What role do the executive have in an organisation?

Today I read one of the more disturbing articles about Apple and its manufacturing processes in China. It was from the New York Times and has been linked on many other sites. The scariest thing about this article is the blasé way in which a senior Apple executive referenced the working conditions in one of the manufacturing centres in China. I've never been one for conspiracy theories and I've always defended an organisations right to set up shop wherever they believe value is but I think this article is the classic demonstration of how capitalism without regulation can be completely screwed up.

Now I created mbh in 1999 with the full passion of a capitalist working within democratic frameworks that provide freedom of thought with associated stability of government. And yet, I can't help feel that all those who rage against the machine and fight for workers rights/regulation are being proven right but this article. This is the classic modern day version of chemical companies dumping toxic waste down river systems in the 19th century leading to the modern day FPA regulation environments.

And yet, I can't help thinking that this is an opportunity for Apple's competitors. Surely people would shy away from Apple's products if they new that staff were treated in such an inhumane manner. Perhaps their competitors can't differentiate because they are no different?

As a managing director and owner of a small company that has done reasonably well, I can't understand the logic of this philosophy against the human race. Within our company people are to be respected. Criticised constructively when they say something in error, challenged to achieve but never to be received as anything other than an equal in the group.

I was on a flight on the weekend from Melbourne to Sydney. Due to flight cancellations and my premium loyalty qualification with the airline I was upgraded to business class. Now the flight is only of 1 hour duration so why there needs to be a class differentiation I have no idea but here I was in business class. The main reason I have always used this airline is that as apposed to their competition, they've never gone in for the elitist garbage that makes up the class system on planes. All people were treated equal and entertained. This flight had 8 people in business class and about 170 in economy. These 170 were made to feel as inferior as possible. AND, sitting in business class, the air steward was trying so hard to treat us like royalty that she stood next to me for at least 1 minute waiting for the person sitting next to me to notice her waiting to deliver her meal. Eventually, I couldn't handle it any longer and tapped the persons shoulder and waved her to the fear stricken steward. WHAT IS GOING ON!!!

Class driven societies and a lack of respect for other human beings seems counter productive to me. It impacts negatively on all private organsations as the few bad apples (pun intended) make it more expensive for the rest of us to do businesses. If the worker could trust the boss to respect them and not rip them off we'd all be able to do business far cheaper than we do today (even though all workers would be paid more). The logic for this is that the burden of compliance and the overhead of union negotiations would be eliminated. Kind of like collaborative contracting where everyone is in it together so you may as well make it work....for everyone.

The role of the executive in a modern capitalist organisation operating in a democratic country has to change to one that includes social responsibility and the requirement that respect is shown to all employees no matter what their background. How you affect this change is depressingly beyond my comprehension.

Distributed information systems

A week after posting on my UniPhi blog about capturing programme management data through the aggregation of distributed project data entered by project managers, an article about distributed energy and communication comes online at my preferred energy blog http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/2012/01/jeremy-rifkins-third-industrial.html. This guys positive views on the growth and potential of a third industrial revolution are very refreshing. There are several risks to this revolution coming to fruition. One of which is corporations lack of awareness of the distributed communication possible through web based platforms.

Organisations that realise the power of distributed data capture will definitely be able to invest in systems and processes that generate significant competitive advantage. The primary advantage is the ability to know when something goes wrong (or right) the moment it does so. Through the power of Twitter it was possible for any person with internet access anywhere in the world to know that the US were engaging with Osama bin Laden as it was happening. Although at first it was unknown who it was they were attacking, the fact that hundreds of millions of people could have known about a top secret mission as it was happening is an incredible example of distributed information systems. Suddenly, managing a multi-national business with 50,000 employees doesn't seem too difficult, and yet all the example companies I have worked with that fit the 50k plus definition would struggle to generate real time financial, customer and product related information. 

Most organisations still track their progress towards their vision through centralised systems. The main reason for this is the perceived need for security when all security is only as strong as the employee who wants to keep his or her password a secret (or even accidently release this information through the need of tracking the ever growing number of usernames and passwords). It seems that large IT business units pride themselves on restricting the implementation of a distributed data capture model. Actually, it seems large IT business units pride themselves on being as value destroying as possible rather than enabling the true power of software to transform the way businesses function.

These business units are supported by the product development of traditional enterprise software houses producing thick client software with complicated user interfaces that only the specialist business analyst, accountant or marketing guru can master.

Why is Oracle, SAP, Sun and others still insisting on developing centralised thick client financial systems? I know of one project manager that knows the true financial position of their project as at 31st of October 2011! He thinks they may have under invoiced $10m but isn't sure because he has to wait for the head office processes to catch up with where his multi billion dollar programme that crosses multiple countries and states is at. He is trying to catch up through the use of an excel shadow system. Good luck!

Funding versus investing decisions

One of the more annoying examples of mismanagement is decision makers insistence of mixing funding decisions with investing decisions. This seriously erroneous practice is endemic throughout many organisations but festers most prominently in government. Take this article published in the Sydney Morning Herald . Aside from it being an hilarious example of an investment decision being woefully inadequate to meet the policy objective, the retort made by the leader of the opposition is even more humerous. How is retraining laid off employees and supporting business innovation a mutually exclusive decision to the original investment decision of providing a subsidy for relocation to regional areas? I guess one could hope that the statement to "use the money" from the axed programme could be a misquote but I doubt it.

The point here is not whether any of these investment decisions actually helps the policy objective of spreading the population across the state of NSW but that the investments described are not mutually exclusive and hence should be invested in based off their own merit and funded accordingly. By making the statement that you would scrap one investment so you can invest in another you are making the erroneous assumption that using the money saved from one justifies the investment in another. What about just not spending the money at all? The fact that you have money to spend is not an argument to spend it. Each investment should have its business case argued for, not subsidised by the fact that you're not going to spend the money on something equally moronic.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/11/starling-flock/

I know this video has gone viral but I had to add it here using the weird science link for future reference. It's a great example of the complexity article http://mbhconsulting.blogspot.com/2006/09/project-management-and-complexity.htmlI referenced here http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/

Tax reform (Part 2)

The smh yesterday had an article written by Michael Pascoe on the pending fiscal doom of Australia.

The demographic shock of the retiring baby boomer horde, the soaring health inflation rate, the urgent need to lift our education investment to at least the OECD average and bringing our transport infrastructure up to speed all require someone to pay for them. And, no, there actually isn't a Hockeynomics Magic Pudding that will provide for everything by cutting back on a few existing government programs.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/a-surplus-could-do-australia-more-harm-than-good-20111001-1l2q1.html#ixzz1ZgOXkRW8

What is curious about this article is the lack of inclusion of Australia's super wealth in the whole doom and gloom. Australia currently has one of the largest pools of superannuation in the world with $1.34 Trillion according to APRA. I thought this money was for people's retirement income. When you look at the nitty gritty detail of pensions and standards of living it becomes very complex. For some reason, people are retiring in Australia at 57 or 58 but have very small super funds to do so. These people won't qualify for the pension until they're 65 so why are they doing this?

However, a macro policy debate has to be based off macro data and if you think that this $1.34 Trillion barely existed 30 years ago and is expanding every year then surely some of the fiscal strain of the baby boomers is removed. It seems however that the debate never considers that an eventual draw down on this lump sum is a favourable thing whereas my view would be this was the whole reason for it. As more and more baby boomers retire, more and more of them will start to draw down on their super and with less work force adding to the number, the total value will decline. Any decline in the value of super through this process is a direct positive to the fiscal situation which would have made up this gap if the money didn't exist.

The total paid in pensions in 2011 is $40.7bn. So, it would be possible to pay this amount out every year for 30 years and still have money left in the kitty even if no further payments were made into super and no income from that super was obtained. This would take us up to 2041. The fact that more super contributions are going to be made and that income will be made (hopefully) on the money invested means that it is theoretically possible to pay the current pension out of super reserves for the next 50 years. The pension however, is expected to double over this time period. So we could theoretically maintain the current level provided by the government and draw down the rest through super. 

Unfortunately, superannuation has not provided the answer as this $1.34 Trillion is not evenly distributed across the population (check out the median versus mean in this publication by the ABS) and is a large contributor to what will become a worsening Gini Coefficient unless of course the government in 20 years time decides to tax this pot of gold and re-distribute it to those who did not accumulate super from those who did. Hmmm sounds like there is a magic pudding for the offering.

Tax reform

Tax reform is THE topic in business and economics conversation at the moment. Europe is going through hell trying to re-balance various countries balance sheets, the US has blown out its budget trying to keep the economy from dying a dramatic death and now seems determined on using fiscal austerity to reverse this attempt as all the stimulus did was create stagnation (seems like hell is better than purgatory). Here in Australia, having a strong fiscal balance sheet and very little economic problems we've been inventing them and not wanting to be left out have created our own tax summit to be held this week in the lovely Canberra.

As per my previous post, I've been impressed with the amount of dodgy facts that have been presented by a variety of sources for each element of the tax and spend reviews that are busily being performed. Probably the highest profile of these is Warren Buffet's cry that the rich should be taxed more and that it is an outrage that he pays less tax than the average salary earner. Now, I don't have much issue with the possibility that the rich should potentially pay more tax. The Gini Coefficient in the US has been getting worse and worse over the past 40 years  and tax redistribution is the best way to make this trend decline. However, one of the knight in shining armour's claims is that he pays less tax than the average salary earner. He says he paid only 17.5% on his income last year. Is this true?

The answer is no and he must know this. His income comes from investment. Personal income from investment whether it be dividends or capital gains in America is taxed at 15%. However, this income is derived from the income generated by the investments made. These investments (mostly in companies) pay their own tax and hence their value is reduced by the taxes paid. If (as the Economist magazine has recommended) company tax was abolished then the value of all shares would rise significantly. Hence, Mr Buffets income would rise significantly. This means his current income is reduced by the taxes paid by the companies he invests in. As the company rate is 35%, you could add this to the 15% already paid and you would be closer to the true tax rate of Mr Buffet; that of 50%.

What is interesting is that while this obvious error is pointed out in this Forbes article, confusion then reigns in the comments and in his attempt to correct errors that aren't errors. More interestingly still is a different article that is trying to argue against Mr Buffet assertions to tax the rich more but accepts his statement of 17% and argues against the % on his receptionist/secretaries income (a trivial argument, who cares if its 31% or 29% it is still higher than 17). If an article trying to argue against the assertion misses the most obvious point then how are people ever going to know the real facts and lobby politically for the right tax outcomes? What chances for a decent outcome in Australia this week at the tax "forum"?

Quantitative decision making, stakeholder influence and gut feel

For a long time now I've pushed the benefits of modelling to aid in decision making. It was never believed that modelling would result in 100% accuracy and that decision makers would not need to make decisions based off judgement or gut feel, just that a well modelled business case would make this judgement a more informed one and hence more likely to be the correct one. Even with the push for long term and triple bottom line analysis, it was always understood that this analysis played a supportive role.

This passion for investment analysis has led to our business case training course being delivered to over 1,000 attendees since 1999. However, of late, I have found that facts are ever increasingly hard to come by. The internet and enterprise search allows for verification of statements in a second. Using these tools to verify statements made in business cases invariably leads to the identification of falsehoods rather than the verification of facts.

I still believe that a well modelled and fact based business case can greatly improve the performance of both business and government, I am being more and more disillusioned with the use of erroneous facts and robust yet erroneous business cases being used to justify what is essentially a gut feel decision (i.e. make the facts bend to the decision that's already made rather than explore the options and decide after the analysis is presented).

What is also disappointing is the periodicals and people who are using this "make the facts meet the story" method in justifying their statements. In the next few blog entries I'll highlight some of the more recent blatant factual errors used to justify some policy or business decision making reason. Included in these will be statements made by Sage of Omaha - Mr Buffet, the Economist, Michael Pascoe of the SMH and some You Tube videos I've watched recently. Hopefully this will help clear the head and get the frustration out of my system.

Cross functional teams

This past month has been very reflective for me. I have met many of my old colleagues from previous consulting projects going way back to the mid 90s. What has been interesting has been the observation that the battles we were fighting then are the same now. I would have thought that basics like the need for cross functional project teams working on a prioritised set of investments that are each going to deliver competitive advantage into the future would be mainstream and yet I still am frequently having to coerce and influence organisations into adopting this philosophy.

It was, therefore, very refreshing to read the article in last week's economist on Pixar. For those of you who have attended one of our training courses you will know that we are big fans of Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Renault and Nissan. Carlos is a genius in leading large disparate organisations to deliver a common vision of being the most profitable car company in the world. He turned both organisations around in the mid to late 90s and has been running both organisations since mid this decade, achieving what other car alliances and mergers have never been able to achieve....shareholder value. The reason I mention this in relation to the Pixar article is that it describes how Pixar used the continuous improvement principles of Toyota to generate constant and never ending improvements to their animated films. This shows how looking at high performing industry's in an innovative way and adopting their best management practices can provide real competitive advantage. The other reason Carlos came to mind when reading the article was because it talks about how Pixar manages to integrate the various creative talents of its 1,200 strong workforce enabling them to work across portfolios and comment and improve works that they are not directly involved in. This is a movie production house's version of cross functional teams. Creative design teams aren't besotted with their own projects but can be called upon to critique and assist other projects that are running in parallel. A rare thing in this industry. So once again, cross functional communication, integration and a common vision creates enormous value for in this case Disney and its shareholders (sounds like a management philosophy I like to peddle).

Prioritisation the impossible dream.

A rather rueful thought has befallen me after a hectic week following up on UniPhi leads from our recently completed road show. One of the big new features in version 5 is the ability to build a tailored made prioritisation framework and then apply this framework to each project in the various portfolios. Working with clients on this concept has made me realise that this is probably the most valuable piece of consulting we provide. It seems so simple and obvious a thing to do when compiling these frameworks that I often wonder where the IP is in what we are selling and yet working with senior executives and selling the benefits of a firm prioritisation framework that is rigidly adhered to is extremely difficult.

The benefits of these frameworks are massive and in my opinion, it is better to prioritise incorrectly than not to prioritise at all. Many organisations that are failing to generate competitive advantage aren't failing due to a lack of ideas or a lack of activity but are failing because of too many ideas and too many activities. Prioritising investments and actually delivering on the top 10 - 20 is bound to be more beneficial than trying to do all 100 and not delivering any.

It is with interest that I correlate this type of thing to organisations that announce random headcount reductions that are neatly rounded to the closest thousand or hundred but can never articulate where the chop is going to be. They usually need to send out "razor gangs" to crawl each silo'd department and ask them what they can do to chop heads. Of course, if they had a prioritised portfolio of investments, a considerable number of heads could be saved by killing low priority projects that are probably no longer viable in the changed environment. This should be a very quick and easy exercise if the organisation has an enterprise portfolio and project management tool that will give them the current status of the prioritised list. Add the killing of these projects to the rationalisation or divestment of businesses that are no longer making money should bring about real savings in a challenging environment and ensure that projects that still will deliver competitive advantage remain. It's the investments you make in a downturn that will enable you to print money in the upturn (just ask the sage of Omaha).

Readers of this blog would be able to see previous articles on stage gate financing and the like to see how best to apply prioritisation frameworks but in a week where this product has come to the fore yet again, I thought it was time to remind myself as well as those who may stumble across our work...PLEASE PRIORITISE!

Demand side solutions in government

We've been working with the South Australian Government for 4 years now on developing capability maturity in business case creation and investment justification. One of the more interesting observations of this work is that most solutions identified to solve problems are supply side solutions (i.e. more capacity or more functionality). Rarely are ideas generated that look to influence demand for services.

This observation (which to some may be trivial and even obvious) was further compounded the other day when I was driving my two children to school. My kids go to school 15 minutes from our house (thankfully driving against traffic). Even though it is only 15 minutes it is still a draining trip through and across the mass of cars moving their way into the city. As I sat at the traffic lights looking at this mass of traffic all I could think of was what a waste of time. Then it occurred to me that a colleague at work battles this traffic even though it would be possible to work from home. So this wandering thought pattern led me one question; why do we always go for supply side solutions. I'm sure most of the people sitting in that traffic curse the government for not making the M5 tunnel four lanes each way and I'm equally sure the people on the north short going across the spit bridge curse the single lane bridge but surely part of the solution is reduce demand in peak hours traffic. Of course easier said than done but this difficulty is the reason why demand side solutions have so much potential; the solutions have to be innovative and innovations = value.

So, from now on, as a management consultancy that targets the real asset investment market, we'll be exploring demand side solutions and seeing of we can't find something a little bit different from the norm...watch this space.

lack of corporate transparency creates perverse incentives

The present hot topic for everyone is how best to curb the corporate and financial excesses and risky behaviour that lead most of the world's economies into the worst recession since the Great Depression. However, the '800 pound gorilla' in the room that this debate neglects is the lack of transparency that senior executives have over their operations and initiatives, and the perverse incentives this creates.

In the English-speaking world, key policymakers and the public at large have taken up the mantle of improving corporate governance, more specifically limiting corporate remuneration, as a way to check senior executives' and bankers' appetite for risky, even illegal, short-term profit maximising that can inject dangerous volatility into financial systems and markets.

In Australia, APRA recently proposed new executive compensation guidelines, and the ASX Corporate Governance Council is considering issuing guidelines that would require ASX-listed companies to maintain records of their briefings with analysts, provide advance notice and make them more widely accessible to provide for the more equal and fair dissemination of information.

In the UK, a recently published government-commissioned report on corporate governance by Morgan Stanley senior adviser David Walker recommends that banker pay be awarded on a long-term basis and would subject banker bonus payments to close public scrutiny. In the US, there is a compensation 'czar' tasked by the US Treasury to reign in senior executive compensation at companies that received government bailout funds.

I can see and appreciate the logic in addressing the perverse incentives that currently reside within executive and banker compensation structures. But, this is only one side of the equation. The other side involves the fact that senior executives within many organisations can not clearly and accurately identify, measure, and manage their internal costs and value-creation activities.

Unfortunately, in many instances, senior management is making important strategic and investment decisions based on experience, 'gut feels', and/or short-term, known measures, such stock price and personal compensation targets - which in the US, especially, normally consists of stock and option grants. Arguably, this inability to identify, measure and manage organisational costs and benefits encourages senior management to focus more on more short-term, tangible performance metrics (i.e., personal remuneration targets) at the expense of longer-term initiatives whose benefits are at best uncertain.

At mbh, we regularly provide technology solutions and consulting services to organisations that lack the internal processes and technology for clear assessment of operational costs and the value potential of initiatives. We developed our web-based, enterprise project portfolio management software solution, UniPhi, to address what we see as an alarming lack of operational and strategic transparency within most organisations.

We believe that any organisation with 100 or more people should adopt an enterprise-level project portfolio management system to provide greater transparency of operational costs and the initiatives most likely to add, or destroy, value. By equipping senior executives with this knowledge, they will be more inclined to behave in the interests of the organisation, because they'll have a better understanding of what is really happening and can take appropriate steps.

In addition, this greater transparency allows for better accountability, since the information resides within the project portfolio management system for the entire organisation to see. This should dramatically lessen management's incentives to engage in short-term, self-serving, and possibly illegal, activities, since the possibility of disclosure is heightened.

A project portfolio management system also assists the Board of Directors in carrying out their oversight duties, given they will have a much better grasp of what is occurring within an organisation at the strategic and operational levels. This system also assists in accurate public financial reporting, since everyone across the organisation will be working from the same set of financial data.

For many organisations, this increased transparency may fell like an uncomfortable 'shock' to the system. However, it is much more preferable than having politicians manage your organisation after some catastophe. Just ask Bank of America, who is paying back its bailout funds early, because it believes the US Treasury's executive compensation restrictions prevent it from attracting a qualified successor to its outgoing CEO.

Enterprise project portfolio management may not be the proverbial 'silver bullet' for the corporate governance problem, but it definitely enhances internal corporate transparency, and thus accountability, which is a step in the right direction.

banks and managers as agents for owners

It's going to be a very interesting 12 months in relation to bank profits. The profit made by Goldman Sachs and the quick return of smugness in the industry is a fascinating example of arrogance that completely destroys self reflection. I'm hoping the jury is still out and that someone within the industry will pull the various egos in a room, bang their heads together and then some sense ensues. The banks have generated such a phenomenal amount of destruction to market based capitalism it is one of life's great examples in arrogance in ignorance. The biggest challenge to market based capitalism for me is the challenge that banks bonuses paid to employees has proven beyond a doubt the importance of owner based management. In fact Adam Smith asserted that self interest will be guided by the invisible hand to generate public good only if the owner is also the manager. Of course, the leverage of the manager being an agent for the owner is crucial to modern market economies but the abuse of this agency power by bank employees has thrown all the benefits of this leverage to the wind.

So, lets see how the public reacts to this new arrogance of the banks that has occured so soon after these same bankers were on their knees begging the public for help.

doing business in developing countries

The latest issue in China with Mr Hu being arrested on "espionage" charges has generated a number of thoughts for me. Since 2006 I have been working with various people in the Australian cattle industry to generate markets for our marvellous cattle genetics and breeding knowledge. The important note here as background information (for blogs to be written later) is that the product is knowledge. To date, the success has been in the sale of physical seed stock both to China in the form of dairy seed stock and Russia in the form of beef seed stock. To call it a success is to have a very low hurdle for success but is made on the basis of the difficulties in opening up new markets in developing countries with more complex political systems.

I'm not sure about other countries but I have first hand experience of the two countries mentioned; China and Russia. These two countries are incredibly hard places to do business. The rules are so different to Australia that Australian businessmen can never confidently do business in these countries and are in constant peril of selling their souls to get the job done (as an example, IKEA has finally decided that it's best to stop investing in Russia....for now http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/blog/europeinsight/archives/2009/06/ikea_turns_sour.html).

The contradiction with all this is that both China and Russia are such beautiful countries and in terms of business have so much potential. I presented to the Russian Agricultural Minister in 2006 a proposal for Australia to export USD300m worth of Beef seedstock and USD300m worth of knowledge and infrastructure development. The research and planning that went into this proposal was massive and the strategy was snapped up by the Russian government. Within 3 months they had ordered massive amounts of seedstock breeders from Britain! Fortunately an outbreak of foot and mouth in Britain killed the deal, but why did Russia take our proposal and run to Britain with it. Since this time, I have seen versions of my proposal (even word for word) in a variety of different Russian business proposals to the Ministry for funding. However, support in Australia for doing business in Russia (and more particularly, on selling our cattle IP) is difficult to obtain. Elders have sold some shipments to Russia since my proposal but the on-sell of services hasn't occurred and the numbers of cattle are far short of what they could be. I do know that Rural Solutions in Adelaide are working on some great proposals for the Russian regions but again, little has come of it in terms of hard core investment by the Russian government.

The story is little different in China. The Australian beef cattle industry has been battling for years to get some traction in developing China's beef production with not a single sale to show for it. My experience and conversations I've had with others has given me first hand anecdotes of the frustrations businesses seem to have in operating in these countries. In Russia, corruption seems to significantly reduce the amount of investment and hence the growth that's possible. In China, the ever present oversight of government control makes it extremly difficult to utilise traditional marketing practices of differentiation and segmentation to make headway. It's more about connections and alignment to the current central plan. And yet, China continues to boom and with their switch from exports to internal infrastructure investment, looks like continuing to boom.

It seems that most people think that establishing operations in these great and populace countries is just too hard, and my suspicion is that the Hu case is only going to make this perception more entrenched, much to the disadvantage of all the world over.

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.

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?

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?

what happens when a company achieves its vision?

One of the interesting things that is commented on in change management texts and can be observed as a frequent phenomena for nearly every company that has ever succeeded is the plateau and slow decline that occurs once they have achieved what it was that they originally set out to achieve. This diagram below best illustrates what I'm talking about:

This graph demonstrates the linear growth trajectory of a successful start-up. However, once the initial vision has been reached and the product range that supported that vision is no longer unique, success plateau's and finally starts to fall. During this contraction phase, a serious of wake-up spikes occur where management reacts to the fall and tries new strategies to re-invigorate the company. However, the loss of an end state (see previous post) means that none of these periods last very long and are always followed by an even sharper fall. Finally, pending doom either results in bankruptcy and death or the re-emergence through a new vision and new mind-set of the organisation. Of course, there are many permutations in how these events take place, but in each permutation the overriding problem of a loss in ends state or vision driving failure. Often it is hard for the original successful organisation to let go of its sacred cows. These are, after all, the things that made them successful in the first place. But, ultimately, what will make the company grow again is an organisation the barely resembles the original at all. Some examples of this may help:

Having nearly died at the end of the 90s, IBM re-invigorated itself to the point where it no longer manufactures computers and makes nearly all its revenue from IT services and software(who would have thought that in the 80s).

Apple went through a tortuous period during the 90s and nearly went out of existence before its original founder created a new vision for the company centred around sleek design that has led to the iPod, iPhone and even a re-emergence of its original Mac product.

Yahoo is currently going through a period of chaos centred around identity (will it re-emerge or die)?

General Motors is representative of the automotive industry in general but as been slower to respond. It is going through a period of chaos centred around a lack of vision now that its big is beautiful vision has been cast aside by society. Will it re-emerge along with the automotive into the new world of electric powered automobiles. There's no doubt in my mind that this is the vision to aspire to in the automotive industry and several organisations have taken up the challenge of meeting this all electric vision (e.g. Better Place, Nissan etc). Progress has been remarkably rapid due to their commitment to a vision they know is real.

What can we learn from this? The truth is that it is difficult to move a big ship once its course has been set and if you don't set a new destination once you reach the original one, you will fail. However, methodologies and tools to do this re-alignment are few on the ground. We have some ideas but are yet to really test them in the marketplace. Any thoughts?

examples of problems that need an end state

What I love about mbh and my role in the company is that we often get involved in developing cases for companies and governments to invest in potential solutions. What is frustrating, as per my previous post, is the lack of an overall guiding goal or end state to weigh up the worth of these investments. There are many large problems facing society that are being commented on in the mainstream press. What is often lacking from these commentaries is the end state or new world that we are trying to achieve.

The two main examples where we have been involved lately or where I have taken a personal interest is the current water and energy problems around the world. While both problems are world problems, their end state scenarios and solutions to reach said end states differ from region to region. At the moment, global warming and peak oil are being blamed for high energy prices and for problems countries are having with supplies of water. The amount of data in the marketplace on these two causes of problems (i.e. global warming and peak oil) is huge. As an example, check out this awesome website on energy http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/. Not only are the blog entries great, there are dozens of links to excellent and reputable websites for further information. It would be possible to write a business case on a variety of investment opportunities from the date linked within 6 degrees of separation from this one site. The problem would be distilling so much information.

It is almost impossible to distill information and analyse options if we don't know the end state of what it is we're proposing. However, once you put a stake in the ground, or define an end state, the options for investing are reduced to those that facilitate achieving the end state. As an example, this link to a video of a school friend of mine talks about a stake in the ground on CO2 emissions http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbwxF47x5ss. What Saul does is suggest an end state stabilisation of CO2 and then discusses how much demand needs to be reduced by as one option to achieving this end state CO2 figure.

I'd be interested to know societies expectations on these matters. It would certainly lead to better investment decisions if we debated what goal we were aiming for. Two answers I'd like are around water supply and energy use:

1. Is Sydney and most other Australian cities happy with permanent water restrictions or do we feel an end state of watering our concrete whenever we feel like it should be the goal or is it somewhere in between?
   
2. Is the industrialised world satisfied with Saul's reduction in consumption to meet global warming or the fact that we're going to lose various islands, flood parts of every coastal town in the world and have far more frequently dramatic weather events ok with is? Or again, is it somewhere in between and if so, what?
   

I know in a democracy that a definitive answer to these questions is impossible but gleanings as to general collective preferences would make government investment decision making a whole lot easier.

ramblings on investment decision making

I've been doing a lot of things around investment decision making lately. Reviewing business cases, teaching people how to complete feasibility analysis and compile business cases, actually compiling business cases for clients and assisting project teams to compile business cases. I've gotten to the point where I need to ramble for a few blog entries to get out of my system some thoughts that have been running around my head.

Real asset investment decision making has been a fascination of mine since University days. The process of discovering if an investment has potential is fascinating. The range of topics you get across is huge.

Over the years I've also discovered the massive political and emotional aspects to decision making too. I've experienced the political and emotional responses through observation rather than participation. Most of my experience in observing the emotive and political response to a problem has been through the review of business cases or cabinet submissions that have been written to get a certain decision up rather than testing and proposing the best option for decision makers. Other observed phenomena is the retrospective business case. This is where a document called a business case is written to cover for the fact that a decision has already been made. What I find interesting in these cases is discovering what was the business case that caused the actual decision to be made. Was it a conversation, a presentation, a site visit or something else. There is always something that is the catalyst for a decision maker or person in power to decide to act. Sadly, it is often some small, quick comment or observation rather than as a result of a sound and well developed business case.

The most frustrating thing for me has been the difficulty in understanding the overall thread or long term goal to investment decisions. They are so often made in isolation with the dependancy and impact on other initiatives rarely considered. Yes, the investment aligns to strategy but does it contribute to an overall plan that leads to some end state that the organisation, community or society finds desirable.

Many new management theories are being explored around complexity theory and the uselessness of trying to predict the future (e.g. through forecasting and modelling). However, I find it impossible to be motivated and commit to investing money in a project that has no clear purpose and cannot be defined as part of some overall goal or end state.

I understand that it is extremely difficult to define an end state, but without one, all common principles of strategic planning and business management are useless and the complexity theorists become 100% correct in their description of organisations as self forming organisms that bumble along much the same way life always has since that first single cell split and became two.

hectic, hectic, hectic

Well, as can easily be seen, we've done a great job updating this blog. Truth is we've just had no time. mbh has grown by 100% this year as measured by full time equivalents and revenue (thankfully, profits have grown by a greater % than this). With all the work that's come in the door, sadly, the blog has been left by the wayside. Some of the things that have been keeping us busy include:

Deployment of UniPhi to 300 users in 11 offices around Australia for Davis Langdon
Establishment of an office in Adelaide to support several projects there including continued business case capability development across the SA Government, compiling business cases for the Health Department and Bio innovation SA and conducting a whole of government project management maturity survey. I will include more about this survey pending permission from the SA Government.
Further product development and research into consulting opportunities in Russia and South American Agricultural industries. We are in the final stages of a business plan for this work which has been fascinating to be involved with.

One of this things I will attempt to blog about over the next few days is work we have been doing in researching triple bottom line methodologies in use. Part of this has come out of work with SA Government on measurement criteria for their business cases. From this catalyst, further research and ideas have been developed. More on that soon....