Collaboration For my sins I have an M.B.A. I am a child of the ’70’s. By the time I hit the ’90’s an M.B.A. was the qualification to have if you were intent on pursuing a corporate career. The course taught me all about the parts of big business. I learnt about: Finance and accounting […]
A World Without Objectives
Objectives: could we manage without them? How would we cope? The guys in H.R. would throw up their hands in horror. We couldn’t rate our staff. Pay for performance would flounder. Annual appraisals would become a farce. We wouldn’t know what we were doing. How could we manage our businesses? But how do we manage with objectives? They just get […]
Does All That “Structure” Help?
Organisations are complicated They have: Customer requirements Partner requirements Legal requirements Compliance requirements Legacy systems Specialist teams Obsolete databases Competitive pressure Profitability problems And all those competing priorities are in conflict with each other. How do we manage complexity? By creating process and structure: RACI frameworks Target Operating Models Interim targets Delegated authority levels KPIs Heads […]
How Good Are Your People? Comparatively?
The theory of comparative advantage In 1817 the economist David Ricardo developed the theory of comparative advantage. It explains why nations trade. He gave this example to explain it: Scenario 1. Imagine the economy consists of two countries that produce both cloth and wine; Portugal and England. Though their output is of equal quality, Portugal is […]
Problem Solving – All Buck and No Bang
There are two ways to solve a problem: First order problem solving: Also known as the quick fix. This type of problem solving removes the issue. E.g. getting the information you need to finish a task. But it doesn’t do anything to stop the problem happening again. Fixing a problem this way often causes a […]