June 2010
The Myth of the Iranian Twitter Revolution
Posted by Grant Brewer on 17 Jun 2010 | Comments (0)
The Myth of the Iranian Twitter Revolution: "Foreign Policy Magazine: ‘But it is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right. Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran. As Mehdi Yahyanejad, the manager of ‘Balatarin,’ one of the Internet’s most popular Farsi-language Web sites, told the Washington Post last June, Twitter’s impact inside Iran is nil. ‘Here [in the United States], there is lots of buzz,’ he said. ‘But once you look, you see most of it are Americans tweeting among themselves.’"
(Via Subtraction.)
That doesn't seem surprising — Twitter as a source of breaking news is over exaggerated. The Twittersphere just seems littered with retweets of the same things appearing on CNN.
FIFA World Cup site confusing
Posted by Grant Brewer on 10 Jun 2010 | Comments (0)
Is it just me or is the FIFA World Cup 2010 web site making it extra challenging to find practical information and links to things like changing the people allocated to tickets or finding out how the park and ride works!
The City of Johannesburg site is far better linking to useful, practical information that a fan is likely to need in order to attend a match.
Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds
Posted by Grant Brewer on 10 Jun 2010 |
Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds: "Wordle is a toy for generating word clouds from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends."
This is the word cloud for this site:
A special report on South Africa: The price of freedom | The Economist
Posted by Grant Brewer on 10 Jun 2010 |
A special report on South Africa: The price of freedom | The Economist: "The price of freedom Since embracing full democracy 16 years ago, South Africa has made huge strides. But, says Diana Geddes (interviewed here), not everything has changed for the better Jun 3rd 2010 | From The Economist print edition"
This is a must read for anyone living, working or interested in South Africa.
south africa (5) | change (3) | news (1) | economist (1)
September 2008
Election words
Posted by Grant Brewer on 05 Sep 2008 | Comments (0)
The New York Times has an excellent and interesting information graphic that shows how open various words are used by the different speech-makers in the either the Democrats or the Republicans. It is an interesting representation and the actual words that feature are food for thought. The Republicans do talk about God an awful lot!
June 2008
SA Blook, Chapter 3 — What the world thinks of South Africa
Posted by Grant Brewer on 02 Jun 2008 | Comments (0)
Understanding South Africa is a challenge. It is a country full of paradoxes and extremes. As the setting of one of the most remarkable political transformations in modern history, it is also home to widespread poverty and mind–numbing violent crime. We remain trapped by past beliefs in our strengths — such as the idea that South Africa is a rich country because of its mineral wealth, or that our extraordinary political transition owes us opportunities in a global economy — and we're struggling to define what exactly we contribute to and how we relate to the world around us. How do all these things come together to forge a nation that can define its own meaning for the twenty first century, and in doing so create an emerging land of opportunity.
south africa (5) | china (4) | world cup (3) | globalisation (3) | brazil (2) | 2010 (2) | mtn (2) | india (1) | tutu (1) | global perspectives (1)
May 2008
Vodafone to Offer Apple’s iPhone in Ten Markets
Posted by Grant Brewer on 06 May 2008 | Comments (0)
Vodafone to Offer Apple’s iPhone in Ten Markets
Vodafone today announced it has signed an agreement with Apple to sell the iPhone in ten of its markets around the globe. Later this year, Vodafone customers in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey will be able to purchase the iPhone for use on the Vodafone network.
Best press release I’ve seen in years. 56 words, short and to the point. No mention of exclusivity, so the presumption is that other carriers will have the iPhone in these markets, too.
(Via Daring Fireball.)
apple (2) | iphone (1) | vodafone (1) | vodacom (1)
January 2008
Freeing information from autocracy & over control
Posted by Grant Brewer on 15 Jan 2008 | Comments (0)
It is always striking how difficult it is to get hold of information from an organisation as a customer, or even as an employee. It is not unusual to be chased from call centre agent to call centre agent as you try to determine an accurate and truthful answer to your questions. Just as common is the employee that struggles to find the correct information such as the most up to date report or a contract. In today's post-information age, getting access to data in organisations shouldn't be this difficult. People have got used to the ease with which they find information with tools such as Google, and this expectation has got to be translated into organisations. Freeing information is about treating customers and employees as partners and with respect. It is about allowing them the freedom to define their own contribution to your organisation as either a customer or an employee.
Essays | Strategy | Intelligence Strategym
management (3) | information (2) | transparency (1) | access to information (1) | freedom (1)
November 2007
Pick ‘n Pay Home Shopping
Posted by Grant Brewer on 29 Nov 2007 | Comments (0)
I decided to register for home shopping at Pick 'n Pay today. I've been a regular user of Woolworths' home shopping site site for many years, but needed to buy things that Woolworths don't stock. So I pointed my browser at http://homeshopping.picknpay.co.za/ expecting things to go smoothly. Well it wasn't to be.
woolworths (1) | user experience (1) | pick 'n pay (1) | home shopping (1)
The Independent’s Rugby World Cup front page
Posted by Grant Brewer on 12 Nov 2007 | Comments (1)
Justin Hartman got it right when he praised the cover of The Independent newspaper in the UK on the eve of the Rugby World Cup final between South Africa and England. It takes a very smart copywriter to think come up with the idea, and brave editor to put something without a picture on the cover!
In case you haven't realised, the headline is about England not South Africa! And the “slave song” is Swing Low.
world cup (3) | design (3) | newspaper (1) | layout (1) | inspiration (1)
Social networking should be useful in business
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Nov 2007 | Comments (4)
These days I frequently read about organisations banning the use of social networking tools like MySpace, LinkedIn or FaceBook. The issues of rising bandwidth usage and the associated costs, and the potential waste of time if employees are spending too much time on these sites that support such a decision. However, perhaps organisations should take a step back from their immediate reaction and explore a strategy that might embrace social networking in the enterprise.
Banning the use of external social networking sites may be short sighted and unnecessarily clumsy. The key is to find common ground -- perhaps limit the time that these social sites are available, say in until nine in the morning and after four in the afternoon. Or over lunchtime. Taking the high ground and embracing the the way modern employees work by implementing social networking as a form of knowledge and people management within your organisation can lead to happier, possibly more productive employees and more importantly better informed employees.
Essays | Technology | Strategy | Intelligence Strategym
social networking (1) | enterprise 2.0 (1) | linkedin (1) | collaboration (1) | information management (1) | facebook (1)
October 2007
Standard Bank & China
Posted by Grant Brewer on 25 Oct 2007 | Comments (0)
The Business Day is carrying an article about the news "that China’s biggest bank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, has agreed to buy a stake in Standard Bank, in a deal reported to be worth $5,5bn." That is very interesting news for South Africa and perhaps an indicator of what we might expect in the future as the economic centre of gravity shifts from the US (and western Europe) to the East.
Something that struck me when working Sri Lanka was that young people there were very entrepreneurial, but that they focus was almost entirely on the market opportunities in China and India rather than on the west. There is something there that South African's could learn from: don't forget to look toward the east!
china (4) | globalisation (3) | standard bank (1) | sri lanka (1) | competitiveness (1)
1000 days before 2010 World Cup
Posted by Grant Brewer on 23 Oct 2007 | Comments (0)
With a successful rugby World Cup campaign behind us, I caught sight of [this article][] on [Accelerate Cape Town][] highlighting that there are 1,000 days to go before the FIFA World Cup 2010 kicks off in South Africa -- that leaves very little time for preparations, although it seems from what I hear and read that things are on track.
The article's author, Linton Rensburg has a few interesting comments.
south africa (5) | world cup (3) | 2010 (2) | economics (1)
September 2007
Strategy is not a competitive advantage
Posted by Grant Brewer on 28 Sep 2007 | Comments (0)
Strategy is about choice. It’s about implementation. It’s about reality. It is about so much more than a document or a planning session. Strategy is worthless when it exists only as an idea, trapped in the intellect of its originator. Only the capacity to act creates value or competitive advantage. Strategy is about direction and a business concept that has focus, a purpose and has a clearly understood way of creating value. Most importantly, good strategy is about bringing the the ideas and the implementation together in an ecosystem that becomes far more valuable than the sum of its parts — an infinitely more difficult and costly for competitors to copy.
Essays | Strategy | Intelligence Strategym
implementation (10) | strategy (8) | execution (3) | value (1) | creating value (1) | complex systems (1) | competitive advantage (1) | choice (1)
August 2007
Why are products so complex?
Posted by Grant Brewer on 28 Aug 2007 | Comments (5)
Technology and progress were meant to make us more productive and make life easier. We were meant to be enjoying more leisure time, whilst technology helped us get the job done. We know that this idea was far from the truth, but there is still a nagging doubt that life (and the products and services we consume whilst living) have become more complex to deal with rather than less complex. One of the keys to overcoming the challenge is to stop trying to please everyone -- accept that some potential customers won't buy your product or service, and this takes courage. Good strategy often requires the courage to take such a stand. If you get your product portfolio right and get customers to understand your products you might be on the road to creating value through product leadership. And that might help you lower the cost of sales and lower support costs as you get the right product to the right consumer, just when they want it.
Essays | Strategy | Intelligence Strategym
design (3) | product strategy (2) | mtn (2) | apple (2) | telkom (1) | simplicity (1) | compexity (1) | bmw (1)
Brazil unveils strategy on crime
Posted by Grant Brewer on 21 Aug 2007 | Comments (0)
So Brazil has announced a strategy to reduce crime -- and what is South Africa doing? Nothing it seems -- believing that the current approach is doing just fine. It is worth understanding what exactly the Brazilian strategy is. Time to go and dig out an English summary of the plan.
south africa (5) | brazil (2) | crime (1)
China’s Trade in Africa Carries a Price Tag
Posted by Grant Brewer on 21 Aug 2007 | Comments (0)
The New York Times carries an interesting article on the affect of low cost Chinese imports on local manufacturing in Africa; and the conclusion is that factories in Africa have suffered. On so many levels Africa suffers at the hands of globalisation. In some senses, it is a penalty for not having sorted itself out earlier in the last century. The only upside is the investments that China is making in Africa, although these seems to be largely related to commodities. Trying to fix some of the issues in Africa is double hard today because of the open-ness of the global economy. As the article points out, it makes establishing a healthy, diverse economy difficult.
(Via The New York Times - New Power in Africa.)
south africa (5) | china (4) | globalisation (3) | imperialism (1) | trade (1) | africa (1)
Innovative strategy is more than passion
Posted by Grant Brewer on 08 Aug 2007 | Comments (0)
It is not unusual to see organisations that are struggling because they allow the passion and the belief in a new idea to masquerade as strategy. It is true that new ideas will almost always fail unless someone has the passion and the belief in the idea to stay with it through all the challenges. However, fresh ideas and people that are passionate about them are not uncommon, yet successful businesses built on these same ideas are a lot less common.
Innovation is more than ideas. Re-inventing an industry or a product category takes more than research and a fresh take on the business model. Managing innovation and implementing new business models is notoriously difficult -- regardless of whether you're an established business, a new business unit or a start up company. It is a common mistake to assume that sheer passion and belief will bring a strategy to life. New ideas need the passion and the belief -- they also need good strategy, leadership and implementation.
Essays | Strategy | Intelligence Strategym
implementation (10) | strategy (8) | leadership (7) | innovation (3) | management (3) | change (3) | project portfolio (1) | passion (1)
July 2007
Startups are hard work!
Posted by Grant Brewer on 03 Jul 2007 | Comments (2)
Staring up a new venture is hard work. It is hard work, regardless of whether you're establishing a real independent start up business, starting a some kind of non-profit organisation or starting a new line of business in an existing organisation. Everything just seems to take much more effort and take much longer than you originally think. I don't think I've ever met or read about a entrepreneur that commented with hindsight that turning their idea into reality turned out to be far easier than they had imagined! The fact that setting up a venture to commercialise your new idea is a lot more difficult than it seems at the outset means that entrepreneurship needs to go far beyond ideas. We've commented before that developing a strategy is difficult, but often more easily achieved than implementing it. This is entirely true of strategies focused on implementing new ideas - truly talented entrepreneurs have skills that extend past the ideas to encompass operational skills and a great deal of patience! The successful embrace these apparent conflicts and above all they develop the patience to trust that their vision will materialise piece by piece over time. Rome was indeed not built in a day.
Essays | Strategy | Intelligence Strategym
implementation (10) | start up (1) | entrepreneur (1) | shuttleworth (1)
May 2007
Cracking your next product implementation
Posted by Grant Brewer on 30 May 2007 | Comments (2)
The strategy development and the design of products or services has been completed. Now onto your next leadership challenge: surviving a successful product launch. Surviving is a good choice of words, because product or service development and the subsequent implementation can be a real challenge. Often, the organisations focus on the product design and development because this is seen to be the innovative and glamorous process. This is at the expense of the good product implementation, without which a good idea never sees the light of day.
Any project to implement a new product is going to be a challenge, will suffer changing requirements and hostile deadlines. Good managers know that this is a reality, yet understand how to manage the expectations and demands so that the collective effort results in a better product or services for the business and its customers.
Essays | Strategy | Intelligence Strategym
implementation (10) | product strategy (2) | operations (2) | product design (1) | high performance (1)
Is your strategy implementation failing?
Posted by Grant Brewer on 04 May 2007 | Comments (0)
The strategy is defined. You're a leader - your job is to develop the strategy for your team. Wrong! Your job is to deliver results. Coming up with strategies is often the easy part since it is frequently an intellectual activity. Choosing between alternative ideas and then managing their implementation is the hard part. Quite often, managers are not as well prepared for managing projects that cut across functions and business processes, where most of the project team are not under their direct management.
Essays | Strategy | Intelligence Strategym
implementation (10) | strategy (8) | leadership (7) | project management (1) | portfolio management (1)
March 2007
Preparing yourself for leadership
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Mar 2007 | Comments (1)
Last month outlined ideas to focus your first hundred days leading a new team, but what if you're not yet leading the team? What do you need to develop to make sure that you're going to be an effective and charismatic leader able to inspire commitment, demand discipline and achieve performance? Here are some of the characteristics or capabilities of people that make good leaders and managers. Be warned, great leadership does not follow a formula and there is as much art as there is science in developing as a leader.
Essays | Strategy | Intelligence Strategym
leadership (7) | career (1) | personal growth (1)
February 2007
The first hundred days
Posted by Grant Brewer on 07 Feb 2007 | Comments (0)
So you've been promoted, or taken on a new role or a fresh direction in your career. Maybe you've taken on the turnaround job of a lifetime. So the question is: where are you going to start, how are you going to leave your mark on your first one hundred days? A fresh start brings the opportunity to reshape and sweep the slate clean (or at least a little cleaner!). As a manager, you often need to be able to take a new situation and impart an immediate sense of leadership and focus on the team and their situation. Your thinking might incorporate these ideas.
Essays | Strategy | Intelligence Strategym
implementation (10) | leadership (7) | value chain (1) | turnaround (1)
December 2006
Guiding innovation
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Dec 2006 | Comments (1)
Every business thinks that is should innovate. It is usually not good enough simply to be an innovative organisation; your organisation also needs to be capable of managing the flow of new ideas and of nurturing these ideas to life. The key to creating an innovative organisation is to make innovation a part of the culture of the organisation. A key part of this cultural change is about creating the context in the workplace in which innovation is most likely to happen. Frequently this means creating an empowered, team oriented environment. Working alongside the culture is an effective management process that guides and nurtures ideas with all the artistry of a tight-rope-walker. It isn't going to be an easy walk, but the reward at the end of the line will be worth the effort.
Essays | Strategy | Intelligence Strategym
leadership (7) | innovation (3) | innovation management (1)
November 2006
Taking stock of your strategy
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Nov 2006 | Comments (0)
The start of a new year is always a good time to step back a little from your day to day leadership or management tasks and think. As a leader, it is valuable to make time to think, to learn and refresh your ideas. When it comes to strategy, time away from the business can add clarity to your ideas and ensure that you don't mistake the strategy process for the real outcome of organisational strategy. This is a common mistake and it leads to strategy ceremonies that serve the strategic planning process, but that are not focused on getting the organisation to focus around a specific purpose and direction.
Essays | Strategy | Intelligence Strategym
implementation (10) | leadership (7) | execution (3) | people (1)
September 2006
All business planning is not strategy
Posted by Grant Brewer on 28 Sep 2006 | Comments (0)
The idea of what is strategic or what comprises strategy is often confused. The terms themselves are so overused that they risk losing any meaning at all. What is often necessary in organisations is a sense of getting back to basics. It is often forgotten that strategy is about the "big picture"; it relates to the overall landscape or context within which an organisation exists. Strategy is not about the day to day tactics.
Essays | Strategy | Intelligence Strategym
implementation (10) | strategy (8) | leadership (7) | planning (1) | strategic conversation (1)
Delivering the Dream
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Sep 2006 | Comments (2)
Interesting to see that Tony Manning has published a new book: Delivering the Dream. Instead of the usual corporate strategy thing he "provides a blue print" for getting effective service delivery in the public sector. Should be an interesting read – Tony's books usually are. I'll give it a review after reading it.
strategy (8) | tony manning (1) | book (1)
August 2006
Technology enabling your strategy
Posted by Grant Brewer on 30 Aug 2006 | Comments (0)
Hopefully by now your organisation has a good strategy that is focused around real business purpose instead of focusing on a flakey “vision statement”. If you’re doing a good job of strategy, then strategy in your organisation will be more than a few days away at the off-site and will have become a consistent and constant conversation through out the year. So this might be good time to extend your thinking to how technology can enable your strategy. Recent columns have considered the role of people in strategy execution in terms of customer service or in terms of leadership and ethics. Technology won’t replace the people or decrease the need to have an people-centric strategy, but it is a useful enabler of strategy.
Essays | Technology | Strategy | Intelligence Strategym
implementation (10) | strategy (8) | technology traps (1) | technology (1) | enablement (1)
Tapping into your customer’s fears!
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Aug 2006 | Comments (3)
Having recently had a baby, I have had the opportunity to experience the whole range of consumer and experience marketing in the baby industry. And it teaches one a lot about marketing.
Essays | Strategy | Intelligence Strategym
retirement (1) | fear (1) | baby (1) | product experience (1) | democratic alliance (1) | marketing (1) | customer service (1) | life industry (1) | children (1)
July 2006
Bringing complex products to market
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Jul 2006 | Comments (0)
Bringing complex products to market is never easy, but there are some ideas that can increase your probability of success. Complex products don't always need to be high technology products, but can also include home appliances, software, or even professional or financial services. The history of business is littered with examples of companies that had a good idea, found some initial market traction but just couldn't break through into mainstream success.
June 2006
Lessons in reinventing the future
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Jun 2006 | Comments (0)
Strategy is about inventing the future. It's about creating your own destiny. Gary Hamel and CK Prahalad, two well known strategists and authors, talks of inventing the future in book Competing for the future. This is what leadership is really about - about setting a direction goes beyond reacting to the circumstances of today; it must create an exciting future that your people want to be a part of.
May 2006
The beginning & end of innovation
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 May 2006 | Comments (0)
The narrator of the Academy Award® winning film Seabiscuit makes an interesting statement at the start of the film when commenting on the invention of mass production and the motor car by Henry Ford. He says "it was the beginning and end of innovation – all at the same time". That the development of factory lines mass producing standardised cars could be seen as both the epitome of the division of labour and efficiency described by the famous economist Adam Smith, and also seen as the end of an era of innovative and highly skilled individual craftsmen raises some interesting parallels into the modern economy.
April 2006
Improving the quality of your business
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Apr 2006 | Comments (0)
A question to answer in all business strategies is: how is the organisation going to achieve a high level of quality in the business and how is it going to continue to improve the quality of what it does? This is a challenging question. Firstly, the meaning of quality is not clear. Business quality should include the quality of services or products, and the quality of business processes that create and deliver the product. In addition, the quality of the experience of dealing with the organisation and using its products or services should not be overlooked.
February 2006
Why is customer service so hard to get right?
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Feb 2006 | Comments (0)
Poor customer service seems endemic in some organisations no matter what their strategy says about their commitment to service quality and their desire to focus on customers.
Strategy is about truth and keeping the truth in strategies is as important as the actual message — there is not point in making your strategy so aspirational that it departs from the reality of your organisation and its customers. Both your customers and your staff will see through it. So don't include things in your strategy about the importance of the customer if your senior executives have never been out to see or meet with a customer; and don't put customer service in your strategy if you're not taking it seriously, measuring your performance and continually looking to improve it.
Customer service is only a competitive advantage when your organisation's people actually live it. Your customers need to feel it. Almost every organisation includes some idea about customer focus or the desire to achieve high levels of customer service quality in their strategy. What separates the great organisations from those at the back of the field is their ability to actually execute on this vision. This requires that they embed an ethos of service in their business — and there are not that many organisations that are able to get this right.
January 2006
Search will change how organisations use information
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Jan 2006 | Comments (0)
The way in which we create, access and search information has undergone a revolution in the past few years. The internet started the change in the nineties, and although the excite of the internet-era was real, it didn't prepare us for the innovation that would come in the mid-2000s with the innovation of various companies, and Google in particular. Google has been a tremendous success, both financially (if you were lucky enough to get in on the unusual auction IPO and owned some of the companies stock) and technologically.
Search has become the fastest developing and probably most important aspect of the internet when considering how we find and access information. It has been a major enabler of the success of other new communication channels such as weblogs, which themselves are having a profound impact on how information is created and published. It is possible to take technologies such as Google or weblogs for granted and it is useful to step back from our role as day to day users and consider what we can learn from their industry.
Ideas from the frontlines of Web 2.0
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Jan 2006 | Comments (0)
The internet has remained relevant since bursting on the commercial scene in the mid-nineties. The most recent evolution is driven by companies that collectively have become known as Web 2.0 companies. It is a loose definition, but exploring it provides a good understanding of the of future of internet applications and technology development.
November 2005
Technology can change your approach to marketing
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Nov 2005 | Comments (0)
A familiar approach to building brand equity is to think of it in terms of above the line advertising. This is the traditional, glamorous approach that we see on television, on billboards and in print magazines. However this is not the only way to create a powerful brand. Some organisations have no choice but to find alternative ways to build their brand, since building a brand through above the line advertising is an expensive business. An alternative way to building loyalty and awareness amongst your customers is to use a more viral approach – sometimes often thought of as guerrilla marketing.
October 2005
China - First impressions of the next global wave
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Oct 2005 | Comments (0)
All organisations need to understand their global context if they are to create successful and sustainable strategy given the unavoidable impact of globalisation in the modern economy. This isn't only applicable to private companies - public sector leaders also need to see themselves as developing a country that will be competitive on a global scale.
China is one country that will have a large role to play in the world of the future - partly because of its large economy (which although currently about 20% to 30% of the US economy is growing at more than twice the rate of most Western economies), partly because its large population creates an enormous domestic marketplace that will fuel this economic growth, and partly because it seems to be manufacturing a part of almost everything you buy these days. As a result, any strategy that responds to globalisation should be acknowledging the role of China. We need to understand China if we are to take the country seriously and develop realistic strategies that either defend against China's growing impact or, better, capitalise on and gain from China's growing influence.
September 2005
Strategy is about making choices
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Sep 2005 | Comments (0)
Strategy in organisations needs to be a continuous, living thing – a continuous strategic conversation. But strategy isn't a planning event or a weekend away with your executive colleagues. Strategy should be translated into everyday behaviour throughout the business. This is one the biggest challenges of strategic leadership. Any leader can hire consultants to define a realistic and effective strategy for their business, even though the leadership shouldn't rely on consultants to generate their strategy since defining and implementing strategy is why leaders are paid. But not every leader can get the business to internalise that strategy so that it permeates to the very culture of the business.
Strategy is implemented through people and people live the strategy through their behaviour. Behaviour is a function of values, beliefs and emotions, each of which should be specifically considered by management when implementing strategy. Connecting the strategy to your team members' and your customers' beliefs and values can significantly strengthen its impact. It will be more powerful because the strategy will appeal to the hearts and minds of the team and the strategy will be executed by passionate team members that are committed to its success. This is a far cry from strategy executed in a command and control style. This is why it is wise for organisations to make a big deal about their values – it is just a pity that so many organisations limit their value systems to a poster on the office wall.
August 2005
What happened to the information economy?
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Aug 2005 | Comments (0)
This year marks a e-business milestone that many people never thought would be reached – the tenth anniversary of Amazon. Other industry veterans such as Yahoo! are also demonstrating that they can survive for the long term – and survive profitably. When all these organisations burst onto the scene in the heady days of the nineties, there was a real sense that the economics of the internet enabled world were changing forever.
The recent surge in Google's share price making it the most valuable media organisation in the world would suggest that the speculative expectations of investors hasn't changed! Google's market capitalisation is about US$80bn making it more valuable than traditional media giants such as Time Warner.
But has the world, or at least the economic rules that govern it, changed at all over the last fifteen years? It has changed, but perhaps not in the ways that we all thought it would ten years ago. For example, the outsourcing of manufacturing and business services, in particular, to emerging markets is a direct outcome of the information age. And this trend hasn't yet run its full course since a very small share of the services market has been outsourced to date. Interestingly, Amazon has opened an outsourced development centred in South Africa. Browse za.amazon.com.
information (2) | google, (1) | economy, (1) | knowledge (1)
July 2005
The democratisation of information
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Jul 2005 | Comments (0)
In any competitive marketplace, organisations need to balance agility with reliability. Much has been written about the need to create competitive advantage out of the ability to adapt to change – a capability often described as agility. Agility goes hand in hand in concepts such as self-organising teams, flat organisational structures and radical innovation. The common understanding is that organisations able to take advantage of the future as it unfolds before them will be able to reach customers first, building brand strength and market share ahead of their competitors. However, there is an almost equal amount of management literature dealing with the need for organisations to perform reliably; based on the idea that raising quality will result in meeting or exceeding the promises made to the marketplace. Six Sigma quality initiatives are all about removing variation from business processes, and are aimed at creating sustainable competitive advantage based on product or service quality.
This strategic balancing act requires constant decisions, not only from senior management but in different ways from all employees. For example, many meetings are held to reach agreement on decisions that involve (even if almost subconsciously) weighing up whether to head in a new direction, or whether to get better at what is already being done.
information, (1) | culture (1) | freedom, (1) | knowledge, (1) | team (1)
June 2005
Better appraisals might raise your teams’ performance
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Jun 2005 | Comments (0)
I recently completed a performance review cycle and was left thinking about how much room for improvement there is in the processes we commonly follow in organisations when we try to evaluate people's performance, yet how important the results are to those being reviewed. Almost every organisation has performance reviews and their lack of success and lack of popularity is almost as universal.
Performance management seems to suffer from too much process. It is common to see organisations start off with a good process through which they manage the performance of employees and teams. It is also common to see those previously effective processes become increasingly bureaucratic and ineffective over time.
However, having no process at all might not be the best option either. With no process at all, you risk running into inconsistency and possible unfairness. Since as a leader it is your responsibility to establish a basis for selecting, developing and directing people in your organisation - the so called "talent" that became such a common way to describe people during the internet-era in the late nineties.
management (3) | performance, (1) | performance (1) | appraisal, (1) | team, (1) | employee, (1)
May 2005
Finding opportunity in globalisation
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 May 2005 | Comments (0)
Globalisation is here to stay. South Africa picked a challenging decade to start transforming itself after 1990 because it was a decade of increasing globalisation; and the effects of a more open world couldn't be avoided. This doesn't mean that the global playing field is level – it is frequently anything but level; just ask the Department of Trade & Industry! Traditional international leaders such as the US and Western Europe remain dominant and are able to ensure the trade rules often favour themselves. The challenges and failures of the world trade organisation talks is evidence that globalisation isn't fair and that the global community isn't yet mature enough to compromise effectively and provide a better life for all people in the world. The challenges are evident, but globalisation isn't going away anytime soon so there is nothing to gain by complaining about it.
strategy (8) | china (4) | globalisation, (1) | south (1) | africa, (1) | competitive (1)
April 2005
Designing strategy
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Apr 2005 | Comments (0)
That approach to strategy epitomised by Gary Hamel and CK Prahalad has often been referred to in this column. Their approach encourages organisations to reinvent their future rather than build their strategy purely as a response to the industry circumstances that they find themselves in. Sometimes this is easier said than done, but an interesting trend has emerged over recent years that links innovative strategy with innovative product or service design.
Apple Computer, Inc is one company that demonstrates this trend more than most: its innovative product design has assisted it to carve out a new set of markets for portable music players, computers and software. And they did this from a position of weakness since although Apple has always enjoyed a strong brand, they have very low market share. Sony is another example. They pioneered a design oriented strategy when they launched the Walkman in the early eighties, creating a new market that has grown significantly since then. In the service industry Virgin has embedded the design and position of their brand into every service they deliver. Boutique hotel chains provide another example of design oriented service delivery.
strategy (8) | design (3) | apple, (1)
March 2005
Creating high performance project teams for strategic change
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Mar 2005 | Comments (0)
Effective execution of strategic change remains a holy grail for all organisations. Since most strategic change needs to happen across business units, the challenges of creating and managing cross functional project teams are very real in most organisations. A previous column explored some of the benefits of operating your organisation in a project centric manner because it increases your ability to execute change and because it enables collaboration across functional business areas.
But working in a project based environment remains challenging because you typically have team members accountable to more than one reporting line, have to create and disband project teams on the fly, and still have to do the day job in your functional business area. So what can you do to make working in this environment more successful?
February 2005
Managing the strategic change portfolio
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Feb 2005 | Comments (0)
It is hard to think of an organisation today that isn't going through some kind of strategic change – whether driven by poor performance that needs to be fixed or whether driven by the desire to increase its advantage over competitors. Ideas to improve strategic vision and become more effective at strategy execution have been previously discussed in this column.
An often forgotten aspect of strategy execution is worth exploring after your organisation got momentum behind a positive strategic direction. And that is developing a project centric organisation.
What is a project centric organisation? It is an organisation that has the ability to coordinate effectively a portfolio of projects grouped into programs in order to implement strategic change. That sounds theoretical - so what does it really mean?
change (3) | strategic (1) | managing (1) | project (1) | portfolio, (1) | projects, (1)