Tag: management

The rise of the business digital native

Today’s new businesses are the true digital natives.

‘Digital natives’ has been the term to describe people born after 1990 who’ve had computers throughout their entire lives.

The theory is these folk have an innate understanding of digital technologies from being immersed in them from an early age.

It’s doubful how true that theory is; the generation born after 1960 were born into the television generation yet the vast majority of GenXers would have little idea on how to produce a sitcom or fix a TV set and the same could be said for the war generation and motor cars.

Digitally native businesses

For businesses, it may be the digital native concept is far more valid. Ventures being founded today are far more likely to be using productivity enhancing tools like social media, collaboration platforms and cloud computing services than their older competitors.

What’s striking about older businesses, particularly in the Small to Medium Enterprise (SME) sectors, is just how poorly they have adopted technology. The Australian Bureau of Statistics report into IT use by the nation’s businesses illustrates the sectors’ weak use of tech.

The most telling statistic is the number of businesses with a web presence; the SME sector lags way behind the corporate sector that has almost 100% penetration.

Australian_business_with_a_web_presence

Many of the zero to four business can be disregarded as most of them are sole trader consultants who’ve had to register a businesses for professional reason, although there is an argument even they would benefit from a cheap or free web presence to advertise their skills.

The ABS statistics show small business is lagging behind the corporates in social media and e-commerce adoption as well so the argument that local businesses are ignoring the web and using services like Facebook, LinkedIn or Google Places to advertise their services doesn’t hold water.

Old man’s business

Part of this reluctance to use digital tools is age; many SMEs were born either in the era when faxes were a novelty or when Windows computers were first appearing on small businesses desktops. They are creatures of another era.

In the current era cloud, social media and collaborative services are running business. The idea of buying a workstation for a new employee and waiting for the IT guy to set them up on the network is an antiquated memory; today’s workers have their own laptops, tablets and smartphones to do the work – all they need is a password.

Those services offer a different way of organising a business and this is the most worrying part of the statistics – large organisations are slowly, and not always successfully, adopting modern management practices while many small businesses are locked into a 1970s and 80s way of working.

For businesses being founded today, this isn’t a worry – they are the true digital natives and are reaping the benefits of more efficient ways of working. Something emphasised by Google’s updates to its Drive productivity services announced overnight.

That’s something that should focus the plans of established businesses of all sizes as they adapt to working in a connected society.

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Limits of the black box business

Many of the leading tech companies hide beyond mysterious algorithms or impassive customer support. That may prove to be their weakness.

One of the paradoxes of the modern tech industry is that while its leaders preach openness and collaboration, their own businesses are mysterious unaccountable black boxes.

This website has often looked at how the Silicon Valley business model leaves users and partners exposed to arbitrary enforcement of vague policies and indifferent customer service.

A good example of the black box business model is eBay’s major security breach where it appears millions of users have had their personal and banking details compromised. Instead of informing customers immediately, the company’s management hid the problem and hoped stonewalling inquiries would make the problem go away.

Lacking accountability

In the black box business model, not being accountable is the key – we see it with Amazon’s bullying of book publishers, Google’s high handed identity policies and Facebook’s puritan censorship.

Those high handed attitudes to customers’ and users’ rights is born out of arrogance; all of these company’s managements, and the corporate bureaucrats who enforce the policies, believe their hundred billion dollar businesses are untouchable.

Such arrogance might though be ill-founded as each of these businesses is less than twenty years old and, while they themselves have deeply disrupted existing industry models, there is no reason why their own market dominance and huge cash flows can’t be usurped by new technologies or challengers.

In age where trust is the greatest currency, hiding beyond a block box of algorithms and impassive customer support may not turn out to be a successful management strategy.

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When should a founder step down from their business?

Letting go of your business can be a wrenching task for a business founder as Viocorp’s founder Ian Gardiner describes.

Earlier this month, Sydney video streaming company Viocorp changed leadership with founder Ian Gardiner stepping down as CEO.

For Gardiner, the decision was tough and in a blog post he described how the company was founded and grew and why it was time to step away. That decision though was not without some pain.

I have nurtured and loved this little startup as it has grown up like one of my children.

And like my children it can occasionally be frustrating, difficult and highly erratic and unpredictable. But most of the time it is fantastic and hugely rewarding. And I love it with a passion that is hard to describe.”

However children one day grow up and leave home. Viocorp is not a start-up any more. It is a serious business with massive potential. And I feel that my skills as a product innovator and fire-starter are not the ones that Viocorp needs for this next stage of our journey.

I spoke to Ian Gardiner in a noisy Sydney Cafe in February for the Decoding The New Economy YouTube channel shortly after he’d made the decision to step down as CEO where he elaborated on the reasons for the change.

“I ended up getting further and further away from the stuff I’m actually good at,” he said. “You end up as the founder and entrepreneur in a place that is not good for anyone.”

“As a result of that the business doesn’t go in the direction you want.”

The right manager for the job

Gardiner’s decision illustrates an important truth about business; different management skills are needed at different stages of development.

A good example of this was with the corporate slashers of the 1980s – CEOs like GE’s Jack Welsh and ‘Chainsaw Jack’ Dunlap here in Australia were the right men to shake moribund organisations. A decade later both were out of favour as the needs of the business world and their companies had moved on.

Similarly the skills that are needed to found and grow a startup are very different to those required to steer a more mature business. This is why Facebook’s experiment with retaining founder Mark Zuckerberg as CEO of a hundred billion dollar company is so fascinating.

With Viocorp, Ian Gardiner and his investors have made a very mature decision about where they see the future of the business, as the now retired CEO told me earlier this week: “The punchline is that I’m happy about it, and very excited about the future of Viocorp.

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Synergies aren’t easy money

Avis are finding Zipcar’s synergies aren’t as great as they hoped, perhaps they’re looking in the wrong place.

Last year car rental giant AvisBudget acquired the vehicle sharing service Zipcar, at the time it looked like the established player was buying in the tech smarts of younger startup.

Citing ‘synergies’ at the time of a takeover is always a warning sign that a corporate acquisition may not go well and so it has proved with Avis’ efforts with Zipcar as travel news site Skift reports;

Speaking at the J.P. Morgan Gaming, Lodging, Restaurant & Leisure Management Access Forum in Las Vegas earlier this week, AvisBudget CEO Ron Nelson said fleet-sharing has turned out to be more complicated than the company thought because there’s a cost tied to moving the vehicles from one location to another.

That’s a strange statement as a casual observer would be forgiven for thinking that if any organisation understood the costs of moving vehicles around it would be a car hire company.

Apparently that’s not the case and the ‘synergies’ from acquisition will be pushed back to 2015.

Synergies are elusive things and it may well prove that Ron Nelson would be better served by examining how Zipcar’s technology, algorithms and flat management structures can be applied to a more staid organisation like Avis.

The real value in companies like Zipcar and Uber is the way they are applying technology to moving physical goods around – it’s no surprise that Uber’s Travis Kalanick describes his ambition for the future of his company as being the Amazon for logistics.

For Avis, Zipcar’s opportunities lie in more that just enhancing the company’s fleet utilization; understanding the marketplace and predicting demand is where the real gains could be made.

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Solving intractable problems

How are consumers like terrorists and what does this teach businesses about solving problems?

Developing counter terrorism strategies is an unlikely path to founding a business that deals in organisational change, the latest Decoding The New Economy video covers exactly this in an interview with David Snowden.

Snowden is the Chief Scientific Officer and founder of UK based consulting network Cognitive Edge that assists organisations with change and solving ‘intractable problems’.

A failing Snowden sees with the way most businesses approach organisational change and problem solving is “the case based approach that dominates most of society.”

“The idea is you find what other companies have done and you imitate it.” Snowden explains; “apart from the fact you can’t imitate the context, no company has succeeded other by imitating other people – they succeed by doing things differently.

“We take what we know about how the human brain works and we help people work those problems out.”

Safe to fail experiments

In approaching ‘intractable problems’, Snowden believes there are two ways to approach them; one is to set up ‘safe to fail’ experiments where smaller experiments are run in parallel within the organisation to see what innovative solutions arise.

The other approach involves using Snowden’s software based approach where staff or customers’ views are captured in real time to create a crowdsourced view of problems and their possible solutions.

“You can’t afford, for example, in market research to spend three months commissioning something, two months gathering the data and one month interpreting it.”

“If we create a sensor network of your customer we can give you data in real time.”

Consumers and terrorists

Dealing with real time data in public security are the origins of Cognitive Edge; “we started in counter terrorism where you have to deal with weak signal detection, you need fast real time feedback loops and you need to intervene very quickly.”

“There’s no difference between a terrorist, a customer, a citizen and an employee,” says Snowden. “They all represent the same problem which is how the hell does a large authority make sense of fragmented data.”

Developing human sensor networks

Snowden sees ‘human sensor networks’ where groups contribute their stories to create a narrative around a topic, as being one of the strongest intelligence and communications channels.

“Big data can tell us where you travelled, a narrative approach can tell why you travelled. If something goes wrong, I can also use that network to communicate.”

One project Snowden is looking at brings these concepts together to create new communication channels at airports, an idea that came to him after being stuck for two days at Toronto airport in a snowstorm, “frequent fliers have smartphones, they can be activated by the airlines and used as a communication mechanism.”

The interview with David Snowden is one of the most information and concept dense videos that I’ve done to date. It’s worthwhile listening this a few times to understand some of the fascinating fields he and Cognitive Edge are working in.

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You can’t get there from here

What the world can learn from the failure of Australia’s National Broadband Network

I swore – mainly for my own sanity – that I wouldn’t discuss Australia’s National Broadband Network on this site anymore, today though the topic raised an interesting point about business leadership and project management that can’t be ignored.

Australian Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull today released the Broadband Availability and Quality Report (PDF) along with the accompanying My Broadband website that identifies the nation’s telecommunications blackspots.

Extraordinary failure

“It is extraordinary that in six years of Labor talking about Australians having inadequate broadband they never bothered to do the work of actually identifying where services were good, bad or indifferent,” said the minister at the announcement.

Turnbull’s comments are correct, although the criticism is just as valid of previous Liberal and Labor governments who’ve all made incredibly poor decisions in the telecommunications portfolio without considering what was actually happening outside the ministers’ offices.

A bigger lesson though is that before commissioning a project the size of the NBN – estimates have put its cost anywhere between twenty and eighty billion US dollars – it’s a good idea to know where you are are and where you want to go.

Big Hairy Audacious Goals

To put the comments that follow into perspective, I was a supporter of the NBN concept although I thought it was a Big Hairy Audacious Goal.

In the shadow of the Global Financial Crisis the NBN project ticked all the boxes; it put cash into the economy, it employed an army of workers and upgraded Australia’s telecommunications network that had been neglected by thirty years of incompetent government policies mixed with incumbent telco greed.

Australia could have afforded ten NBNs during the mining boom of the 2000s; it was an opportunity to rebuild the nation’s ports, roads, railways, schools and tax system that all needed reinvestment and reinvention to meet the needs of the 21st Century.

Building a middle class welfare nanny state

Rather than reform the economy or build modern infrastructure, the Howard Liberal government decided to spend the mining boom’s proceeds on building a middle class welfare state.

Keen students of Australian politics crack a wry smile that the recently elected Abbott Liberal government, of which Turnbull is a member, proposes a paid parental scheme that will complete John Howard’s grand vision of a Middle Class Welfare Nanny State.

One of the tragedies of the populist and cowardly Gillard and Rudd Labor governments that succeeded Howard was neither had the courage to dismantle the Liberal party’s middle class welfare state.

At least though both Rudd and Gillard were prepared to make some big infrastructure investments, even if they weren’t fully thought through and chronically underfunded.

Failing to think through the needs, scope and costs of the project meant the National Broadband Network project quickly collapsed into a managerial mess exacerbated by the dribbling incompetence of the company’s executives, government officials and contractors, which bought us to Turnbull’s announcement today.

A project in search of a scope

The project’s failure is a worrying commentary on the abilities of Australia’s management elites in both the private and public sector, however the lesson for the entire world is understanding both where you are and where you want to go to is essential for a project’s success.

Spending on well planned and necessary infrastructure is good, but to avoid disasters like Australia’s NBN it’s good to start with understanding the problems you want to fix and a project scope that clearly identifies the work that needs to be done.

Unfortunately too many governments and businesses don’t know where they are or where their plans will take them.

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