Pursuing the ‘Better Way’

There is always a ‘better way’ to do things. It is a mindset. What often serves as a roadblock in pursuing a ‘better way’ are the default setting within our organisations. Default settings dictate how we operate as a system and are learnt behaviours to secure reward, avoid conflict, create efficiencies, acknowledge status, maintain comfort, secure favour…in other words those things that shape the over-riding reality within the organisation.

The problem is that it is our default settings that inhibit or constrain an organisation’s ability to innovate and therefore adapt to changing realities. This can and usually does prove fatal. Developing the capacity to override the default settings becomes a necessary focus for leadership in times of change. Leaders need to create both the space and permission for their people to, ’see a better way’ and then develop supporting structures and processes that explore, nurture and grow alternative ways of doing things.

Following the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon the American Jewish community responded to the crisis by raising $300 million to help rebuild the northern part of Israel. A normal reaction one might reason. A default reaction is what it was in the circumstances. One senior person in the Jewish network proposed a ‘better way’ to the challenge than the default setting that had been engaged. he proposed that the money raised should also be used to help rebuild southern Lebanon which had also been devastated in the conflict. His proposal recieved no support and a fair amount of push-back. In the end, much of the help given to restore southern Lebanon came from Hezbollah and so they were able to solidify its patron-client relationship with the Lebanese in this situation.

‘Better ways’ are often unpopular as they go against the grain, the status quo; they often create discomfort and challenge the conventional wisdom. That is exactly why we need them. Smart Leaders encourage ‘better way’ thinking and practice at both an individual and organisation level and in doing so invite feedback, reflection and experimentation.

It is an essential element in becoming an adaptive organisation. It could well determine whether or not you survive the future. And of course, today’s ‘better way’ becomes tomorrow’s default setting. Such is the nature of life!

Conferences of the future – more online / more connecting

New and ever improving telecommunication technologies have improved how we communicate. From the first telegrams to virtual reality holographic conference rooms, we’ve come a long way. The key now is not so much the technology (we have the technical ability to put a 3-d representation of a person live on stage anywhere in the world, after all). Of course, we still need better, faster and cheaper broadband to be more evenly spread around the world, but that will happen – sooner rather than later. It’s now more about our acceptance of these technologies, and the user friendliness of their application.

It won’t be too long before a significant number of our conferences go fully digital. That is, the speakers and delegates will all hook up to the Internet, and participate digitally. This will take many forms, the best of which will include video walls and full interactivity.

There are many reasons to go this route, including: making it easier for people to work from home, reducing commuting time, office space, the need for conference rooms (which often stand empty for long periods of time – especially the big auditoriums), reducing the number of flights around the world and the amount spent on corporate conferencing. So, save money, reduce pollution, save time… why would we not do it?

Of course, what we lose is the time between sessions. Conferences are a lot more than just information transfer meetings. Lots of networking happens, and relationship development. It’s often the time between formal sessions that is most important. We can’t change this, and virtual conferences will not replace this aspect.

However, this means that those people who put conferences together need to know exactly WHY they need to get people together physically. There are good reasons to do this – but these need to find their way into the design of the conferences themselves. This is a challenge for the next few years for this industry.

HBR: Why Sustainability Is Now the Key Driver of Innovation

Last week, The Harvard Business Review issued a new white paper illustrating that sustainability strategies are not a bottom line drain to business, but the most effective way to create competitive advantage moving forward. The authors, Ram Nidumolu, C.K. Prahalad and M.R. Rangaswami, are well known for their future focused views, and I think their article makes a good contribution to this field. As you would expect from HBR, there is a focus on the opportunity in sustainability, using successful corporate sustainability stories from companies such as Wal-Mart, Clorox and HP.

You can read the introduction to the study here, and get the whole study if you’re an HBR subscriber.

They come out with a five point strategy:

… Continue Reading

Can I Clean Your Clock? Why China must wake up to clean power

Thomas Friedman is one of my favourite authors. He has a knack for a good story, and the insight to help us understand what the story means for how the world is changing. His latest column in the New York Times helps to frame the global energy crisis differently. And it’s very, very clever.

He explains how China should respond. Currently many Chinese people rightly complain that America has had 150 years to pollute the world while establishing a solid industrial base. They want the same right. But Friedman correctly points out that that is looking backwards. Looking forwards, the next revolution will be clean power. And every year China (and India, and Brazil, and Russia…) continues to look backwards, they give America a head start in the next big thing. He’s right. Not necessarily right about the economics and the detail. But he’s right that this is the type of mindset shift we need in the world right now.

Read his article at the NYT here, or below.
… Continue Reading

Guy Kawasaki on how he Tweets

Anyone who follows @guykawasaki on Twitter assumes the man never sleeps. We’re all certain that Tweeting isn’t his main job, but he never seems to stop tweeting. So how does he do it?

Click over to ‘How to Change the World‘ for an interview with Guy, that I certainly enjoyed reading. Well actually it looks like it’s an interview with Guy by Guy?

Clearly he’s doesn’t mess around : )

“Yes, four people contribute to my tweets: Annie Colbert, Gina Ruiz, Noelle Chun, and Neenz Faleafine. This is why you will see the initials “AC, “GR,” “NC,” and “LF” at the end of some tweets. If there are no initials, then it’s me.“

Zappos hits $1 billion sales

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about Zappos, the online shoe and accessories company. They are a “new world” company that interests me immensely. The company just hit a major milestone 10 years in business and $1billion in sales. The CEO Tony Hsieh was interviewed recently about their success, interestingly rather than talk about the financial success of the company he focuses all his answers rather around the culture of the company, its values and its customers. You can read the interview below or visit Zappos’s website and read it there.

Tony Hsieh wants to build Zappos into a Virgin styled company, with Zappos Bank, hotels, airlines etc using ten guiding principles. Have a look at them they are not about financial returns or market share but have to do with the people side of the business…get these right and the financial rewards follow. With $1 billion sales in the bank I think Zappos is doing things right:

… Continue Reading

The Meaning of the 21st Century

One of the most important books I have read in the last year is James Martin’s “The Meaning of the 21st Century” (Buy it at Amazon or Kalahari). The subtitle explains: The Megaproblems of the 21st Century.

You can hear me talking about it on a ClassicFM book review show.

I recently came across the author’s website, and found this excellent summary of his book. From James Martin’s own website:

… Continue Reading

The Myth of the Rational Buyer

What if what we understood about marketing wasn’t true? This is how the article from Fast Company, The Myth of the Rational Buyer: How too much thinking can hurt your brand, begins.

The author Mark Dziersk suggests that companies spend 95% of their time fussing over the 5% that the consumer thinks about when it comes to purchasing behaviour.

And as he points out, the average hypermarket in the US, carries more than 167 000 sku’s (units), compared to 40 000 in that late 1950’s. That’s a lot of product to choose from. And we’re missing what goes into consumer behaviour, then we’d better start doing things differently.

Read the full article here.

A new way of looking at inheritance is needed

If you read this blog regularly, you might have spotted that last week’s Spectator magazine has been on my reading list. It just happened to be a fairly thought provoking edition. Here is another thought it sparked for me.

When the world changes, we need to change too. As demographics change, the institutions of the world also need to change. We are living in an era of unprecedented change. I mean fundamental shifts, not just technological changes or infrastructural improvements. One example of demographic change is that we are now living longer on average than at any time in recorded history. An example of a change in institutions this requires is that we should be rethinking inheritance.

My grandmother is 95 years old, and still going strong. She spent most of her life in Christian ministry, and so doesn’t have much of a nest egg to pass on as an inheritance. But, if she did, who would it go to? The current system means my aunt and father would receive the inheritance. But aunt is retired, as is her husband, and my father is certainly of retirement age. As the oldest grandchild, I am nearing 40 with three children under 10 years old, while the youngest cousin of my generation has just become a father for the first time.

Surely it is my generation that would gain much more benefit from an inheritance from her?

As the demographics of longevity have changed, should we not change our practices, so that inheritance is passed onto the grandchildren? Once this is established, each generation will receive an inheritance. The only generation to be affected would be the current middle aged generation who would need to forgo an inheritance in favour of their children.

And there lies the problem. To implement such a change, the Baby Boomers would need to forgo their inheritance. But, this seems unlikely. The Boomers have spent their lives not only being selfish about hoarding and spending their money, but also whittling away the inheritance they could leave to their children. There is a danger that many of them will take the inheritances they should start to receive soon, and use these up. I don’t think, then, that they’re likely to look favourably on the idea of giving up their inheritance rights altogether.

But, it would make sense if they did.

Read the Spectator article that got me thinking about this online here, or below.

… Continue Reading

To Catch a Wild Pig – A Parable About Today’s Society That Offers Valuable Lessons for Leaders

I came across this excellent article by Norman Wolife, President/CEO, Quantum Leaders, a regular contributor for Fast Company.

In it he describes how if you want to catch a wild pig you lay down corn in the forest and over a period of time build a fence one section at a time until the pigs are happy to enter through a gate in the fence to collect their “free food”. Once inside the enclosure the gate is closed trapping the pigs, they run around madly for a while but then calm down and return to the food. It takes some time to hunt like this but at the end of it you have the whole herd captured and not just one pig.

The parable is an interesting one in our western society today especially with the current financial crisis. The fence can be equated to rules and regulations slowly encircling business. Norman argues that we must guard carefully not to fall into the trap of being so dependent on the government that we lose our sense of responsibility and even worse, the very spark of life. On the other end is allowing things to run wild which has led to the financial crisis.

The trick is to find a balance between regulation and freedom and this requires true leadership. As the article points out “The trouble we have in our political system is we keep running back and forth between taming the wild pigs and letting them run wild. Wildness is good for creativity, entrepreneurialism, and the like. You want the free flow of energy to stimulate new innovation. And yet when you have unbounded flow of energy you have chaos, which then has to correct itself. As we learn to work with the powerful flow of societal energies, I believe we can learn to modulate the unbounded flow of energy while not reaching the point of constraining it to where we are limiting its flow.”

The parable’s lesson is not only for society but also for business. How many companies so over manage their projects that they miss out on the innovation and creativity of “running wild”. The lessons from the current crisis and the message for leadership is the importance of finding a balance between rules and regulations and the unbridled freedoms that lead innovation astray.

You can read the full article here

Let the crowd decide (if you have a bestselling book or not)

Founded by HarperCollins, Authonomy is a new community that invites unpublished and self-published authors to post at least 10,000 words of a fiction or non-fiction manuscript for visitors to read online.

Visitors can review and recommend books, and can showcase their five favourite submissions on a virtual bookshelf that’s viewable from their profile page. Authonomy keeps track of the number of recommendations a book receives and ranks writers accordingly. Readers are also ranked, based on how good they’ve been at spotting books that make it to the top of Authonomy’s charts. To help authors make it from computer screen to printed book, once a month the top five books are delivered to the desks of an editorial board made up of international HarperCollins commissioning editors.

The website is free to use both for readers and writers, and HarperCollins hopes the wisdom of the crowds will help them unsource potential hits that individual editors or agents might otherwise miss, or just don’t have the time to read. Needless to say, the site could also prove to be a good marketing tool once manuscripts are actually published, since authors won’t have to build a fan base from scratch.

The Power of Imagination

JK Rowling gave the 2008 graduation address at Harvard. You can read and watch it here.

I think it’s excellent, focusing on the benefits of learning from failure and imagination.

This section is the best for me:

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other peoples minds, imagine themselves into other peoples places. Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise. And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are….

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

The Future of Publishing’s History

I am not the greatest fan of the publishing industry. The first paperback book, a massive innovation in the industry, was published this week in 1935, and sometimes it seems that was the last innovation the industry has seen. As a published author, the lead times in the industry are seriously frustrating and the processes archaic. But, hey, I suppose I shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds me (well, part feeds me – in a world dominated by the increasing valuation of intellectual capital and decreasing value of manual labour and intermediation, the publishing industry, with their paltry standard 12-15% of wholesale price paid in royalties stands as a bastion of anochronism).

But, today, I read of something that inspires some hope in me that the wonderful people of the publishing industry do have an eye on the future. Faber are going to be publishing out of print books on a once-off, on-demand basis. They have started with a limited catalog, but the concept itself could (and should) easily be extended to all books everywhere. With digital printing and even e-books, it should be very little extra work to take any book anywhere and reproduce it. Check out the announcement and details here. A nice idea, and one that I hope is copied, and inspires further innovation.

Free games

At TomorrowToday, we are great fans of games, and especially of the learnings we can get from games. We are also keen observers of the gaming industry, which often picks up on shifting values and economic models before other industries do (compare them, for example, to the music industry – especially on the issue of pricing I’m about to talk about!).

Here is a small feature from the latest Economist magazine on a new financial model for games. Give them away for free!

FOR millions of East Asians, online gaming is not so much a hobby as a way of life. “Massively multiplayer” online games such as “Legend of Mir 3” and “MapleStory” have legions of devoted fans who spend an alarming proportion of their waking hours sitting in front of their PCs, at home or in internet cafés, doing battle with elves, wizards and mythological beasts. Some players take their parallel gaming lives very seriously: one man murdered a friend in a dispute over a stolen virtual sword (GC: this happened a few years ago, and is the only known extreme incident – but it is still much quoted).

Many of these games rely on a business model that is different from the way the video-games industry works in the West. Rather than selling games as shrink-wrapped retail products which can then be played on a PC or games console, the Asian industry often gives away the software as a free download and lets users play for nothing. Revenue comes instead from small payments made by more avid players to buy extras for their in-game characters, from weapons to haircuts. In this way, a minority of paying customers subsidise the game for everyone else.

… Continue Reading

How to get young talent to notice your company

There is a lot of talk about targeting the next generation of new talented, graduates called Gen Y or Millennials. And for good reason, they are supremely confident, well educated, know exactly what they want and how to get it. This is presenting some unique challenges for today’s businesses.

This past Friday we were asked to shed some light on the issue and presented at the annual Bright Futures conference, an excellent organisation that helps students and companies connect. A number of top employee brands were present including HP, KPMG, L’Oreal etc. Dr Graeme Codrington presented to both corporate companies and students on Being Talented and Winning the Talent Wars.

One of the key challenges that the companies were raising at the conference was how to attract young talent and alert them to job opportunities. One of our clients a Big 4 accountancy and consulting firm is doing innovative work in this area. They are promoting their employee brand by going to the spaces where young people are congregating such as FaceBook, MySpace and YouTube. Deloitte is interviewing and videotaping employees about how great it is to work at their company in a fun light hearted way and using the clips to promote job opportunities and attracting Millennial talent. Have a look at what Deloitte is doing on YouTube.

The Future of Mobile

We all know how ubiquitous mobile phones have become. In poorer countries, where communication technologies have been slow to arrive, the take up of mobile telephony is nothing less than breathtaking. But, the future brilliance of mobile phones lies not in their communication ability, but in the add ons that can be made to these little computers we all carry around with us. A decade from now, mobile phones will be personal digital devices hooked up with tens and hundreds of functions.

I recently blogged about the ability of MP3 players to replace stethoscopes – of course, any MP3 and microphone enbaled mobile phone could do the same. I also recently read about mobile phones being used by diabetics – they have a little needle embedded in them. A click of a button, the needle pops out of the phone and is inserted into the skin, the insulin reading is done by the phone and displayed, and the diabetic knows immediately what has to be done (sorry, I am not diabetic and don’t know exactly how it works – but the key is that the technology to do the test diabetics must do daily is embedded in the cellphone).

But, now graduate students have found a way to turn their cellphones into microscopes.

… Continue Reading

A great carpark innovation at Joburg airport

I spend a lot of time in carparks, specifically at airports. Normally, I am rushing to park and get checked in. And, at most airports around the world, there are not enough parking spaces, and it can take a lot of time to find an empty bay. But, at OR Tambo International airport in Johannesburg, the carpark has added a wonderful new feature.

Above every parking bay a small unit has been installed in the ceiling. This has the ability to detect whether something is parked in the bay, and turns a bright light from green to red if the bay is full. This is a remarkable improvement – you drive into the parking area and scan the ceiling for green lights. Search time is dramatically reduced, and from the far side of the parking garage, you can set a course for an open parking bay.

Thanks ACSA. This is one of your best innovations ever!

V-day

Today is the tenth anniversary of the little purple pill. Although I personally think that big pharmaceuticals should spend more time trying to cure diseases that are part of the scourge of poverty (like malaria and TB), it is noteworthy that one of the biggest money spinners over the past decade has been Viagra – the erectile dysfunction pill developed by Pfizer.

Viagra is one the best case studies for what companies must do to benefit from the ageing Boomer generation. As the generation born after World War II, who came of age in the swinging 60s, they were never going to be coy about sex, and certainly did not want a mere biological issue like “getting old” stand in the way of their preferred lifestyle. They are a generation that believes in choice – their choice! So, medicines that deal with hair loss, sagging skin, sexual slowdown and other age-related conditions were always going to be successful. Pfizer got there first. Others have – and will continue to – follow.

The Boomers are the “youngest”, healthiest, richest and most powerful retiring generation of all time.

… Continue Reading

Where’s my silver bullet?

I am sitting in a full day session with Gary Hamel. I didn’t pay enough money to be alone with him, so I am sharing the hall with a few hundred other people, representing many of South Africa’s top corporates and leading businesses. Gary has been great. I enjoy his style (his PowerPoint slides are are shocker, but he is a relaxed and engaging presenter). His content is compelling. He knows his stuff. It’s been woirth the time and money investment.

But it’s now the afternoon tea break, and all around me I hear the same comment: “I’m looking forward to this last session….”. The reason for the anticipation is that Gary has set up things brilliantly in the morning sessions. He has explained the 21st century context, he has shown us why innovation in management processes is a key to sustained success, and he has inspired and excited us to want to innovate and make a change. But he hasn’t told us what to do yet. That’s what everyone thinks is coming now! I think they will be disappointed. OR, I will be disappointed in Gary. Either way, it’s going to be a disappointing end to a great day.

Here’s why.
… Continue Reading

Conferences with no power

Here I sit, at another conference without power. Don’t get me wrong – I am not talking about the content. I am at Gary Hamel’s latest thing: “The Future of Management”, a full day session with the innovation guru himself. “Live and in person”, just as the advertising promised! The guy is good, and probably the best academic on the issue of innovation in business. So, the content is great.

But in just a few minutes, my laptop is going to die, because I don’t have a power supply near my table. I came prepared – I have two extension cables, and if there was a power outlet within about 20m of my table, I’d be OK (maybe creating a few health and safety issues, but nevertheless I could finish this blog entry without worrying about my battery). But once again the conference organisers have just not thought about people who don’t use paper. I have been given a deskpad and another pen. I don’t use those things. I want to be able to type notes directly into my laptop. I want to be able to work on my computer. I want power!

This needs to be standard practice at conferences! It is the 21st century, after all. AND, today, it is a conference on innovation! If only….

(Let’s not even talk about the fact that there is no free wifi available here. They are giving us free toilet facilities, free water on every desk, free pens and deskpads, free coffee and tea, but no wifi connectivity!)
… Continue Reading

Getting a generation out of debt

The Fast Company magazine of Dec 2007 ran a story that combines some of my favourite topics: young generations, technology and personal finance. It was called “Easy Money”. Read the full story here.

Here is a summary:

Americans under 35 spend 16% more than they earn, on average. College graduates leave school with an average of $20,000 in student loans and almost $3,000 in credit-card debt. This demographic, in sum, is sorely in need of an easy-to-use solution to their ample money woes. “There’s this dull throbbing sense of guilt that we should be doing something, but where do we start?” says recent Stanford grad Ramit Sethi, who draws more than 150,000 readers a month to his blog Iwillteachyoutoberich.com.

In the past six months, a slew of free online services has popped up to answer this question, offering widgets for budgeting, automatic bill pay, mobile alerts, and social networking. All are fighting to be the anti-Quicken. Although Intuit’s venerable personal-finance software commands 70% of the market, its $30 to $100 price tag, hundreds of features, and required hour or two a week of data entry are unlikely to appeal to a generation raised on Halo and diagnosed with ADD. Sure enough, Quicken’s 15 million users have an average age of 47. If personal finance for most folks is like personal hygiene–an unpleasant chore motivated by necessity–Quicken is Old Spice.

Meanwhile, the Axe Bodyspray of personal finance–cool, fresh, and even sexy–is an upstart named Mint. Its unique features, wrapped in an exceedingly clean and appealing design, are winning tech-industry plaudits and brisk traffic. …It signed up more than 40,000 users in the two weeks after launch. So has Mint cracked the code on getting Generation Debt to buckle down and take responsibility for its finances?

… Continue Reading

A car for the people of the world

This is how new markets are made, and how worlds are changed! Today, Tata released their latest car. It was a car that all of their rivals said could not be made. About 5 years ago, Tata announced that were going to build a car that would cost less than 100,000 rupees, or US$ 2,500 (the price of a DVD player in most luxury cars).

Today, they unveiled it in India. See the early news reports here and here.

It is the Tata Nano. And, besides being a 5 door sedan, seating four, with just less than 650CC power, it also has remarkable fuel efficiency (20km/l), top speeds at 100km/h, meets all emissions standards and all safety standards, too. The deluxe model will have aircon. See the Reuters “factbox” for details. At this price, it is bound to be attractive to those who have not been able to enter the car market in the past.

It is no surprise that a car for the people in the “bottom half of the pyramid” should come out of India (see previous post on selling profitably to the world’s poor). For some, it may be a sad truth, but it is true nonetheless: unless companies make money out of supplying goods and services to the world’s poor, they won’t. But Tata shows yet another example of how this can be a win-win for everyone.

With a car like this, Tata will create a new market of car drivers, and are poised to conquer the world. I wish them well!

“There’s a problem with Facebook”

At least, that’s what my favourite Talk Radio station (Radio 702) said during their half hourly news reports throughout today. As a regular facebook user (see my profile here, and challenge me to Rock, Paper, Scissors here, if you have nerves of steel), I was intrigued. Read the story here (not sure how long their archives last, so I have copied it in full below).

Now the story itself is a fairly newsworthy one – especially at this time of year, when final year High School students are writing final exams, and some are trying to find illegal shortcuts to success. BUT, to headline the piece, and add commentary to it, indicating that this is a Facebook problem is ridiculous. And that’s what the news readers did this morning.

What a load of rubbish!! This is such typical media hype. The type that breeds dangerous attitudes in parents, and really does more harm than good.

… Continue Reading

The Airbus A380 is delivered – but will it deliver?

The long awaited monster passenger plane, the Airbus A380, is now ready for delivery. In fact, Air Singapore today took delivery of their first plane with much pomp and ceremony. Read about it here at the international airlines news, and read about the financial details at Forbes.com.

Some people have said:

• The plane is too late – the market has moved on, and there won’t be enough orders to pay for it.
• Given the delays and increases in development costs, they need to sell almost double the estimated number of planes to turn a profit.
• Its unlikely the market will be able to absorb the additional planes they need to sell.
• The plane will become obsolete before they sell 400 units.
• The plane is too big – no-one wants to fly with that many people.

In fact, these things were all said of the Boeing 747 when it was introduced to the market in 1970. Some people are saying very similar things of the A380 today. They have obviously not looked at the past and learnt from it. That’s a problem everywhere today, isn’t it?

Learning from Apple’s Innovation machine

With all the chaos and bad press related to Apple’s just-released iPhone, maybe the Economist magazine of a few weeks ago pre-empted things a bit too much. They wrote a great article on lessons we can all learn from Appe’s innovation machine – read it here at The Economist (subscription required, I think), or see an extract below.

Whilst the launch of their phone might not have been the all-conquering success they had planned, we can still learn a lot from the masters of design and innovation at Apple. Read on…
… Continue Reading

Crowdsourcing – Getting Your Customers and Staff to develop new innovations for you

Crowdsourcing is a technique that progressive companies are using to translate the enthusiasm of their most highly-engaged customers into valuable marketing, branding, or product-development insight. Dean van Leeuwen, TomorrowToday’s UK and European director, who has an MBA and extensive work experience in marketing, looks at this new trend and provides practical guidelines for customer-led organisations.

… Continue Reading

The Pope’s Limbo

It’s official. After 800 years of being Catholic church policy, the theological construct of “limbo” has been abolished (read the International Herald Tribune on this). This was a place were unbaptised babies were said to go, awaiting some kind of final judgement at the end of times. It was “created” over 800 years ago, as a way of dealing with two competing theological factions in the Catholic Church. Last week, after a 3 year theological review, the Pope agreed that it was an error in judgement, and officially “abolished” it as a concept in Catholic dogma.

Good for him!

I suppose the lesson for us all is to ask what long held beliefs we each have that we need to be prepared to give up – no matter how embarrassing or life-changing it might be to do so. You can criticise the Vatican for this change. But you can’t argue with their guts to do something!

What do you need to change? And do you have the guts to do so?

Ten Faces of Innovation

I was recently sent the outline of a book, “The Ten Faces of Innovation”, by Tom Kelley with Jonathan Littman (Profile, 2005) – buy it online at Amazon.com or Kalahari.net. In our work on “Invitational Innovation“, we have been telling clients for a long time that just like there are different types of personality, there are different styles of innovative thinking. Not a big thought, really, but an important one, nevertheless.

This book appears to put some nice labels on different innovation types.

… Continue Reading

Cutting Costs reaches its event horizon

A nice article in the Economist, 18 Jan 07, entitled: “Browne out“, looks at the departure of BP’s boss, Lord (John) Browne. He has been in charge since 1995, and his tenure coincides with some huge changes in the industry. These include massive mergers, the “greening” of Big Oil, and at the same time some big mess ups – “In March 2005 a fire at an American refinery killed 15 people and injured 170 more. Since then, BP has suffered corrosion and spills on its pipelines in Alaska, delays in developing new oilfields and two investigations of its trading arm for price-rigging.”

But the article makes a very interesting point: most of these issues relate to massive cost cutting that has characterised the oil industry in the past decade. Ruthlessly cutting costs eventually strips out the ability of a company to do what it has to do. It stretches staff, and demoralises them as well, often beyond their ability to cope with situations that arise. In oil companies, as in other industries, this can have catastrophic results, in the glare of public scrutiny. But for other companies, especially in the service industries and professional firms, the results can be equally catastrophic – yet unseen until the company teeters and topples.

There are only so many costs you cut, until you and all your competitors are all running on empty. In most industries, we’ve reached that point. Now, I predict, we’ll see competitive advantage coming in the form of “we’re not the cheapest, but we are the best” type approaches, as companies rebuild strategic capacity, and focus on VALUE, not just COSTS.

qnomore – gotta love the free market

Anyone who knows me will know that I am irrationally exuberant about South Africa’s future. I believe my home country has a rich legacy, a wonderful heritage to share with the world, and a bright future. Of course, there are problems – but we’re sorting many of them out. We need more houses – but we’ve built close to 2 million in the last 10 years (can’t ask for much more, can you?). We need a better AIDS policy – that seems to be happening, now that the health minister (in an ironic twist) has fallen ill, and is on long term sick leave. Every decent economist I know is confident our economy’s fundamentals are solid – and our finance department and tax office are absolutely top drawer! Crime is a HUGE problem, and must be sorted out. We need more political will in this area.

But my friends at SA The Good News, and Guy Lundy, author of Reasons to Believe, and the great crew at HomeComing Revolution and the official crowd at the International Marketing Council all help me to be positive.

… Continue Reading