In my post of 10 July 06 (Current Topics: Bliesner family, importance of organisational history, the creative organisation) I spoke among other things about the importance of organisational history and about individual versus organisational creativity.
Two of my colleagues - Tom Schwarz (Kinnogene Australia) and David Jago (Smart Meetings www.smartmeetings.com.au) - have been working on the development of new facilitation approaches at community level intended to help communities resolve problems and take greater responsibility for their own development.
This work links to a broader question. Why do some communities develop despite the odds while others in apparently similar positions stagnate or decline?
The answer appears to lie in the presence of key champions. However, when we dig down we find that it is normally the combination of those champions with community history, structure and culture that creates the positive outcome. Champions on their own do not appear to be enough. This equates to the difference between organisational and individual creativity referred to by Jeffrey Baumgartner.
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Friday, July 14, 2006
On productivity: a short note
Over lunch I was reading the latest issue of Australia's Business Review Weekly. Lunch, by the way, was salad with fish sauce. I have very little time, but I do try to do some things outside especially gardening. And lettuce is easy to grow!
Back to the point. The BRW had a short comment on decline in productivity in Australia's electricity industry. All very serious. But, and as the few readers of this blog will know, I actually believe that history is important. And history provides a very useful corrective to the view expressed in the BRW story. In doing so, it also demonstrates the need to look at key measures like productivity change in a longer term context.
I have been monitoring performance in networked industries like telecoms or electricity for the best part of 30 years. There is no doubt that there have been huge productivity gains, although those gains are not associated primarily with new technology (the common assumption) but with new work structures. However, some of the gains can be transitory.
Corporatisation and privatisation of Australia's electricty industry saw large productivity gains. However, some of those gains were due to unsustainable cost cutting on the staff side.
In 2004 I chaired a seminar trying to attract trades people to consider employment opportunities in regional NSW. One of the speakers was from the electricity industry. He said in part that cut backs across the industry in the recruitment and training of linemen had created a major shortage. The industry was now struggling to catch up.
Link this to the productivity question. The initial cuts led to substantial apparent productivity increases. But the industry then had to pay lot more to try to attract immediately available linemen and to train new one. So productivity turned negative.
The point? Beware of apparent trends unless you understand what had happened before.
Back to the point. The BRW had a short comment on decline in productivity in Australia's electricity industry. All very serious. But, and as the few readers of this blog will know, I actually believe that history is important. And history provides a very useful corrective to the view expressed in the BRW story. In doing so, it also demonstrates the need to look at key measures like productivity change in a longer term context.
I have been monitoring performance in networked industries like telecoms or electricity for the best part of 30 years. There is no doubt that there have been huge productivity gains, although those gains are not associated primarily with new technology (the common assumption) but with new work structures. However, some of the gains can be transitory.
Corporatisation and privatisation of Australia's electricty industry saw large productivity gains. However, some of those gains were due to unsustainable cost cutting on the staff side.
In 2004 I chaired a seminar trying to attract trades people to consider employment opportunities in regional NSW. One of the speakers was from the electricity industry. He said in part that cut backs across the industry in the recruitment and training of linemen had created a major shortage. The industry was now struggling to catch up.
Link this to the productivity question. The initial cuts led to substantial apparent productivity increases. But the industry then had to pay lot more to try to attract immediately available linemen and to train new one. So productivity turned negative.
The point? Beware of apparent trends unless you understand what had happened before.
Australia's history wars
In two of my early posts I referred to the history wars in Australia and briefly discussed approaches to history. Now Geoff Robinson in his the southcoast blog has drawn my attention to the Australian Government's summit on the teaching of Australian history. Geoff's blog includes a link to an Australian article on the summit.
Now Geoff makes an interesting point, one that bears upon the question of topic selection, one of the elements in the history wars. Will they include in any new curriculum key topics relating to things such as the industrial strife in the 1890s, the role of the union movement and the arbitration system? I do wonder.
Now Geoff makes an interesting point, one that bears upon the question of topic selection, one of the elements in the history wars. Will they include in any new curriculum key topics relating to things such as the industrial strife in the 1890s, the role of the union movement and the arbitration system? I do wonder.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Current Topics: Bliesner family, importance of organisational history, the creative organisation
The last few days have been one of those busy periods when things have been all over the place, making it difficult to think about a single topic in any in-depth way. So I thought that I should simply record some of the issues/topics.
Part of the time was spent creating a story on the Regional Living Australia site - www.regionalliving.com.au - on the relocation of the Bliesner family from Melbourne to the Dalby on Queensland's Darling Downs. These case studies on people who have left metro for Regional Australia are always interesting because they introduce me to new communities, or at least communities that I do not know well.
Part of the time was also spent in professional discussion inside and outside my own group, looking especially at issues associated with organisational development and change.
One discussion thread triggered in part by the current University of New England strategy review (see story of 7 July : Welsman, University of New England and Planning) was the role that history plays in both impeding and assisting organisational change.
This is a topic that deserves a long post in its own right. In summary, organisational history is often ignored or seen as an impediment, especially by new broom CEO's. Change is required, we must get rid of the past. Yet the reality, at least as I see it, is that cultural change depends upon understanding existing history and culture, is most effective when related to that history. The challenge is to find the right way to understand and respond to both history and culture.
A second discussion thread was the difference between individual and organisational creativity. This one was triggered by a post by Jeffrey Baumgartner on Nava Shalev's Global Relocation Portal blog - http://www.globalrelocation.ca/blog/. In this post Jeffrey makes a clear distinction between the two and argues that organisations must consciously manage organisational creativity if they are to maximise individual creativity.
Now that's fair enough. But like the earlier and related concept of the "learning" organisation, management of organisational creativity is actually a slippery topic.
Organisations can, as Jeffrey suggests, adopt policies that will encourage creativity at individual level, they can consciously bring in new people from different areas (I am always astonished at the way organisations want to just recruit people from narrowly defined experience slices), they can use multi-function teams. But is this the management of organisational creativity or simply the creation of conditions that will encourage creativity? Is is possible to go further than this? Does it in fact matter?
As a consultant and senior manager, my experience has been that there are in fact creative organisations, that the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts, that it does therefore matter. However, getting this across properly to clients is hard because so much of it is "soft" stuff, things that cannot be directly measured. And we live in a measurement age.
This post is long enough. I will return to these themes later.
Part of the time was spent creating a story on the Regional Living Australia site - www.regionalliving.com.au - on the relocation of the Bliesner family from Melbourne to the Dalby on Queensland's Darling Downs. These case studies on people who have left metro for Regional Australia are always interesting because they introduce me to new communities, or at least communities that I do not know well.
Part of the time was also spent in professional discussion inside and outside my own group, looking especially at issues associated with organisational development and change.
One discussion thread triggered in part by the current University of New England strategy review (see story of 7 July : Welsman, University of New England and Planning) was the role that history plays in both impeding and assisting organisational change.
This is a topic that deserves a long post in its own right. In summary, organisational history is often ignored or seen as an impediment, especially by new broom CEO's. Change is required, we must get rid of the past. Yet the reality, at least as I see it, is that cultural change depends upon understanding existing history and culture, is most effective when related to that history. The challenge is to find the right way to understand and respond to both history and culture.
A second discussion thread was the difference between individual and organisational creativity. This one was triggered by a post by Jeffrey Baumgartner on Nava Shalev's Global Relocation Portal blog - http://www.globalrelocation.ca/blog/. In this post Jeffrey makes a clear distinction between the two and argues that organisations must consciously manage organisational creativity if they are to maximise individual creativity.
Now that's fair enough. But like the earlier and related concept of the "learning" organisation, management of organisational creativity is actually a slippery topic.
Organisations can, as Jeffrey suggests, adopt policies that will encourage creativity at individual level, they can consciously bring in new people from different areas (I am always astonished at the way organisations want to just recruit people from narrowly defined experience slices), they can use multi-function teams. But is this the management of organisational creativity or simply the creation of conditions that will encourage creativity? Is is possible to go further than this? Does it in fact matter?
As a consultant and senior manager, my experience has been that there are in fact creative organisations, that the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts, that it does therefore matter. However, getting this across properly to clients is hard because so much of it is "soft" stuff, things that cannot be directly measured. And we live in a measurement age.
This post is long enough. I will return to these themes later.
Saturday, July 08, 2006
Country Week 06: selling regional NSW
In my last post (Welsman, University of New England and Planning) I talked about the way in which an email from the UNE Alumni Office dealing with the future of UNE provided a link point across my various interests. During the week I also received another email with similar effects.
Peter Bailey emailed me that Country Week - www.countryweek.com.au - had brought a new web site on line. Now I think that this is important.
Peter has been a man with a dream. He has believed for a number of years that country Australia, all the areas outside the metro cities, must combine together to sell their story. As a first step, he launched Country Week in NSW.
Now this might all seem self-evident, at least to Australians. The metro markets are big and crowded. It is hard for any regional centre to get its story across. They are all just too small. So why not combine to sell the message?
The on-ground reality is very different. Regional centres find it very hard to combine because they see themselves in competition with each other. So they fragment and waste their resources.
On my companion blog site on the history of New England - http://newenglandaustralia.blogspot.com/ - I have looked at some of the reasons why this is so in one area, at the way in which divide and rule - the factional system - has been used as a weapon.
One of the marvelous things about Peter, something that I admire enormously, is the way in which he has refused to admit defeat. Somehow he has managed to unify sufficient parts of non-metro NSW into a single promotion selling a credible story to those in Sydney. To do this, he travelled thousands of miles by car and plane, criss-crossing NSW constantly. Anybody less determined than Peter would have given up.
Ndarala became a major sponsor of Country Week in 2004. We did so in part because we had member practices providing a range of regional development services, in part because many of our members were in regional Australia. Our media centre - http://www.ndarala.com/index.cfm?id=950 - contains a range of stories explaining our involvement.
This year's Country Week will be held in Sydney on 11-13 August. It provides a major opportunity to find out more about some of the opportunities offered by regional NSW.
Peter Bailey emailed me that Country Week - www.countryweek.com.au - had brought a new web site on line. Now I think that this is important.
Peter has been a man with a dream. He has believed for a number of years that country Australia, all the areas outside the metro cities, must combine together to sell their story. As a first step, he launched Country Week in NSW.
Now this might all seem self-evident, at least to Australians. The metro markets are big and crowded. It is hard for any regional centre to get its story across. They are all just too small. So why not combine to sell the message?
The on-ground reality is very different. Regional centres find it very hard to combine because they see themselves in competition with each other. So they fragment and waste their resources.
On my companion blog site on the history of New England - http://newenglandaustralia.blogspot.com/ - I have looked at some of the reasons why this is so in one area, at the way in which divide and rule - the factional system - has been used as a weapon.
One of the marvelous things about Peter, something that I admire enormously, is the way in which he has refused to admit defeat. Somehow he has managed to unify sufficient parts of non-metro NSW into a single promotion selling a credible story to those in Sydney. To do this, he travelled thousands of miles by car and plane, criss-crossing NSW constantly. Anybody less determined than Peter would have given up.
Ndarala became a major sponsor of Country Week in 2004. We did so in part because we had member practices providing a range of regional development services, in part because many of our members were in regional Australia. Our media centre - http://www.ndarala.com/index.cfm?id=950 - contains a range of stories explaining our involvement.
This year's Country Week will be held in Sydney on 11-13 August. It provides a major opportunity to find out more about some of the opportunities offered by regional NSW.
Welsman, University of New England and Planning
During the week I received an email from Jennifer Miller, the alumni officer at the University of New England attaching a strategic planning paper for the University.
For those who are interested in a general sense the VC's letter and discussion paper can be accessed through the UNE home-page at http://www.une.edu.au/ or http://www.une.edu.au/2006-strategic-plan/.
The discussion paper managed to straddle a number of my current interests.
The paper itself was prepared by Dr Sandra Welsman, one of our own Ndarala professionals with a long interest in higher education as a sector. Our own site carries an earlier article by Sandra - Australian Higher education 2016 - Looking Back- http://www.ndarala.com/index.cfm?id=1116. This article explores the changes now taking place in the sector.
Sandra's interest in the general topic is shared by a number of our professionals and has been the subject of a number of internal email chains. However, there is added interest in the UNE case because a dozen of our professionals including me have an involvement with the place totalling more than a 100 years as children of staff members, students, present and former staff and alumni.
Founded as a college of the University of Sydney in 1938, UNE is one of Australia's older tertiary institutions and the first university located outside a capital city. Its establishment and the earlier establishment in 1928 of the Armidale Teachers College were one of the outcomes of the historical processes that I have been tracing through in my blog on the history and culture of Australia's New England - see http://newenglandaustralia.blogspot.com/.
Like other tertiary institutions located outside Australia's metro centres, UNE has suffered in recent years from a combination of demographic change, creation of a plethora of rival institutions in both metro and regional areas, constant changes in Government policies and funding and shifts in community attitudes. One of the aims of the planning process is to find the best way of addressing these challenges.
As a collective, we have long been interested in regional development and the promotion of opportunities outside Australia's metro centres. This led to the launch last year of Regional Living Australia - www.regionalliving.com.au - as a site intended to promote non-metro opportunities including higher education.
So we have a very clearly established interest. However, Sandra's extremely well written paper raised an interesting challenge.
It would seem logical for us to put in a submission to the UNE review given our interest as well as our collective professional knowledge. However, how do we do this without running across Sandra's professional role? What do we do or say if our collective view is different from the necessarily composite view put forward in Sandra's discussion paper? And that seems quite likely on some issues.
Take one simple example. Is UNE a regional university or simply one located in a regional area?
Speaking personally, I have never thought of UNE as regional university in the narrow way the term is used today - it really has become a put down - and hence am uncomfortable with the attachment of that term to the University. Here I have a lot of sympathy with Charles Sturt, a university that has steadfastly refused to classify itself as a regional university on the simple grounds that such a tag is likely to be sudden death to some of its strategic aspirations.
I think that we will probably put in a submission, but have to work through just what we can usefully say first.
For those who are interested in a general sense the VC's letter and discussion paper can be accessed through the UNE home-page at http://www.une.edu.au/ or http://www.une.edu.au/2006-strategic-plan/.
The discussion paper managed to straddle a number of my current interests.
The paper itself was prepared by Dr Sandra Welsman, one of our own Ndarala professionals with a long interest in higher education as a sector. Our own site carries an earlier article by Sandra - Australian Higher education 2016 - Looking Back- http://www.ndarala.com/index.cfm?id=1116. This article explores the changes now taking place in the sector.
Sandra's interest in the general topic is shared by a number of our professionals and has been the subject of a number of internal email chains. However, there is added interest in the UNE case because a dozen of our professionals including me have an involvement with the place totalling more than a 100 years as children of staff members, students, present and former staff and alumni.
Founded as a college of the University of Sydney in 1938, UNE is one of Australia's older tertiary institutions and the first university located outside a capital city. Its establishment and the earlier establishment in 1928 of the Armidale Teachers College were one of the outcomes of the historical processes that I have been tracing through in my blog on the history and culture of Australia's New England - see http://newenglandaustralia.blogspot.com/.
Like other tertiary institutions located outside Australia's metro centres, UNE has suffered in recent years from a combination of demographic change, creation of a plethora of rival institutions in both metro and regional areas, constant changes in Government policies and funding and shifts in community attitudes. One of the aims of the planning process is to find the best way of addressing these challenges.
As a collective, we have long been interested in regional development and the promotion of opportunities outside Australia's metro centres. This led to the launch last year of Regional Living Australia - www.regionalliving.com.au - as a site intended to promote non-metro opportunities including higher education.
So we have a very clearly established interest. However, Sandra's extremely well written paper raised an interesting challenge.
It would seem logical for us to put in a submission to the UNE review given our interest as well as our collective professional knowledge. However, how do we do this without running across Sandra's professional role? What do we do or say if our collective view is different from the necessarily composite view put forward in Sandra's discussion paper? And that seems quite likely on some issues.
Take one simple example. Is UNE a regional university or simply one located in a regional area?
Speaking personally, I have never thought of UNE as regional university in the narrow way the term is used today - it really has become a put down - and hence am uncomfortable with the attachment of that term to the University. Here I have a lot of sympathy with Charles Sturt, a university that has steadfastly refused to classify itself as a regional university on the simple grounds that such a tag is likely to be sudden death to some of its strategic aspirations.
I think that we will probably put in a submission, but have to work through just what we can usefully say first.
Blogging Woes Revisited
In my 4 July post on blogging woes, I complained more in sorrow than in anger about the way in which Google's automated system had decided that two of my blogs were potential spam creators.
I am pleased to report that after inspection both have been removed from the watch list, meaning that I can again post without going through the time consuming process of constantly entering letters to prove that I am not a machine!
I am pleased to report that after inspection both have been removed from the watch list, meaning that I can again post without going through the time consuming process of constantly entering letters to prove that I am not a machine!
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Exploring the blogosphere - Searches
One of the best and most enjoyable devices that I have found is to actually use the search facility on the blog.
These are far from perfect. For reasons that escape me, a search on this blog on blog, blogs, blogging yielded just one result when it should have thrown up several entries. Sometimes, too, you have to plough through a lot of ephemeral material to find a few nuggets. But it is still worth while.
This is best illustrated by example.
I found Gautum Ghosh's blog, Gautum Ghosh on Management - http://gauteg.blogspot.com - through our common membership of LinkedinBloggers - http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/LinkedinBloggers.
Gautum is an Indian HR professional. He uses his blog to talk talk about a range of management issues, especially from an Indian perspective. So when I found the blog I used the search engine to get an overview, searching on topics of particular interest.
I started by searching on professional services, finding 10 posts. These included several general posts on blogging that I scanned quickly for interest. In one I found a nugget, a link through to technorati - http://technorati.com.
I am sure that all the blogging experts know this site, I did not. It appears to be a very good blog search, monitoring and measurement site.
Drilling down, I searched on law firms, another interest of mine within professional services. In this case, no results. So I then searched on outsourcing, an interesting topic at present because of India's role. Here I found 29 posts, some containing interesting material.
I then looked at training, 27 posts. This showed me that the Indian discussions on topics such as training metrics were a subset of broader global discussions. I found some interesting links here, but did not pursue them because of time.
In all, I thought that this was not a bad yield for half an hour's investment, so will come back from time to time.
These are far from perfect. For reasons that escape me, a search on this blog on blog, blogs, blogging yielded just one result when it should have thrown up several entries. Sometimes, too, you have to plough through a lot of ephemeral material to find a few nuggets. But it is still worth while.
This is best illustrated by example.
I found Gautum Ghosh's blog, Gautum Ghosh on Management - http://gauteg.blogspot.com - through our common membership of LinkedinBloggers - http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/LinkedinBloggers.
Gautum is an Indian HR professional. He uses his blog to talk talk about a range of management issues, especially from an Indian perspective. So when I found the blog I used the search engine to get an overview, searching on topics of particular interest.
I started by searching on professional services, finding 10 posts. These included several general posts on blogging that I scanned quickly for interest. In one I found a nugget, a link through to technorati - http://technorati.com.
I am sure that all the blogging experts know this site, I did not. It appears to be a very good blog search, monitoring and measurement site.
Drilling down, I searched on law firms, another interest of mine within professional services. In this case, no results. So I then searched on outsourcing, an interesting topic at present because of India's role. Here I found 29 posts, some containing interesting material.
I then looked at training, 27 posts. This showed me that the Indian discussions on topics such as training metrics were a subset of broader global discussions. I found some interesting links here, but did not pursue them because of time.
In all, I thought that this was not a bad yield for half an hour's investment, so will come back from time to time.
Exploring the blogosphere
When I started this blog, I said that I wanted to chat, to reflect on things that might otherwise get lost in a busy professional life. Now the use of the word chat implies a conversation.
When I began I knew the that the blogosphere was incredibly crowded. I had not realised how crowded.
Technorati presently monitors 47 million sites with 2.7 billion links! The number of blogs grows all the time, especially among young people. My eighteen year old's group uses blogs as a device for keeping in touch, for sharing photographs in particular. Some of those blogs are created and then just sit there, others change all the time.
So how do we explore this incredibly crowded space to best advantage, how do we use it to achieve our own ends whether they be professional, business or simply conversational? I think that it all depends upon purpose.
I first became interested in blogging because I saw it as a tool that my own professionals within the Ndarala Group might use to achieve their practice objectives, promoting their expertise to a broader world. This can be especially helpful for the self employed professional lacking the promotional resources of a conventional organisation. This remains my view, although there are a number of difficulties to be overcome if it is to work.
I then looked at blogging as an internal communications device and learning tool within organisations, especially where an actual or potential community of practice was involved. I think that this is one of the most exciting practical applications of the blogging format.
More recently, I have focused on blogging as both conversation and a way of finding things - personal and professional - that I might otherwise miss.
In the next few posts I want to record some of the things that I have learned. In doing so, I will write not as a technical professional - I am in awe of the technical expertise I have found among bloggers and cannot hope to match this in anyway - but focus instead on the personal lessons.
When I began I knew the that the blogosphere was incredibly crowded. I had not realised how crowded.
Technorati presently monitors 47 million sites with 2.7 billion links! The number of blogs grows all the time, especially among young people. My eighteen year old's group uses blogs as a device for keeping in touch, for sharing photographs in particular. Some of those blogs are created and then just sit there, others change all the time.
So how do we explore this incredibly crowded space to best advantage, how do we use it to achieve our own ends whether they be professional, business or simply conversational? I think that it all depends upon purpose.
I first became interested in blogging because I saw it as a tool that my own professionals within the Ndarala Group might use to achieve their practice objectives, promoting their expertise to a broader world. This can be especially helpful for the self employed professional lacking the promotional resources of a conventional organisation. This remains my view, although there are a number of difficulties to be overcome if it is to work.
I then looked at blogging as an internal communications device and learning tool within organisations, especially where an actual or potential community of practice was involved. I think that this is one of the most exciting practical applications of the blogging format.
More recently, I have focused on blogging as both conversation and a way of finding things - personal and professional - that I might otherwise miss.
In the next few posts I want to record some of the things that I have learned. In doing so, I will write not as a technical professional - I am in awe of the technical expertise I have found among bloggers and cannot hope to match this in anyway - but focus instead on the personal lessons.
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Blogging Woes
A few days ago I established a third a blog - http://professionalservicesmanagement.blogspot.com - to focus on the management of professional services firms. I did so because I want to use this blog for conversation across the full range of my interests.
So far so good. However, Google's automated anti-spam system then decided that the new blog might in fact be a spam generator. This means that while I can still post, I have to keep filling in letters before I can do so. This happpens each time I save to draft. I do this a fair bit having lost previous posts, so it's time consuming and annoying. It also means that while the blog can still be found at its web address, there is some loss of access and I think indexing.
Worse still, Google has now extended the anti-spam system to this blog, presumably because of the link between the two.
Whatever my blogs may be, they are clearly not spam. I have sent the required follow up measures to Google so that they can inspect the sites. Hopefully this will not take too long, or I am going to expire from frustration.
So far so good. However, Google's automated anti-spam system then decided that the new blog might in fact be a spam generator. This means that while I can still post, I have to keep filling in letters before I can do so. This happpens each time I save to draft. I do this a fair bit having lost previous posts, so it's time consuming and annoying. It also means that while the blog can still be found at its web address, there is some loss of access and I think indexing.
Worse still, Google has now extended the anti-spam system to this blog, presumably because of the link between the two.
Whatever my blogs may be, they are clearly not spam. I have sent the required follow up measures to Google so that they can inspect the sites. Hopefully this will not take too long, or I am going to expire from frustration.
Monday, July 03, 2006
the southcoast: the Geoff Robinson blog
I have just come across a very thoughtful and I think useful blog - http://thesouthcoast.blogspot.com.
Published by Geoff Robinson, the blog defines itself in part as "historically informed comments on labour and politics with an Australian & North American focus."
I come at things from a different perspective to Geoff.
To the degree that I now have a party political position I describe myself as Country Party. My grandfather (David Drummond) was a Country Party parlimentarian. As a child I handed out party how to vote cards at election after election. Later I was a Country Party machine official, helping rebuild the party in Eden-Monaro. In this role, I supported and actively promoted the change of name to National Country Party, a move I now regret. I also ran for but lost party preselection.
My views on social issues never fitted exactly with the conservatism of some party members. But I felt strongly then and now that the basic philosophy of the party, its belief in the small person, in the virtues of cooperation, in the need for electoral systems to prevent the oppression of the minority by the majority, was right.
While I come at things from a different perspective to Geoff, I support what I see as one of his key points, that the past should be used to inform the present. I also find his different perspective refreshing. Finally, his blog seems to include a wealth of interesting links.
Published by Geoff Robinson, the blog defines itself in part as "historically informed comments on labour and politics with an Australian & North American focus."
I come at things from a different perspective to Geoff.
To the degree that I now have a party political position I describe myself as Country Party. My grandfather (David Drummond) was a Country Party parlimentarian. As a child I handed out party how to vote cards at election after election. Later I was a Country Party machine official, helping rebuild the party in Eden-Monaro. In this role, I supported and actively promoted the change of name to National Country Party, a move I now regret. I also ran for but lost party preselection.
My views on social issues never fitted exactly with the conservatism of some party members. But I felt strongly then and now that the basic philosophy of the party, its belief in the small person, in the virtues of cooperation, in the need for electoral systems to prevent the oppression of the minority by the majority, was right.
While I come at things from a different perspective to Geoff, I support what I see as one of his key points, that the past should be used to inform the present. I also find his different perspective refreshing. Finally, his blog seems to include a wealth of interesting links.
Sunday, July 02, 2006
Why can't professionals sell?
One of my clients is a CBD law firm. Their professionals find marketing hard. The same thing holds with the professionals in my own Ndarala Group. They know that they have to get the work through the door, but find it hard to go and chase the necessary clients. Why is this so?
I think that part of the reason lies in the combination of personality and training. The professions attract people who can examine problems objectively. Our training reinforces this. But sales works on emotion, on the ability to explain to the prospective client why we can solve their problem. Our training in objectivity makes this hard.
But I also think that part of the problem lies in intellectual arrogance. We actually expect the client to understand why they should use our services simply because we are a professional. But why should they? It is our task to help them identify their needs, to give them the information to choose us.
I think that part of the reason lies in the combination of personality and training. The professions attract people who can examine problems objectively. Our training reinforces this. But sales works on emotion, on the ability to explain to the prospective client why we can solve their problem. Our training in objectivity makes this hard.
But I also think that part of the problem lies in intellectual arrogance. We actually expect the client to understand why they should use our services simply because we are a professional. But why should they? It is our task to help them identify their needs, to give them the information to choose us.
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