Embracing Growth

In the race towards creating shareholder value, finding growth for the top line becomes the mantra.....No where is this more evident than in industries where product life cycle is near maturing. If you look around you will find ample examples of this. Banks are looking for white space to expand into, software giants must constantly reinvent themselves or find new territories to find growth in an attempt to immunise themselves from disrupters. Even we are not immune from this process.


Standing still is not an option. Take the pharma industry for instance. A big chunk of its competitive advantage period can be lopped off due to the expiration of patent rights and by disrupters flooding the market with generics.

Once the patent expires, it may end in cataclysm for some players.

We can also draw lessons from history. Take a look at the Channeled Scablands where its landscape is carved in a very short time period from a single or series of similar giant flood. Glacier-like speed it appears but is not. At the base of an ice dam, the sheer amount of pressure stops the water molecules from expanding and since they cannot expand, it also cannot freeze. This resulted in a state called "super-cooled" water which remained liquid despite being several degrees below freezing. This force its way into tiny cracks in the ice resulting in an ice dam collapsing and end in cataclysm. Harlen Bretz won a Penrose Medal for thinking that goes against convention wisdom that such landscape is through a gradual process over millions of years. This "tipping point" phenomenon occurs more frequently than we realise.

We must be able to embed and institutionalise this memory so that it becomes second nature to us. For instance, let's examine how social networking tools can allow us to tune into "signals" and filter out the noise. On the other spectrum, we also need to be aware of "black swan". In the short-term we are vulnerable to the "unpredictable", the so-called "fat tail".
However, in the long-run, it is the business model with the right value proposition that will prevail provided we do not fall by the sideway in the meantime.



Keywords: quality, value systems,
trust, domain knowledge, technology, networking, maven traps, speed of trust

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Filter And Discern

When it comes to execution, the nuts and bolts of the matter count....

Execution involves a myriad of things including design, scaling, and user’s acceptance.

All these have to be aligned, and we need to anticipate and narrow all gaps, by closing the loop.

Above all, we need transparency and an honest approach to solving problems. We need informal leaders who buy-in to the concept and be the mavens and connectors to achieve "tipping point".

The soft issues are even more critical and in particular users must not be made to feel alienated. They must feel that they have a role to play in the process and the ideal approach is to ensure that the roll-out is from the bottom-up. Additionally, we need to make it easy for them to learn and use the product.

They should be able to demonstrate by way of examples of how useful the product is. We need to have case studies that allow subsequent users to better understand the benefits from using the product. One of the tasks is to install a "maven trap" which allows an easy way to provide feedback and the feedback is fed quickly to the key process owners.

This FLAT structure is expected to cut across red tape and ensures a quick response to the issues raised. For instance:

1) all team leaders, respective mavens and connectors to be Copy To
2) A comment box for providing feedback on the most useful element and least useful elements of the products, and to provide suggestions to how to further improve the product.

Lessons that we want to learn include
1) what can we discern from the filtered data?
2) can we infer and or make conclusions? and
3) how will it help us to get to our goals?

Ultimately the success it measured by how well we aligned the processes, and ensuring that we tighten our focus vis-à-vis our target audience. Is the "Quality" the same as felt by customers and the way we convey it by way of our conduct, processes, interaction within and without etc.

Keywords: quality, value systems,
trust, domain knowledge, technology, networking, maven traps, speed of trust,

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