Book Review – The New Capitalist Manifesto

I’m a big fan of Umair Haque’s blog (and have always gotten a kick out of the fact that the blog is on the Harvard Business Review site—they aren’t usually this radical…)

Anyway, I had been dying to read his new book The New Capitalist Manifesto. There were some great ideas here…Like his explanation of the societal cost of things like burgers (a $3 burger includes $10 in health and environmental costs) and $10 of subsidies of water, land and jobs) and oil (hidden costs add $4/gallon the price). Read more

IC and KM – Building from the Bottom Up

Yesterday, I talked about how process can give your organization superpowers. These include processes that support value creation for customers and those that support the internal operations of the company. This list is pretty standard includes infrastructure, human resources, information technology and finance. Each of these functions has its own body of knowledge, competencies and processes. While they are part of the intangible capital of your organization, we won’t spend a lot of time on the details of these classic support systems because these functions are pretty mature.

One support process that is newer and therefore less standardized is knowledge management (KM). This was actually one of the earliest solutions offered by the market in response to the rise of the knowledge economy. The message was simple: If we live in a knowledge economy, we need to manage knowledge. Software and consulting companies sold a lot of people on the concept of KM driven by a faith that if people in an organization could just have access to all the knowledge of their peers, everyone would be smarter and more effective. As often happens with new trends (which always walk the line of fads…) a lot of people thought that this single business function would provide the answer to management in the knowledge era. Check the box and you are a modern company. Of course, this faith was misplaced. This book is a testament to the fact that knowledge and the management of knowledge is about more than a software program.

But that does not mean that KM is irrelevant. Read more

McKinsey’s New Innovation Metric

I have faulted McKinsey before for suggesting simplistic metrics that can provide interesting historical data but be very dangerous as guides to management. So I read their latest suggestion on tracking innovation performance score with some skepticism.

They don’t really explain how they calculate it but the sense of it is that they look at how much a company outperforms its competition over a five to seven year period and assume that this compound annual growth rate is a measure of a firm’s innovation performance. Here are a few thoughts. Read more

How to Increase the Return on Your IT Investments NOW

I love the fact that McKinsey is talking about IT as a strategic investment here and advising companies to avoid wholesale slashing of investments in “Managing IT in a downturn: Beyond cost cutting.”

There is a lot of good advice here. They lay out areas of opportunities for quick return for investment in specific business processes, as well as specific areas that can be ripe for short-term gain.

I think there is also a real opportunity in today’s environment to fine tune and increase your return on past investments. What I see with my clients is that the most important factor in success of IT investment is the accompanying ecosystem.

Read more

Management Lessons on Web 2.0

Thanks to KNOW Network here for the great summary of McKinsey’s suggestions here on how to make Web 2.0 work:

1. The transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top.
2. The best uses come from users – but they require help to scale.
3. What’s in the workflow is what gets used.
4. Appeal to the participants’ egos and needs – not just their wallets.
5. The right solution comes from the right participants.
6. Balance the top-down and self-management of risk. Read more

Gartner on Investor Communication

The McKinsey Quarterly recently ran an interview here with Gartner CFO Christopher Laford. In the interview, he explained that:

When our new CEO, Gene Hall, joined, we established a long-term financial road map as a key element of our investor communications. We told our investors how we were running our businesses and where we thought we could drive performance over the long term-key measures, like revenue growth by business segment and margins.

And when we did that, we also identified the two or three metrics, for each segment, that would help investors understand Read more