Sunday, July 26, 2009

energy

There's been much debate and blogging time being spent on the need for political action to prevent global warming but I wonder how much positive impact politicians can make in this area. It's highly likely that politics can slow down the transition to "clean" energy (today's clean energy will be tomorrow's pollutants as we run out of silicon, lithium and other essential ingredients). However, can legislation really speed up the natural progression to this new energy world? Maybe the world would transition quicker if the world's politicians managed to negotiate a policy framework that priced carbon dioxide effectively but when in history have politicians been able to legislate a market price?

The articles referenced at this blog http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/2009/07/monumental-failing.html (a great consolidator of information by the way) demonstrate my point. It is unrealistic to think that politicians will create a world wide policy framework that will abate the affects of global warming. However, it is less unrealistic to think that the natural reduction in the cost of renewables will drive a far quicker transition through market forces than any policy ever could. Energy is the largest industry in the world and the opportunity to get a slice of this industry into the future means that there will be millions of people world wide trying to invent product. Barriers to entry were massive while oil and coal dominated the landscape, but now, these barriers have been lowered (mainly by the success of renewables supported by the focus on issues such as global warming and peak oil). New players will emerge while the encumbents scramble to change their business models and resist the transition as much as possible. These encumbents are powerful, but political incompetence may actually be hindering them even while their lobbying efforts continue to have a significant effect.

In fact, Alan Kohler's article shows how political incompetence could actually assist more than political competence. The strain that the uncertainty caused by a garbled CO2 policy has put on the coal industry is in fact having the same effect as a carbon price would. Coal fired plants are now being viewed as expensive due to their uncertain future. This will drive investment in solutions and because the coal industry is finally being hindered in competing for these solutions, less money will be wasted on the fanciful idea of carbon capture.

Thursday, July 09, 2009

proposal writing

It's been a bad week for mbh this week. We've missed a number of proposals we'd submitted and with staff either sick or on leave, it's taken all our experience in prioritisation and workload management to make sure we keep supporting our clients to the same extremely high standard they've come to expect. Still for every bad week there tends to be a good one so after a couple of days of reflection, I'm now in the lessons learnt phase of the week. I always tend to learn more from things that go wrong than right.

This week's lessons are around proposal writing and having just finished a proposal 15 minutes ago ( and having committed to maintaining this blog) I thought I'd sign in and write down some random thoughts. After finishing the proposal, I asked my partner to have a read and give me her thoughts. Thankfully, she has far superior intellect than me and her communications degree certainly assists in challenging my arguments. Her comment this time related to the use of the term "hot" when referencing a product that is doing well at the moment. We have a four hour project planning course that takes people through a crash course in critical path analysis and network crashing. This course is very popular at the moment and I referenced this in the proposal as a "hot" product. My partner's challenge was "is this formal enough for a proposal" and my response at the moment is yes for when you are competing in bloody red ocean (which we are when it comes to PM training), one has to differentiate yourself as much as possible. However, as always, the doubts creep in.

Thoughts please, is using the term "hot product" too informal for a business proposal?

Wednesday, July 08, 2009

strategy execution

Over the years, this blog has been poorly maintained. One of the frustrating things is feeling constrained in being able to write the things I verbally comment on during the day. I'm a fairly argumentative person and have strong and passionate views. These views can land you in hot water if you don't think them through. When speaking, there's always the feedback loop from the listener in the form of them replying but also in terms of their body language that assists me to determine if I'm going too far. On the web, through a blog, this is much different. However, there is the opportunity to reach a far wider audience and obtain some validation or repudiation on thoughts and ideas. So, I am determined to make another attempt at regular blogging. On this occasion, my blogs will be less researchy "white papers" and more just random thoughts and observations about what happened during the day.

One of the more peculiar terms I've observed over the years is the management consultant's term "strategy execution". There's an American based management consultancy that differentiates their business via the tag line "strategy execution" and yet when you look at their services, they're much more about strategy formulation than strategy execution. To me, the only thing that "executes" strategy is the implementation of portfolios of projects aligned to that strategy with its associated change and resulting benefits based on the shareholder value created. It's not that I think their service offering wouldn't add value, its just that their whole proposition around strategy execution seems weird to me and undermines my trust in them actually knowing what makes a business hum.

Any thoughts?