4,434, a first. While both outsold MG in the full year, it seems only matter of time before MG overtakes them on that metric as well. Its rise has been meteoric, from 3,000 cars in 2018 to 49,582 in 2022.
Before we wax lyrical about the power of the brand, and the equity it may retain from the long ago glory days, it might pay to look at some of the facts that underpin such a stellar performance from a very basic marketing perspective.
Product.
The product seems pretty good. Even that well known sceptic John Cadogan has a nice word to say about the value delivered, which he rightly points out is an equation with quality on one side, and price on the other. I am the last person to comment on aesthetics with any authority, but to me it looks OK. If you trawl owner websites, you may get the impression that the quality leaves something to be desired, with a number of recurring shortcomings. However, you get what you pay for, and MG seems to be a practical price driven offering, burnished by all the cheap bling touted as features by the PR.
Price.
Against its obvious competitors, MG has a substantial price advantage. They may be buying market share, but it is clearly working. Add in the 7 year warranty, and the price package is winning fans. Combined with the OK product, the ‘Value’ is clearly being seen.
Place.
There are currently 153 MG dealerships around the country. Most are multiple shops, but who really cares? That number combined with the sales numbers means you can have some confidence in the availability of spares, and resale value, and you do not have to travel too far to go and sit in one, and try before you buy.
Promotion.
Here is where MG have done a surprisingly good job. Surprising to me because most car marketers seem to get carried away by their own bullshit, failing to see the offer through the eyes of a potential customer. MG has combined the brand building job with the short term sales activation job better than any car brand I can remember. It helps that they seem to have buckets of money, but it is easy to waste a lot of that, which they have not done.
The local ads run on TV position the product clearly, young, aspirational, and skewed towards female. A look on YouTube, shows some pretty slick UK based ads featuring among others Benedict Cumberbatch adding British cred and male sophistication to the Australian ads. This is long term brand building material. MG has a 5-year significant sponsorship deal with South Sydney Rugby league, and the PR and short-term sales activation machine has been cranked up to ‘high’. For anyone in their target market looking to buy a car, MG is hard to miss. The offers are simple, go across the range, and will encourage at least consideration.
Strategically, MG is on a well-trodden path worn first by the Japanese, followed by the Koreans. Start with a narrow range at the lower end of the market with cheap, mass market cars full of bling, long warranty periods and extensive investment in customer facing infrastructure like dealers and spare parts inventory. Then, progressively move up the quality and price scale, while expanding the range as they get better at designing and building cars. What took the Japanese 40 years, took the Koreans 20 years, seems to have taken MG only 5 to have made big inroads.
When will we see an MG F1 team?
Toyota had a shot at F1 between 2002 and 2009, and while not a winner, did generate credibility. BMW has a long history with good results in F1 from the 50’s to withdrawal in 2009, while Mercedes upped its game in 2010. Since 2014 Mercedes has won every drivers and constructors championship, an unprecedented record at the extreme automotive cutting edge, where fractions of a second are the difference between winning and being an also ran. Mercedes in this time has also won in the car sales race, at least in Australia where they closed a big gap, then overtook class rival BMW in 2018, and have not looked back. This seems a natural progression for MG to follow, and any success at all would rewrite the global perception of Chinese engineering.
My conclusion is that MG is a bit more than just a label transposed onto an entry level range of cars with none of the ‘gravitas’ associated with the MG brand of old. It is a genuinely good effort to build a brand from the ground up, taking a helping hand from whatever MG heritage may have survived the implosion of the British motor industry. Worked everywhere into their marketing material is the MG logo, unchanged from the 1920’s creating a link, they hope, to the values they wish to rebuild. If nothing else, the combination of low price, long warranty, brand recognition, and lots of bling in a unit that delivers good value for not a lot of money is a good mix for customers. It also indicates to me that they are here for the long term, as it will take a while to recover the very substantial investment that has been, and continues to be made.
BTW, my friends son ended up buying a 2004 Jaguar, built while Jag was owned by Ford. Bit of a risk on parts and reliability, but a nice car at half the price of a new MG, and not a Chinese label in sight.
Feb 20, 2023 | Change, Culture, Governance
Lifelong employment is a thing of the past, casualisation, remote work, and the gig economy have consigned that idea to the dustbin of history.
It seems to me that there should be a revision to the way we seek to employ people, on whatever basis that employment occurs.
When recruiting for my clients as I do from time to time, I use a checklist that has a number of elements not usually obvious in most recruiting processes I have seen, or indeed been subjected to. The checklist assumes that anyone you are speaking to has the required domain qualifications and experience to in theory, get the job done. After that I look for ‘the 3 C’s and E’
Curiosity. To my mind curiosity is essential to be able to see alternatives and options from outside the domain. A wide span of interests, hobbies, reading, and an apparent ‘let’s just see’ attitude are signposts.
Critical thinking. To be able to subject opinions, data, and so-called facts to a process that strips away the inbuilt bias, self-interest, ‘short- termism’ and just bullshit, to reveal the foundation assumptions and facts. ‘How would you approach……..’ Type questions and resulting conversation surfaces this ability quite quickly, as does asking about times they have failed to reach an objective, and what they learnt as a result.
Collaborative capacity. Collaboration has unfortunately been turned into a cliché. However, the reality is that we are in a knowledge world, and most of the valuable knowledge is elsewhere, so you better figure out a way to get access to it. Generally, those who demonstrate they take responsibility for problems in their area of responsibility, while passing on praise for good work by others will find themselves as a ‘node’ in communication networks, rather than being just a receiver or originator of input. The number and distribution of ‘Nodes’ drives collaborative outcomes.
Education, in its broadest sense. STEM education is vital, from cutting-edge technology to basic trade skills. These technical skills drive productivity. Just as important are the ‘soft skills’, the capacity to see through the eyes of others, engage in constructive debate, and accommodate conflicting ideas in your brain at the same time. Education powers the three ‘C’s above
The recent changes have been profound, and the train has not stopped. One of my concerns for the world my grandchildren will inherit is what we are going to do with those who are displaced by technology? The argument that they will find new jobs created by the changes as has always happened in the past, may not happen as smoothly this time. The chances are in my view, that we will see increased levels of pain and anxiety.
We have an emerging social disruption over the next 20 years we have no idea how to manage, and really are not even considering the challenges in any meaningful way.
Header cartoon courtesy Tom Gauld. Originally published in New Scientist magazine.
