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Andrew Greatrex |
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Friday, November 17, 2006 |
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News and Announcements for NPODS |
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Ashes To Ashes
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By Andrew Greatrex on
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
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Friday, December 15, 2006
By Richard David Hames
In our sports-mad country much of the population is once again caught up in watching a titanic struggle between two of the best teams in the world – a struggle of immense character, requiring strategy, fitness, skills and persistence in equal proportions from those engaged in the hostilities. I am referring, of course, to the traditional battle for the Ashes. Australia versus England. ‘Dad’s Army’ against the ‘Barmy Army’!
In rugby, as any avid fan will testify, there is nothing more satisfying than beating the All Blacks, preferably in New Zealand, and then watching with uncontained glee as an unforgiving Kiwi public rubs salt into the gaping wound. Yet, in spite of appearances to the contrary, this is a friendly rivalry grounded in mutual admiration and ungrudging respect.
In cricket the nature of competitiveness is poles apart. England is the team to whip. Indeed, it is our moral duty to crush them. While the prospect of beating the Poms is compelling, defeat at their hands is simply unthinkable. This is a clash borne more out of rancour, the need to settle old scores, perhaps even a visceral desire to humiliate those who would still have us believe that we are just a nation of ignorant louts and upstarts. Nothing compares to the joy we feel when grinding them into the Australian dirt…
Ok, ok, so that’s a bit over the top. But I’m illustrating the power of metaphor here right?
There are other so-called ‘team’ sports we must include but that exist on the edge of such a definition: swimming, diving, skiing and horse riding spring to mind. Strictly speaking these ‘team’ sports are mostly an aggregate of individual performances. Overall results matter, except that here competition is intrinsic – although there are other people competing, the real contest is between the individual and the stopwatch and against each individual’s capacity to endure physical stress.
Under the surface of populist convention and marketing hype, then, all three types of ‘team’ sport differ in their motivations, the conditions under which they operate, and how they embed distinct emotional responses in the community’s collective unconscious.
Of course, neither cricket nor rugby is universal in its appeal. Nowadays soccer is held up to be the egalitarian team sport par excellence. It has become a world game with enthusiastic competition existing at many levels between clubs, countries and even highly partisan ethnic groups. The only downside has been the unfortunate violence inflicted on both property and people by a few fanatical fans hell-bent on striking fear in others - an ironic twist to conventional gladiatorial combat where spectators become the combatants.
Clearly sporting metaphors have a clarity about them that makes them seductive in some contexts. What makes little sense, however, is their continued use in situations where conditions bear little or no relationship to reality. Such is the case with business where the context has become global, instant and volatile and where the most effective organisational metaphors are mostly to do with networks and living systems. To continue to use team sport metaphors, of whatever persuasion, as tools for understanding business in this environment is a stupid vanity that suppresses, rather than liberates, creativity and knowledge.
In recent years Australia has had enormous success on the sports field and in the pool. For a nation of some 20 million people we have constantly ‘punched above our weight’. (Oh my god, even I am falling into the trap of using sport metaphors. You see how easy it is!)
But the same success has been had elsewhere - not least in the arts, in scientific research, in education and yes, even in business. Our task is to find metaphors that make sense today – and they are not to be found on the sports field.
Richard Hames will be speaking at NPODS 2007 and posts a regular blog spot with Global Leaders Network.
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World Expert to Speak at NPODS 2007 - C.K. Prahalad
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By Andrew Greatrex on
Friday, November 17, 2006
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 World renowned strategy and innovation expert Professor C.K. Prahalad has agreed to speak at NPODS 2007. Quoted by Business Week as “the most influential thinker on business strategy today”, CK Prahalad has appeared within the top ten of every management strategy surveys worldwide for the past 10 years. Known as the inventor of the concept of core competencies, Professor Prahalad is widely acknowledged as one of the world's most significant forces in corporate thinking. He has consulted with the senior management of many of the world's foremost companies, including HP, Sony, Ahlstrom, AT&T, Cargill, Citicorp, Eastman Chemical, Kodak, Oracle, Philips, Quantum, Revlon, Steelcase, and Unilever. During his presentation at NPODs 2007 Professor Prahalad will cover:
- The need for new approaches in a world of discontinuous changes.
- Why the “forgetting curve” is as important as the “learning curve”.
- The creation of value through innovative experiences with customers.
- How to use emerging markets as a source of information.
- The new face of strategy: how to anticipate the needs of markets and customers.
- The new nature of strategy: from focus on a particular industry to focus on discovery and innovation.
- The tension between efficiently managing “today's businesses” and creatively positioning the company for “tomorrow's businesses”.
- Strategy implementation: how to put complex ideas into practice.
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Malcolm Gladwell - The Tipping Point
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By Andrew Greatrex on
Thursday, November 16, 2006
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 NPODS Speaker Malcolm Gladwell is known throughout the world as the flamboyant staff writer for The New Yorker. He took the business world by storm with his books The Tipping Point and then Blink. World leaders have been using the salient points of The Tipping Point ever since. Below is a summary of the The Tipping Point as prior reading to his talk at NPODS 2007.
The Tipping Point
By offering readers a groundbreaking analysis of how trends are sparked and take hold, Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point became an exemplification of the very processes he was describing. Upon its 2000 release, the book became a national bestseller whose influence would help to initiate paradigm shifts in fields ranging from marketing to public health.
The processes and mechanisms by which some trends achieve exponential popularity while others sputter and fade into oblivion have long been thought to be mysterious and resistant to analysis. However, Gladwell’s central argument is that there are actually a number of patterns and factors that are at play in virtually every influential trend, ranging from the spread of communicative diseases to the unprecedented popularity of a particular children’s television show. If you analyze the evolution of any major phenomenon, the author suggests, you will find that the processes involved are strikingly similar.
The nature of modern culture is such that many new ideas are constantly being introduced from a wide variety of sources, ranging from trend-setting teens and twenty-somethings in the nation’s metropolitan centers to new product offerings from established corporations. Some of these achieve a measure of steady, consistent success, some fail, and some take off on an upward trajectory of exponential popularity and influence.
Based on his in-depth research spanning a number of different fields, industries, and scholarly disciplines, Gladwell identifies three key factors that each play in role in determining whether a particular trend will “tip” into wide-scale popularity. Gladwell’s discussion and illustration of the concepts of the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context comprise the majority of the book.
The Law of the Few contends that before widespread popularity can be attained, a few key types of people must champion an idea, concept, or product before it can reach the tipping point. Gladwell describes these key types as Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. If individuals representing all three of these groups endorse and advocate a new idea, it is much more likely that it will tip into exponential success.
Gladwell defines the Stickiness Factor as the quality that compels people to pay close, sustained attention to a product, concept, or idea. Stickiness is hard to define, and its presence or absence often depends heavily on context. Often, the way that the Stickiness Factor is generated is unconventional, unexpected, and contrary to received wisdom.
The concept that Gladwell terms the Power of Context is enormously important in determining whether a particular phenomenon will tip into widespread popularity. Even minute changes in the environment can play a major factor in the propensity of a given concept attaining the tipping point. Also, Gladwell defines the term context very broadly, discussing the implications of small variations in social groups and minor changes in a neighborhood or community environment as shifts that can cause a new idea to tip.
After identifying and describing these key concepts, Gladwell dedicates the remainder of the book to illustrating them and their interdependency in a series of compelling case studies and examples. An afterword included in the newest edition of the book updates some of Gladwell’s arguments for more pertinent application in an era of widespread Internet connectivity.
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