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.

management (3) | information (2) | transparency (1) | access to information (1) | freedom (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.

social networking (1) | enterprise 2.0 (1) | linkedin (1) | collaboration (1) | information management (1) | facebook (1)

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.

implementation (10) | strategy (8) | execution (3) | value (1) | creating value (1) | complex systems (1) | competitive advantage (1) | choice (1)

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.

design (3) | product strategy (2) | mtn (2) | apple (2) | telkom (1) | simplicity (1) | compexity (1) | bmw (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.

implementation (10) | strategy (8) | leadership (7) | innovation (3) | management (3) | change (3) | project portfolio (1) | passion (1)

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.

implementation (10) | start up (1) | entrepreneur (1) | shuttleworth (1)

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.

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.

implementation (10) | strategy (8) | leadership (7) | project management (1) | portfolio management (1)

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.

leadership (7) | career (1) | personal growth (1)

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.

implementation (10) | leadership (7) | value chain (1) | turnaround (1)

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.

leadership (7) | innovation (3) | innovation management (1)

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.

implementation (10) | leadership (7) | execution (3) | people (1)

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.

implementation (10) | strategy (8) | leadership (7) | planning (1) | strategic conversation (1)

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.

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.

retirement (1) | fear (1) | baby (1) | product experience (1) | democratic alliance (1) | marketing (1) | customer service (1) | life industry (1) | children (1)