Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: management

  • Bernie Brookes’ Blues – the inability of managers to learn from failure

    Bernie Brookes’ Blues – the inability of managers to learn from failure

    One of the notable aspects of modern corporations is the inability of executives to identify failure.

    A good example of this is the Australian department store industry. Like most Aussie industries it’s dominated by two major players, Myer and David Jones,  both of whom have struggled with the realities of modern retailing.

    David Jones is notable for deciding the web was too much hard work in 2001 while Myer’s management whines about sales taxes despite struggling with antiquated point of sales systems and an inadequate online presence that still lags its international competitors.

    This week illustrates both companies’ state of executive denial, yesterday Myer’s CEO Bernie Brookes blamed falling profits and escalating costs on the GST and labour rates – the idea that management should take some of the blame for increased overheads didn’t seem to occur to Bernie.

    One telling comment of Brookes’ are his comments about productivity and global competitiveness.

    “The sector would benefit from reform to help drive productivity and become more competitive in an increasingly global marketplace,” said Brookes.

    Brookes’ comment illustrates just how the Australian corporate sector has flubbed the transition to operating in a high cost economy.

    At the same time Bernie Brooks was bemoaning the state of the world, David Jones CEO Paul Zahra was opening a new small format store and – like all champions of free enterprise – blamed the government for slow sales.

    David Jones’ new store is interesting in itself, notably this comment in the Sydney Morning Herald story;

    Mr Zahra said the store had been especially catered to the wealthy demographics of the Malvern area with a focus on high margin items.

    “Higher margin categories are what we have focused on and low margin categories are available in store but in the online system so we can get it shipped directly to people’s homes.

    “And we get a better gross profit per square metre as a result.”

    Welcome to the Twenty-First Century, Mr Zahra.

    Both Zahra and Brookes’ statements show they learn nothing from failure, indeed they don’t even seem to acknowledge they have failed.

    It’s understandable in modern corporate life not to acknowledge failure, in the alpha-male environment of the executive suite admitting failure is a form of professional suicide.

    However not learning from mistakes is a recipe for making more errors – “those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

    And that’s exactly what the hapless Myer and David Jones shareholders are condemned to, as are all the other businesses whose management doesn’t see its failures.

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  • Building the post-agile workplace

    Building the post-agile workplace

    “I personally believe we haven’t seen a major change in how companies work since the industrial revolution,” says Yammer co-founder Adam Pisoni. “We’re, I think, on the brink of a change as large as that.

    Pisoni was speaking at Microsoft’s Australian TechEd conference on the Gold Coast and gave an insight into how Yammer’s development philosophy is being implemented at Microsoft since the smaller company was acquired last year.

    He believes all businesses can benefit from collaborative, cloud based tools like Yammer however software companies like Microsoft are the ones being affected the earliest from their adoption.

    “We sometimes joke that Yammer’s development methodology is post-Agile, post-Scrum” says Pisoni. “Because they were not fast enough and don’t respond to data quickly.”

    Understanding modern workplaces

    This will strike fear into the minds of managers who are only just coming to understand Agile and Scrum methodologies over the traditional ‘waterfall’ method of software development.

    “We focused primarily in the past on efficiency,” states Pisoni. “In many ways things like scrum attempt to make you more agile but still focus on efficiency. Everyone is tasked based and hours and burn down points and all that”

    “The name of the game now is not efficiency, it’s how quickly you can learn and respond to information.”

    “Yammer is less of a product than it is a set of experiments running at all times. We take bold guesses about the future but then we try to disprove our hypotheses to get there.”

    “So we came up with this ‘post-agile’ model of a small, autonomous, cross-functional teams – two to ten people for two to ten weeks who could prove or disprove an hypotheses based on the data.”

    “This lets us quickly move resources around to double down on that or do something else.”

    Flipping hamburgers the smart way

    Pisoni sees this model of management working in areas outside of software development such as retail and cites one of his clients, Red Robin burgers, where the hamburger chain put its frontline staff on Yammer and allowed them contribute to product development.

    The result was getting products faster to market – one burger that would have taken eighteen months to release took four weeks. The feedback loops from the customer and the reduced cost of failure made it easier to for the chain to experiment with new ranges.

    With companies as diverse as hamburger chains, telcos and software developers benefitting from faster development times, it’s a warning that all businesses need to be considering how their employees work together as the competition is getting faster and more flexible.

    It remains to be seen if this change is as great as the industrial revolution, but it’s now that can’t be ignored by managers and entrepreneurs.

    Paul attended Microsoft TechEd Australia as a guest of Microsoft who paid for flights, accommodation and food.

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  • Why do executives see romance in the startup culture?

    Why do executives see romance in the startup culture?

    One of the fascinating phenomenons of the modern era is how corporate managers have appropriated the startup culture.

    At the announcement of the Australian Centre for Broadband Innovation’s Apps For Broadband prizes, Foxtel’s CIO Robyn Elliot described her experience of working in a startup.

    “Foxtel was once in the category of startup itself,” said Elliot at the start of her speech.

    Apples and Oranges

    Comparing Foxtel to a scrabbling startup in the modern sense is bizarre given the company was a well funded joint venture between News Limited and Telstra – the company being a good example of modern Australian crony corporatism rather than a risky undertaking by daring entrepreneurs.

    This conceit about startups isn’t unusual among corporate executives, in the early days of Australia’s National Broadband Network it was quite common to hear NBNCo managers talk about their startup ethos – this from a company backed by around 30 billion dollars of government funding.

    At one stage I interviewed for a job at NBNCo and I struggled not to start giggling when the “startup ethos of the organisation” was earnestly emphasised to me several times during the meeting.

    Not surprisingly the job went to an ex-telco staffer, as did most of the team’s roles. No doubt their corporate experience was far more suited to the company’s ‘startup ethos’  than that of actually having worked in four startups. Giggling in the interview probably didn’t help either.

    The romantic dreams of executives

    Given most corporate staffers would curl into the fetal position and weep after two weeks of working in a real startup, why do executives indulge in the conceit that their business is ‘just like a startup’?

    The answer could lie in “The Consequences to the Banks of the Collapse in Money Values” written by John Maynard Keynes in 1931.

    A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him. It is necessarily part of the business of a banker to maintain appearances, and to confess a conventional respectability, which is more than human. Life-long practices of this kind make them the most romantic and the least realistic of men.

    So it is for the modern corporate executive who has spent their working lives fighting for the corner office having met their KPIs and spending years cultivating their network of like minded managers.

    After two decades spent writing stern memos on the use of paper clips and climbing the corporate ladder, it must be tempting for a middle aged executive to look at those funky youngsters getting billion dollar payouts after a couple of years grabbing three hours sleep a night among the pizza boxes under the desk and get pangs of what might have been…..

    A harmless startup fantasy

    In some many ways the executive startup fantasy is touching and largely harmless, even if it does attract sniggers and giggles from the unwashed and underpaid who’ve actually been there.

    The real risk is when a senior executive tries to shoehorn a Silicon Valley startup culture into an organisation.

    While most large companies could do with some of the hunger and flexibility found in smaller businesses, there’s many ways that could go terribly wrong – particularly when driven by a starry eyed romantic manager.

    For most executives though, the dreams of being in a startup will remain a fantasy – and that’s probably best for everybody.

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  • Cutting the middle management fat

    Cutting the middle management fat

    No-one can say life is comfortable at Cisco when every two years the company engages on a round of job cutting that tends to keep employees on their toes.

    While this year’s job cuts are relatively mild – only 4,000 as opposed to nearly 13,000 in 2011 – it’s notable the focus on culling middle management positions.

    “We just have too much in the middle of the organization,”  the Wall Street Journal reports Cisco CEO John Chambers as saying.

    One of the challenges for businesses is become more flexible when markets are rapidly changing. Having ranks of middle managers makes it harder for organisations to respond.

    John Chambers and Cisco are reducing their middle management head count to respond to that need. Many other companies are going to have to do the same.

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  • Politics, business and leadership

    Politics, business and leadership

    I’ve covered the New York Times’ interview with Google’s senior vice president of people operations, Laszlo Bock previously in describing what the business has learned from its scientific method of hiring people.

    One striking aspect of that story that deserves further discussion is Bock’s thoughts on leadership;

    We found that, for leaders, it’s important that people know you are consistent and fair in how you think about making decisions and that there’s an element of predictability. If a leader is consistent, people on their teams experience tremendous freedom, because then they know that within certain parameters, they can do whatever they want. If your manager is all over the place, you’re never going to know what you can do, and you’re going to experience it as very restrictive.

    This is something that applies in all walks of life — whether you’re coaching a kids’ football team, running a corporation or leading a nation.

    Sadly in many of these fields we’re lacking the consistent leadership Laszlo Bock describes. That could turn out to be one of the greatest challenges for the 21st Century.

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