Posts Tagged ‘Business’

Is Sustainability – sustainable?

Tuesday, March 1st, 2016

Is sustainability – sustainable?
By Roger La Salle

Is the video more powerful than the pen?
This business insight is a recent TED talk. It exposes some very serious issues, but is quite entertaining and funny as well, so I am advised.

The talk actually went for close to an hour but the TED people very skillfully edited it to their preferred 18 minute format.

Please have a look, think about the message, have a laugh and forward it to a friend or colleague.

Next month’s article will ask the question – “Is it good to fail?”

**** END ****

Roger La Salle, trains people in innovation, marketing and the new emerging art of Opportunity Capture. “Matrix Thinking”™ is now used in organizations in more than 29 countries. He is sought after as a speaker on Innovation, Opportunity and business development and is the author of four books and a Director and former CEO of the Innovation Centre of Victoria (INNOVIC) as well as a number of companies both in Australia and overseas. He has been responsible for a number of successful technology start-ups and in 2004 was a regular panelist on the ABC New Inventors TV program. In 2005 he was appointed to the “Chair of Innovation” at “The Queens University” in Belfast. www.matrixthinking.com

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Metrics For Managers

Sunday, August 4th, 2013

Metrics for Managers
By Roger La Salle

Measuring work performance is vital to ensure we are making good decisions.

Indeed, there is an old saying: “if you can’t measure it, don’t change it”.

This particularly applies to process innovation where the cost benefit of changes can usually be accurately quantified before they are ever made.

Do Innovation Managers deliver?

As for innovation management the same applies.

If you are investing in innovation then it is important to understand the return that investment delivers. That is real returns and not abstractions like “It’s important to be seen as innovative”! Further, the return should ideally be forthcoming within 18 months. If this is not happening then it may be time to entirely review your approach.

Measuring the Cost benefit

It is interesting that in many businesses the cost benefit of most employees can be accurately measured.

In processes of course this is easy, so too in accounting and law and consulting where people are expected to bill typically 70 to 80 percent of their time to a client at a rate of at least double their actually cost. This is easy to measure with time sheets.

Abstract job functions

But what of the managers of:
• Products
• Categories
• Sales
• Marketing
• Communications
• Finance
• HR
• and so on, and what of their subordinate staff and executive assistants?

I am often amused when I see the English version of “The Office” with people silently poised over computer keyboards. One wonders just what value each and every one is delivering and moreover if and how it is measured?

Senior management!

As you career develops you may reach the dizzy heights of senior management or even get lost in the bureaucracy. Apart from some KPI’s that can usually be met by clever operators, there is usually no real measure of the return on investment that you or even your position delivers. What would happen if you or that position was no longer there? Would somebody take up the slack, perhaps the business may well proceed as normal?

In the case of very senior positions, perhaps those people making several millions of dollars per year, this is an interesting question.

One answer may be to explore the value and accuracy of decision making. For example if one person at the top can make just one better decision than a person that may have been passed over for the position, that single better decision may be worth millions, or even billions.

Steve Jobs was a classic example of a great decision maker.

More work to be done on this!

The bottom line is that we need to find proper ROI measures for all positions to be sure each and every staff member is delivering at least twice what they are costing.

More will be said in this is coming months.

Roger La Salle, is the creator of the “Matrix Thinking”™ technique and is widely sought after as an international speaker on Innovation, Opportunity and business development. He is the author of four books, Director and former CEO of the Innovation Centre of Victoria (INNOVIC) as well as a number of companies both in Australian and overseas. He has been responsible for a number of successful technology start-ups and in 2004 was a regular panellist on the ABC New Inventors TV program. In 2005 he was appointed to the “Chair of Innovation” at “The Queens University” in Belfast. Matrix Thinking is now used in more than 26 countries and licensed to Deloitte, one of the world’s largest consulting firms. www.matrixthinking.com

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Opportunities Abound

Tuesday, June 4th, 2013

Opportunities Abound

Roger La Salle

In this Business Insight I did intend to discuss the structured way to explore the third Horizon of business, but time and events have changed the priority, so below are matters of a different nature.
Using Innovation to achieve Innovation
No matter what business you are in, there are two things that should never be overlooked:

• up skilling your staff in how the business operates, and

• the need to embrace both innovation and opportunity.

There are many ways to achieve this upskilling and you would be aware of my books and workshops already in the marketplace on these topics.

However, as an Innovator myself I am always on the lookout for new ways to get these messages across to employees and companies in general. So, when I come across a new idea, I am always keen to give it a try. Business Development at trainingsnippets.com.au is such an idea.

I have teamed up with Training Snippets to produce the first six of what I expect to be a series of Business Development video snippets presenting my workshops in a format that can be used by companies who cannot attend workshops or for people more comfortable learning through video. Eventually, the entirety of my material will be in this modern format.

You can view the first six in their entirety at this link:

vimeo.com/album/2346487 (Password: tsrls1to6), or to purchase them, go to:

www.trainingsnippets.com.au/topic/roger-la-salle-business-development

Roger La Salle Business Insight Roger La Salle Business Insight www.trainingsnippets.com.au

Upcoming topics will include:

• Innovation and Opportunity capture

• Product evaluation and ranking

• Management reporting and even KPI setting

I am keen to hear your thoughts on this method of educating the workforce.

INNOVIC
Have you ever wondered how to identify a new opportunity and what to do next to turn it into a viable business? Well, INNOVIC is running an Opportunity Cafe on 14 June at a funky down town cafe/bar (Campari House, Melbourne) that can explain exactly what you need to do to create, refine and fast track new ideas and opportunities.

I will be running the session on innovation and opportunity capture and other experts will be discussing IP, idea-to-market strategies, grants and “crowd funding”. It will be a very innovative and stimulating day. Details at: www.innovic.com.au

As we all know identifying a ”frustration” is one of the greatest sources of opportunity for any business. For example: coffee cups/glasses that are too hot to hold, poor service in restaurants, jam jars that can’t be opened. The list goes on.

INNOVIC

Join INNOVIC’s Frustration to Innovation Competition on Facebook and post your frustrations.
http://tinyurl.com/c6p4pkj (facebook.com/innovic.ideas).

INNOVIC is offering a free ticket to the Opportunity Cafe for the best and most insightful frustration.

**** END ****

Roger La Salle, is the creator of the “Matrix Thinking”™ technique and is widely sought after as an international speaker on Innovation, Opportunity and business development. He is the author of four books, Director and former CEO of the Innovation Centre of Victoria (INNOVIC) as well as a number of companies both in Australian and overseas. He has been responsible for a number of successful technology start-ups and in 2004 was a regular panellist on the ABC New Inventors TV program. In 2005 he was appointed to the “Chair of Innovation” at “The Queens University” in Belfast. Matrix Thinking is now used in more than 26 countries and licensed to one of the world’s largest consulting firms. www.matrixthinking.com

Regards,

Roger La Salle
Innovation – Opportunity – Inspiration
Conferences – Key Notes – Workshops – Facilitation

www.matrixthinking.com
Twitter @rogerlasalle
Mobile 0418 370 828
Office + 613 9842 7267
Fax + 613 9842 2260
Sponsor – INNOVIC Next Big Thing Award

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Exploring the 3rd. Horizon

Monday, June 3rd, 2013

EXPLORING HORIZON THREE! Roger La Salle
In my penultimate business insight the McKinsey’s three horizons was presented demonstrating the unsurprising fact that research has shown that less than 3 percent of executive time is actually spent exploring the third horizon. Yet this is the one most relevant to the longer term survival and growth of an organisation
EXPLORING THE THIRD HORIZON
In many cases business and association conferences engage speakers known as a futurist to present some insights as to what the future may hold. Such people most often deliver interesting and engaging talks, mostly about where technology is taking us and the gizmos of the future, fascinating as they may be. However, the direct relevance of this to your business may be somewhat obscure so perhaps an alternative approach could be considered. This alternative is somewhat more rigorous than the abstraction of futurism and is based on the known mathematical methodology of extrapolation.

In short one of the best ways to explore horizon three and envisage where you business, or perhaps just as importantly your industry sector is heading, is to plot a trajectory curve of the past and extrapolate that to the future. This approach leads to outcomes far more precise than the abstraction of futurism and allows you to make plans to position yourself precisely at the future waypoint.

How can we do this?

The starting point is to first decide what represents your core offering.

McDonald’s is an excellent example. Their core offering is definitely not great tasting and wonderful food, but standardised safe food at an affordable price but most of all with a minimum of queuing time (i.e. convenience).

As competition emerged to challenge McDonald’s they rose to the occasion by expanding their range to match their competitors. Most of all they leveraged their core offering of convenience, by providing customers with drive through service. An extrapolation of this core offering of fast convenient food would have revealed the need to migrate the drive through service well in advance of its initial introduction. Now so firmly has McDonald’s embraced this convenience offering that it is in fact usually much faster to use the drive through service than to enter the shop and get served at the counter.

An extrapolation of the present convenience at McDonalds may now be to offer even faster service, if that’s possible. One wonders how long it may be before an iPhone app will be developed to allow “pre-ordering” and collection via a rapid drive through
“E-queue”, possibly with payment via a direct debit from an iPhone app even before you get to the store.

Convenience stores

Another example of this extrapolation approach may be to look at convenience store businesses. What is the core offering of a convenience store, certainly not low price, but convenience of course! Based on an extrapolation of that we would look to offer even greater convenience, and what would that be? Drive through convenience stores, again maybe with a pre-ordering App and even pre-payment?

Use this to foresee the future!

This type of extrapolation approach can be done in many industries. The only requirement is for your management team to be able to agree on your core offering(s) before applying extrapolation as a means to forecast the longer term position of your industry and to thus make plans to address this new horizon.

This is far more likely to provide accurate outcomes than the abstraction of futurism and can be done with your senior team at you next management getaway. You may be amazed at the outcome, an outcome that reveals horizon three and sets you apart from the competition.

Roger La Salle, is the creator of the “Matrix Thinking”™ technique and is widely sought after as an international speaker on Innovation, Opportunity and business development. He is the author of four books, Director and former CEO of the Innovation Centre of Victoria (INNOVIC) as well as a number of companies both in Australian and overseas. He has been responsible for a number of successful technology start-ups and in 2004 was a regular panellist on the ABC New Inventors TV program. In 2005 he was appointed to the “Chair of Innovation” at “The Queens University” in Belfast. Matrix Thinking is now used in more than 26 countries and licensed to one of the world’s largest consulting firms. www.matrixthinking.com

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Over the Horizon

Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013

Over the Horizon vision
Roger La Salle
Which Horizon?

McKinsey’s sometime ago defined what they referred to as the three horizons of growth in business. In summary we may call these Horizon 1, or what we are doing now and in the very near term.
Horizon 2 refers to what are going to be our actions for the medium term and Horizon 3 refers to the long term future. This is what I prefer to call “over the horizon” activities.

Although the first two horizons occupy most of our time in many businesses, Horizon 1 gets by far the greatest attention.

The Facts

Indeed recent studies have shown that in fact Horizon 3 attracts less than three percent of executive time. In many businesses of course one wonders if Horizon 3 gets any attention at all, especially in these days of tight economies with many businesses literally fighting for survival.

Of course embracing innovation is one way to work to continually move your customers products and services to a better place and the formation of innovation teams is the best way to implement this. However such teams usually focus on Horizon 2, that is what we can be doing in the short to medium term.

Horizon 3

Horizon 3 is the one that the senior executives of a business need to pay more attention to; but like it or not the distractions of the office environment are not conducive to Horizon 3 development.

Most businesses of course from time to time have off site executive retreats. In most cases these focus on reports from business units and discussion of the issues and problems of the day and what can be done in the short to medium term to enhance the business and overcome any immediate issues at hand.

Perhaps had KODAK being looking to the longer term several years ago its ongoing business demise may have been somewhat different.

So too with the US auto industry that suffered in the wake of the Japanese attention to quality and cars more appropriate to the times than the oversized, overpowered all too heavy typical US built autos. Of course the list goes on of businesses that have failed to see the longer term big picture and have subsequently gone to the wall or been forced to take emergency corrective action to avoid catastrophe.

Exploration of over the horizon activities at such retreats is however where much of this valuable executive time should be spent. If you are in fact doing this it is quite unlikely your competition will be doing the same.
Use proper tools

There are several tools that can be employed to good effect to explore long term predictions. These are not the abstraction of the so called “Futurist” but deliver quite a rigorous process that can be plotted on a graph and used to good effect to anticipate the future and allow you to best position yourself to be at the right place at the right time.

What now?

The bottom line is to recognise that too little attention is paid to over the horizon planning with day to day reactive tasks taking most executive time.

Put your executive team to work and look at the longer term, few business are doing that.

To do so will put you in a commanding position.

**** END ****
Roger La Salle, is the creator of the “Matrix Thinking”™ technique and is widely sought after as an international speaker on Innovation, Opportunity and business development. He is the author of four books, Director and former CEO of the Innovation Centre of Victoria (INNOVIC) as well as a number of companies both in Australian and overseas. He has been responsible for a number of successful technology start-ups and in 2004 was a regular panellist on the ABC New Inventors TV program. In 2005 he was appointed to the “Chair of Innovation” at “The Queens University” in Belfast. Matrix Thinking is now used in more than 26 countries and licensed to one of the world’s largest consulting firms. www.matrixthinking.com
Regards,

Roger La Salle
Innovation – Opportunity – Inspiration
Conferences – Key Notes – Workshops – Facilitation

www.matrixthinking.com
Twitter @rogerlasalle
Mobile 0418 370 828
Office + 613 9842 7267
Fax + 613 9842 2260
Sponsor – INNOVIC Next Big Thing Award

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ROI for Innovation – The low hanging fruit!

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

ROI for Innovation – The low hanging fruit!
© Roger La Salle 2010
Business Units need to provide a return

In my previous article I challenged innovation practitioners to examine the return on their innovation investment. If your innovation initiative is not providing returns greater than its cost, then the very existence of the program needs to be questioned.

Having said that, one may well ask what is an appropriate time scale to obtain this return? Months, years or maybe even a decade as we wait in vain hope for the breakthrough initiative that seldom ever comes!

So let’s examine the possibilities and find the low hanging fruit.

If you can have an early win with innovation then you can be sure more budget will be forthcoming and still greater achievements can be obtained.

Where to start?

Essentially there are just four ways in which innovation may be tackled:
• Product innovation
• Service Innovation
• The broad landscape of systematic opportunity capture
• Process Innovation

The first three above mentioned approaches herald the introduction of innovated products, services and perhaps the implementation of a new captured opportunity. Without doubt it is with these that we can build the top revenue line of a business. Put simply, this is really the only way to build a business. Businesses grow on increased revenues and by no other means.

Having said that, the implementation of any of these involves some degree of risk, technical in the development phase, but much more significantly, risk in the market place. Will the market be as large as you forecast? Interestingly if you embrace proper innovation practices market risk can also be largely mitigated, but of course never completely removed.

With the above in mind, perhaps the early innovation initiative should be focused on the one with the least risk, Process Innovation.

What is Process Innovation?

Process Innovation is about finding better ways to do whatever we are doing. Process innovation, unless it means tinkering with the sales process or sales model really carries little if any risk and in my experience I have found that there is almost always room for process improvements.

Further, any improvement in a process translates dollar for dollar to the bottom line, thus measuring the gain compared with the cost or perhaps the ROI is relatively easy.

Governments both state and federal push process improvement, Lean, Continuous Improvement, 5S and Six Sigma as their way of encouraging innovation in businesses. They do this I believe because these are somewhat tried and tested methods but also because improvements can almost always be made and cost benefits determined with little downside risk. Furthermore the benefits of process improvement are easier to understand and articulate.

However, even so, these extremely simple methods are still somewhat shrouded in a mystique that makes them unnecessarily complex, much more so than they need to be.

For many large multinationals with subsidiaries in Australia, unfortunately there is neither the opportunity nor appetite for innovation except in processes. Consequently this is where the bulk of attention is paid.

In the case of utilities such as water, gas and electricity where this is little scope to actually “innovate” the product there is still scope for service innovation and opportunity capture. In such organisations that are largely process driven and with many people doing the same thing, the gains possible from process innovation are almost unlimited.

Keep it Simple

I like to keep things really simple and in process innovation there are really only two things that need to be addressed:

• Costs – how much does each and any activity cost in cold hard cash, from telephone bills to rents, interest, labours and raw materials, including the cost of work in progress?

• Cycle Time – how long does each activity take? This includes the process of getting an incoming order into the system right though to collecting the money from the customer.

If the above two are addressed in a systematic manner, consistent with the maintenance of quality, the process innovation business is pretty straight forward. It simply commences with an activity that maps and measures where you are now with each process and then works to make improvements in the two above mentioned places.

This is not rocket science and is very low risk.

So what’s the time scale?

With process innovation leading your innovation initiative it should be possible to make real cost benefit gains within six months at the most and, of course as stated, any savings go straight to the bottom line.

But I emphasise again, removing costs or improving processes does not build the revenue line, however the extra funds provided by such improvements can now be applied to where the real business building action can take place, product and service innovation and of course “opportunity capture”.

That’s where the real game is.

**** END ****

Roger La Salle, is the creator of the “Matrix Thinking”™ technique and is widely sought after as an international speaker on Innovation, Opportunity and business development. He is the author of three books, Director and former CEO of the Innovation Centre of Victoria (INNOVIC) as well as a number of companies both in Australian and overseas. He has been responsible for a number of successful technology start-ups and in 2004 was a regular panellist on the ABC New Inventors TV program. In 2005 he was appointed to the “Chair of Innovation” at “The Queens University” in Belfast. Matrix Thinking is now used in more than 26 countries. www.matrixthinking.com

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