Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: management

  • Restructuring the media

    Restructuring the media

    The British Broadcasting Corporation could be about to abolish its radio and television divisions reports the London Telegraph. This could be a pointer for how many other businesses will revamp themselves in the face of digital disruption.

    As audiences change, the organisation’s Director General is looking at restructuring the 94 year old broadcaster into new divisions based around content rather than platform.

    The demarcation between radio and television, let alone the Internet, made sense in the 1950s as the cost of production was high and the specific skill sets to get a radio program to air were very different to those of television.

    Now with increased automation many, although not all, of those differences have vanished and with the internet changing distribution methods it’s harder to justify duplicating production.

    Another important aspect of the BBC’s mooted restructure is streamlining of management, with the Telegraph noting how this would be an opportunity to cull the executive ranks.

    The changes will lead to a new round of senior executive departures, as Lord Hall seeks to flatten the corporation’s labyrinthine management structures, and reinvest more money on-screen.

    How the BBC is restructuring itself in the face of technological change is a lesson for many other businesses, not just media companies.

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  • Planning a business succession

    Planning a business succession

    What happens when your Managing Director of five years standing announces he’s decided to move on?

    This was something Xero’s senior management had to deal with when Chris Ridd, the company’s Managing Director for Australia, announced that after five years he had decided to move on.

    In interviewing Chris and his successor, Trent Innes, last week for The Australian it was striking just how well the succession process had gone for Xero in dealing with the management change, “It has worked out well, it was our preference to go with an internal candidate,” the outgoing GM told me. “From my perspective it’s always good when you can do that but it doesn’t always work out that way.”

    Much of this comes down to Chris putting together a cohesive management team, something he’s quite proud of, “Xero has a huge bench, we have a really talented leadership team. I feel really good about leaving now given that the business has gone from six staff to 295 people, three and a half thousand customers to 265,000.”

    “I achieved way more than what I thought I’d be able to do in that role and after five years it seemed like the right time frame to go into something else,” he continued.

    Part of his confidence in moving on was his confidence in his successor, “Trent and I go back twelve years at Microsoft,” he told me.

    The other part of his confidence was that the company has a clearly defined strategy and business plan that neither he or Trent see changing.

    Many companies struggle with changing their senior management and much of that is because the board and executives are in denial that people – even those at the top – will move on to new ventures.

    A stable management team, a solid business plan and a realistic view about leadership succession are the keys to successfully managing a change at the top, so far it looks like Xero have managed to pull off a change that many other struggle with.

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  • Thinking beyond the group

    Thinking beyond the group

    It’s nice and comfortable living in an echo chamber and we’re all guilty of it one way or another. An example of how insular echo chambers can be are two surveys done by UK company Apollo Research on who UK and US tech writers follow on social media.

    The answer was each other, with most tech writers following a common core of twenty in the UK and thirty in the US. Basically the groups are talking to each other which explains how technology stories tend to gain momentum as variations on the same stories feed through the network.

    While technology journalists are bad for this, it could be argued their political colleagues are far more guilty of this group think as their working in close quarters makes them even more insular and inward looking. That explains much of the political reporting we see today which often seems divorced from the real world concerns of voters or challenges facing governments.

    For all of us, not just journalists, it’s easy to become trapped in our own little echo chambers and find it harder to think outside the pack as the web and platforms like Facebook deliver us the information we and our friends find confirms our own biases.

    Clearly, thinking with the pack creates a  lot of risks and for businesses also raises opportunities. At a time of fast moving technology and falling barriers to entry, thinking outside the prevailing group could even be a good survival strategy.

    A good example of industry group think is the US motor industry of the 1970s where they dismissed Japanese competitors as being cheap and substandard – similar to how many think about China today – yet by the end of the decade Japan’s automakers had captured most of the world’s market.

    On a national level, Australia is a good example of dangerous groupthink as up until three years ago the consensus among governments, public servants, economists and business leaders was the China resources boom would last indefinitely.

    Today that consensus looks foolish, not that those within the echo chamber are admitting they made the wrong call, and now governments are struggling to find new revenue streams as the expected rivers of iron ore and coal royalties fail to arrive.

    For Australian businesses, governments looking to raise revenues are another factor to plan for and getting one’s tax return and company paperwork in on time might be a good idea to avoid fines from overzealous public servants.

    The bigger lesson for us all however is not to think like the group. While it may feel safe in the herd, we could well be galloping over a cliff.

    One simple way to avoid groupthink, and that cliff, is not to copy the tech writers or the Australian economic experts who mis-called the China Boom. With the web and social media we can listen to what other voices are saying, most importantly those of our markets and customers.

    A varied information diet is something we all need t0 understand what our markets, economies and communities are doing. It might be comfortable huddling down with the herd, but you’ll never stand out from the pack.

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  • Zappos and the new management structure

    Zappos’ experiment with a new way of management continues to show slow progress reports the New York Times.

    While Halocracy’s introduction is proving problematic at Zappos, Tony Hsieh’s quest to reinvent management remains fascinating. In an October 2015 interview on This Week In Startups with Michael Arrington the Zappos CEO explained how the system works.

    “The ultimate goal is for employees to find what they’re passionate about, what they’re good at and what’s going to move the company forward,” Hsieh explained.

    Given such a change in management philosophy, it isn’t surprising a lot of staff and supervisors are struggling. Hsieh though should be credited with this experiment to move away from Twentieth Century management practices and we are some way off finding out whether it’s successful or not.

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  • Waiting for an innovation miracle

    Waiting for an innovation miracle

    Many companies are waiting for an innovation miracle said Autodesk CEO Carl Bass at the company’s final press and analyst conference at the Autodesk University conference in Las Vegas late last year.

    “Change happens when new people enter the market or companies find new ways to do things or they are scared by competitors doing something they can’t do,” Bass said in an answer to a question from a Korean journalist about dealing with changing markets.

    “The two things I hear over and over again from customers – you stand back and scream because they are all the same – most of our customers want to innovate,” Bass continued.

    Building for sustainable change

    “Generally they mean they want to build sustainable, competitive changes. They want to create products that have the ‘Apple Premium’ that someone wants to pay more for because it’s the best product in the category and they want to sustain that for as long as possible.

    “The second thing that’s almost universal with our customers is when they have a good idea, they want to get that to market as quick as possible. To the extent we supply the tools to help them fulfil those two big needs of ‘how can I innovate and do something I wasn’t capable of doing?’ or ‘how can I shorten the time between when I think about this to when I can sell this?’ Those are things that will motive people.”

    At this stage Autodesk CTO Brian Kowalski chimed in, “there is slightly depressing moment in the innovation conversation where the customer says ‘I really want to transform into an innovative company. Can you help me do that using exactly the same tools, people and mindset I currently have. They are hopeful our answer will be ‘yes, we can help you.”

    For those organisations Kowalski had bad news pointing out that creating a corporate environment that embraces change requires all three of the ‘people, processes and technology’ triangle. Just adding a new product over the top of the existing culture won’t change the business.

    Sympathy for the corporation

    Bass though has a sympathetic view towards those large organisations seeking to change.

    “Companies do believe there’s some miracle that happens and one of the things I’ve seen most clearly is this idea among startups and VC backed firms is that big companies are just dumb and unaware,” Bass stated. “There almost no large company anywhere in the world that doesn’t know what is going on the world, some of these companies have whole armies of people whose only job is to figure out what’s new and exciting and interesting.”

    “People on the other side don’t understand this, they (big company managers) know what’s going on and what’s different, they may not have the wherewithal to change but the idea that car companies didn’t see changes coming – that they couldn’t see a Tesla – they knew but there were a bunch of reasons why they couldn’t make it to the other side.”

    Skilling the next generation

    Another aspect that troubles Bass are the skills of the next generation of managers, engineers and software developers.

    “The second thing I wanted to say about tools is that I go to a lot of universities and I talk to academics about what’s coming next,” he says. “What depresses me a little bit is the faculties have all sorts of new ideas and methodologies but they are teaching using old software tools. No student I know would want a twenty year old cellphone but they sit dutifully and learn twenty year old software. I think that’s one area they have to change first.”

     

    Bass and Kowalski make some important points about the challenges facing organisations seeking to adapt to changes markets, workforces and a rapidly evolving society – it’s not easy and the issues facing all businesses are complex.

    Paul attended Autodesk University in Las Vegas as a guest of Autodesk.

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