Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: managerialism

  • Privileges and princelings

    Privileges and princelings

    A strange thing about Australian business reporting is that its often full of gossip and name dropping as any third rate scandal magazine.

    In a perverse way, treating business executives like the Kardashians gives the average mug punter – and shareholders – a glimpse into how these companies do business. Like this story in the Australian Financial Review;

    Hamish Tyrwhitt was unaware of the latest drama unfolding within the Leighton board as he relaxed in the Qantas First Class Lounge in Sydney on Friday morning.

    Indeed, the contractor’s chief executive officer was busy chatting to former Wallabies captain John Eales while waiting to board a flight to Hong Kong where he was due to close a recent deal to build the Wynn Cotai hotel resort in Macau and enjoy the Sevens rugby tournament.

    The timing was not good. Tyrwhitt had only just boarded the flight when the news broke that chairman Stephen Johns and two directors had resigned. Tyrwhitt was forced to change his plans and is expected back in Sydney for a board meeting convened this weekend.

    Nice work if you can get it.

    A few pages further in the day’s AFR is another gem;

    One July evening about four years ago, off the south coast of France between Cannes and St Tropez, two men sat in the jacuzzi on the top deck of a 116-foot Azimut motor yacht. It was about 3am and the sea was rough. The spa water was sloshing about and had given the latest round of caprioskas a distinctly bitter taste.

    Dodo boss Larry Kestelman was telling his good friend, M2 Telecommunications founder Vaughan Bowen, about the challenges of growing his internet service provider business.

    It’s tough doing business when the spa waters are choppy. One expects better from a seven million dollar boat.

    That second article raises another point that’s often overlooked, or unmentioned, when reporting Australian business matters.

    on Thursday the 14th, something unexpected happened. At 12.30pm, after no activity all morning, shares in the thinly traded Eftel started to rise sharply. By the time the market closed at 4pm, Eftel had soared 44 per cent to 39.5¢. Someone with knowledge of the deal was insider trading.

    Insider trading? On the Australian Security Exchange? Somebody had better call those super-efficient regulators who were responsible for Australia cruising through the global economic crisis of 2008.

    Somebody obviously wanted their own 116ft luxury yacht or corporate box at the Hong Kong Sevens.

    Both of these stories illustrate the hubris and privileges of corporate Australia and its regulators.

    One wonders how well equipped these organisations are for an economic reversal when their leaders are more worried about caprioskas and their spots in the first class lounge.

    We may yet find out.

    First class airline seat images courtesy of Pyonko on Flickr and Wikimedia.

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  • Does Google have corporate Attention Deficit Disorder?

    Does Google have corporate Attention Deficit Disorder?

    The news that Google were releasing a service called Keep designed to store things you find on the web for future reference received a hostile response yesterday.

    It seems the company’s dropping Google Reader into the deadpool proved the final straw for many of the tech early adopters who’d invested too much time building their feeds and other digital assets only to find services taken away from them.

    This isn’t just Google Reader, various other services are suffering; Google Alerts has become functionally useless while the Frommers guide book franchise is slowly dying after the company bought it from John Wileys.

    Corporate Attention Deficit Disorder

    Google are suffering corporate Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) where management find a bright shiny thing, play with it for a while then get bored and wander off.

    This is trait particularly common amongst cashed up tech companies. In the past Microsoft and Yahoo! were the best examples, but today Google is the clear leader in the Corporate ADD stakes.

    Corporate ADD requires a number of factors – the main thing is a big cash flow to fund acquisitions.

    In companies with this luxury, bored managers find themselves looking for things to do with all the money flowing through the door and when a hot new product or market sector appears those executives want to be part of it.

    So a company gets acquired or a project is set up and the advocate drives it relentlessesly within the corporation, usually with lots of PR and write ups in the industry press.

    Then something happens.

    Usually the advocate – the manager or founder who drives the project – gets bored, promoted or sacked and the project loses its driving force within the organisation.

    Without that driving force the service stagnates as we saw with Google Alerts or Reader and eventually company closes it down.

    This has unfortunate effects on the marketplace, users invest a lot of time in the company’s service while  innovators in the affected market struggle to get funding as the investors say “we can’t compete with Google’.

    A changed perspective

    What’s interesting now though is the sea-change in the attitude towards Google’s Keep announcement – rather than dozens of articles describing how competing services like Evernote are doomed in the face of the search engine giant entering their market, most are saying this validates the existing startups’ investment and vision.

    More importantly, most commentators are saying they are going to stick with the services they already use because they no longer trust Google to maintain the product.

    This is what happens when you lose the trust and confidence of the market place.

    One of the mantras of the startup community is “focus” – focus on your product and the problem you want it to fix. That large businesses lack that focus shows how far from being a lean startup they have become.

    Google’s real challenge is to regain that focus. Right now they have rivers of cash flowing through their doors but in an age of disruption, it may well be that they could dry up if no-one pays attention.

    Ritalin image courtesy of Adam on Wiki Images

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  • More National Broadband woes

    More National Broadband woes

    This is not good for the National Broadband Network project; contractor Service Stream announced it was handing back the Northern Territory rollout contracts to the Australian Security Exchange this morning.

    It raises serious questions about the timetable of the project.

    Service Stream advises that Syntheo, a 50/50 joint venture with Lend Lease, has reached agreement with
    NBN Co to hand back the remainder of its design and construction activities in the Northern Territory. Syntheo is committed to working with NBN Co to complete its work in Western Australia and South Australia.
    Given NBNCo abandoned its construction tender in April 2011 amidst hints of price fixing by contractors, this is a worrying development that indicates those ‘overpriced quotes’ may have been closer to the money after all.
    I’ll be writing something up later today for IT News.

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  • The high cost of new media experiments

    The high cost of new media experiments

    The BBC yesterday sold Lonely Planet to US media company NC2 Media. Their £80 million loss on the venture puts them in good company as established media struggle to find new online channels and revenue streams.

    While the losses aren’t trivial, they are not quite in the league of News Corporation $545 million loss on MySpace or Time Warner’s billion dollar adventure with AOL.

    All three stories show how tough it is for ‘old media’ adapting to a new landscape.

    The problem is there for ‘new media’ as well, most ventures struggle to make money and many of the success stories like Huffington Post rely on a combination of free content and a greater fool buying them.

    No-one has really figured out what the new media revenue models are; not the established publishers or the online upstarts.

    Lonely Planet’s online success was due to their forums which, like most web discussion boards, can feature discussions politely described as “robust”.

    This was always going to a problem for the BBC’s public service management culture and it resulted in the shutdown of the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree forums over Christmas.

    So it’s not surprising that the BBC has decided to end its experiment and now the corporation’s management is dealing with the criticism of those losses.

    While it’s easy to criticise the BBC for the deal, at least the broadcaster was attempting something different online, doing nothing is probably a poorer strategy than buying MySpace or Lonely Planet.

    Over time, we’re going to see a lot more experiments and many will be public embarrassments like those the BBC and News Corporation have suffered, but there will be successes.

    Someone will crack the code and they will be the Randolph Hearsts of this century. It could one of the Murdoch heirs, it could be the owners of NC2 Media or it could be some young, hot shot developer working in a Rio favela or the slums of Kolkata.

    But it will be someone.

    It’s an exciting time to be in business.

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  • First we kill email, then Powerpoint

    First we kill email, then Powerpoint

    Two years ago French technology firm Atos raised eyebrows after announcing the company would go email free.

    Atos CEO Thierry Breton said at the time,

    We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives. At [Atos] we are taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organizations took measures to reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution.

    Eighteen months on, the Financial Times reports Thierry is well on the way to eliminate the office pollution that is email. Lee Timmons, one of Atos’ Vice Presidents, tells the paper,

    “At the 2012 London Olympics, we were able to zero-email certify some processes – a first – and (we) look set to be email-free internally by the end of 2013,”

    Now Atos is looking at eliminating other business distractions, notably Powerpoint presentations and meetings.

    Eliminating inboxes, Powerpoint and meetings from the workplace seems a noble cause. Few organisations would be prepared to even consider this.

    For many staff and managers, spending hours sorting email, attending pointless meetings and futzing around with over-elaborate Powerpoint presentations is how they justify their time.

    It’s going to be interesting to see how Atos goes with thier objective of streamlining the workplace and how many other companies are prepared to copy them.

    Man sending an email image courtesy of Bruno-Free at SXC.hu

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