January 2012
24 posts
5 tags
Bad times should spark a light.
When times are great we’re visionless, when it comes to opportunities and problems they’re hidden. We’ll hit targets regardless of innovation or not. But times are hard. We all have less to waste, which should open our eyes to and force us to think different.
A decrease in outlay should be the bright spark moment. The stimulant for businesses to fashion something new, something that people will...
4 tags
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
– Abraham Lincoln
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Trash the rules, it's back 2 basics.
To transform a way something’s done, in other words re-engineering a process requires you to take what’s expected, tear it up and toss it in the bin.
Important stuff to think about.
— 1st. Don’t attempt to improve the existing process, fashion a completely new way of doing it.
— 2nd. Disregarding any structure, pay attention to the process in hand.
— 3rd. Aim big, don’t use...
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“This morning, ask a few of your coworkers the following question. “What are the...”
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Waiting for that spark.
Cloud as a business platform is changing the way entire industries function. Educated companies are beginning to deliver new industry leading openings. Businesses, great and small, new and old, have to think carefully about how to build a management and operational blueprint for the future.
As any other new technology, Cloud has taken a little wile for the ‘spark of enlightenment’ to kick in....
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“If you’re the average person out there doing average work, there’s...”
– Seth Godin
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Stale cheese and pickle
Over the past few days I’ve read a few articles explaining why Eastman Kodak got into such a pickle, eventually filing for ‘Chapter 11, bankruptcy’.
http://bit.ly/zmQZtr http://onforb.es/yztCvY
Read them and it points out some very important failings that senior management seemed blind to.
— Having an enterprise mind-set that is open to change
— Thinking and acting...
3 tags
Transformers, robots in disguise?
Managers need to be more ambitious and inventive rather than becoming a 9 till 5 spreadsheet focused, meeting obsessed androids. Managers need less ‘manage’ and more ‘lead’ in their lives. Sadly the majority of managers don’t see themselves as motivational leaders. They’re programmed from the early age of ‘baby manager’ to take other peoples beliefs and turn them into profit. They’re chosen,...
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From China and India, how the West can learn.
It’s forecast that by 2050 China and India will become the greatest powerhouses of manufacturing and services.
All up and coming economies are achieving substantial competitive power by embracing open-source and/ or low-cost technology as well as probing current Western ways of ‘doing stuff’, stuff that’s generally old and irreverent in todays global market. In India this is...
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Recklessly unaware of what’s really needed.
Out-dated decision making needs a little bit of a shake-up IMO.
Executives and manager who are at the top of the ‘pyramid of power’ are often overrun by the vast number of decisions they must make, and high percentage of the time they’re so disconnected from what’s actually happening it’s almost impossible to give a decent decision. Time after time bad rulings are made and they...
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‘Cloud’ marketing dudes, think a tiny little bit...
It’s great to see Cloud getting it’s well deserved press, 2012 is going to be BIG. But I’m still surprised to see the same old noise coming from the marketing dudes pushing out the typical ‘Cost saving’, ‘Elastic’ and ‘On demand’ quotes. Sure all massive motives for Cloud but there’s a whole lot more to it than that.
The Cloud offers a whole new...
8 tags
How Dilbert could do with ...
.. a little BIG DATA processing
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“The Cloud is a framework for the disruption of structure, a place we’re we will...”
– Thomas Koulpouos, CEO, Delphi Group
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Ideas can originate from anyone.
Knowledge needs to flow in every direction, up, down, left, right, forwards and backwards. We need to develop new ideas to stay relevant and more significantly, fresh. An astonishingly high proportion of mainstream industries employ a strict top–down attitude through ‘formal’ networks, viewing imagination as a ‘specialist’ area within a business. Don’t have your guys spending all their time...
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“We have to learn to think in a new way.”
– Russell-Einstein Manifesto
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My new washing machine
Commercial success is partly driven on operational excellence, get it correct and you’re a star. Excellence defines how good we are, efficient how well we’re doing it. Long-term sustainability with growth have historically required these ingredients, but that was then. Today business feeds on excellence and efficiency to survive but we need more, relevancy. You see relevancy is building on the...
8 tags
big post for BIG DATA
You might have read my earlier blog around BIG DATA, oodles of Harry Potter stats, well a few anyway. Here we go with the resulting agreement, my follow up.
Let’s start again with a few more stats, we all like stats, stats make us feel fantastic.
94% of organisations that now process BIG DATA previously did not have the possibility to do so.
82% of all organisations say they now retain more of...
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Incoming dizzy digital business..
Emerging technology is providing us with a revolution, redefining the basic landscape and technique of how business delivers. If we view the past century’s working model, it was built on the talent gained from processes initially devised through the Industrial Revolution. For ease, and to keep this post small, let’s have a look at single process. A process can qualify for a digital...
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“Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand...”
– Author Unknown.
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Do ‘Gaggles’ know?
The power alpha CEO takes the 2-minute lift down to the crypt, welcome to the I.T department. It’s cold, pizza boxes straddle the recycle bins, and empty ‘Diet Coke’ cans challenge the high calorie twilight snacks. Smooth FM murmurs away in the background to ‘Copacabana’ by Barry Manilow.
‘So, tell me what Cloud computing is? Apparently it’s the future, my son told me over dinner last...
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Harry Potter, you've a long way to go!
There’s around 250,000,000 tweets per day globally and growing. That’s 10 million per hour, 173,611 per minute and 2893 per second! J.K Rowling’s largest book in the Potter series is ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix’ a snatch at 257,045 words. The equivalent of 972 books per day, every day!
From the beginning of time to 2003 every bit of data, that...
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“Technology’s only the enabler. It’s how we use and understand it...”
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Assume nothing, nothing at all
When an academic stands up and talks about management and what’s involves it generally takes the form of assumptions gained over years. Reading, writing and talking to fellow academics gives us all the assumed way stuff operated and works. These academics, be they professors and ‘experts’ in such fields promote what they believe to be reality when in fact it promotes chaos.
What they are in fact...
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Double vision towards the future
Every so often we’re presented with such a cultural shift in business dynamics that we have to sit up and pay attention; this is what ‘a’mikewatson is all about. Social technology has spread beyond the marketing departments into sales, customer service, and finance confusing the hell out of some businesses. Managers who understand how to embrace this new era of business are very well positioned...
