Green Recovery
Just been alerted to Green Recovery, another debunking of assertions that it is too costly to tackle environmental damage [notably carbon emissions]. This follows a session I saw from John Sterman of MIT and the Sustainability Institute, which reported McKinsey data showing 10 giga-tons per year [!!] of CO2 abatement potential that is financially profitable to undertake right now. John went on to describe the huge economic dividend to be had by tackling carbon emissions - will feature more on this in a future post.
Don’t wait for recovery: focus and drive forward
When will the business climate improve? – wrong question! I’m not usually a fan of Fortune – too focused on personalities, rather than what actually gets done and works – but great item by Ram Charan explains with some good examples [GE and environment services group Nalco] that strong companies are looking to drive forward, rather than hunkering down and hoping. Yes, they have cut costs and conserved cash, but refocused to position themselves for growth.
One intriguing piece of Nalco’s response was a deep review of their product range, leading to them ‘blowing up’ hundreds of under-performing products. I’ve noted before that over-extension is a common route into trouble – adding too many products, chasing too many new markets and small customers, starting too many initiatives etc just to be seen to be delivering growth. So a question for Nalco might be ‘If you just killed hundreds of poor products, how come you didn’t do that years ago?’
Later in the same issue, Fortune reports on Pfizer’s re-worked drug development process which includes an interesting slogan – ‘Kill early and often’. Focus does seem to keep reappearing as a feature of strategically successful organizations.
Skills and capabilities
Capabilities clearly enable performance – if your organization can do key tasks, faster, cheaper or better than others, then you will develop stronger resources in a more powerful system than they can. But academic strategy articles on the topic are mostly too abstract to connect with the practical appraisal of skills and capabilities in organizations. So it’s good to see a down-to-earth approach to assessing skills from McKinsey – asking people to evaluate their own needs. But there’s more to a team’s or organization’s capabilities than just the sum of individuals’ skills, so could the same approach work for self-assessment of team capabilities?
If such capabilities consist of Read more
Good sense from McDonald’s
A great review of What McDonald’s Can Teach Us About Recovery from an insider involved from the turn-round after 2002. Read more