Behind the Scenes at Global-Roam

Shane has been lightning-quick and beaten me to the punch (as it were) with his take on the seminar we both attended on Wednesday (29th) this week.

On the day I took 4 pages of notes (and not a doodle in sight) so I thought it might be of interest, to you, for me to waffle on a little, as well – even just to cure your insomnia.

Until they take it down, the IIB has a page on their website that explains a little about the seminar – which was focused around “Building a Resilient Company”.

An economists view

Craig James (Chief Equities Economist from Commonwealth Securities, and sometime television commentator) was first to the stage.

Craig suggested the audience should ask themselves “so what?” throughout his presentation (I think the objective was for each business owner/manager to identify what each particular bit of economic news meant for their particular business).

I’m afraid I took the invitation a little more literally, though, as I began to question why a seminar like this should start off with a focus on the doom-and-gloom in the here-and-now?  Craig’s view was upbeat, compared with some other forecasts, sure - but the reality is that everyone’s predictions are just that, and no-one knows how it will pan out until afterwards, anyway.

Surely Queensland’s best and brightest companies in the ICT industry should be aiming for a little bit more than just muddling through?

As I sit here now, I’ve checked the trusty dictionary to ensure I have it right in my head (Resilient = readily recovering from a setback).  Yes, we all need to ensure our businesses can do that, but it seemed like a focus on current trading conditions is just a bit myopic.

Granted, Craig was an enthusiastic presenter, and even entertaining (for an economist) – rare, but certainly not as rare as an entertaining engineer. I just wondered if it would have been better if there had been a more appropriate focus – beyond just resilience, to establishing a truly remarkable business.

For the record, I think it was that Craig forecast that the recovery from the “Recession we Talked Ourselves Into” would be coming pretty soon, with a chance of rain about 4pm clearing overnight.

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A view from one who’s lived to tell the tale

I agree with Shane – Col Chandler (CEO Proton Consulting - and entrepreneur extraordinaire, it seems) is pretty enlivening, and he does call a spade a shovel, in his own words.

Having listened to him on one other occasion (another IIB event at the same venue, last year) I thought his presentation was perhaps not quite as good as last time.  I recall, then, that he delved more into his horror stories (and the successes), which was good (at least for me) at putting his lessons into perspective.

That said, it was still a great presentation.  Seemed Col agreed with my sentiments (above) as well.

My paraphrasing of his main points are along the same line as Shane’s summary:

1)  if you are afraid to fail, and don’t have a touch of mongrel insanity in you, give up and get a 9-5 job.

2)  if your business is just limping through now, and you don’t have a vision for the future, do Darwin a favour and take it outside and shoot it.

3)  embrace change, as it’s here to stay

4)  Col noted his involvement is now with a company (Peak3) in an industry related to ours (i.e. something to do with energy) – and gave as another personal example how the business was currently being redirected on a tangent because someone had dared to ask a question like “why?” or “how?”:

(a) The company was built around technology to make diesel engines burn cleaner.

(b) The tangent they are moving into is all about mobile emissions monitoring - and were already fielding plenty of interest across the country and internationally.  Note, here, Col talked at length of the need for the tangent to be related to the core business, in some way (I believe so that expertise and reputation would carry over).  I think this is along the lines of what was noted in “10 Rules for Strategic Innovators”

(c) Col noted they were currently involved in a range of capital raising.   My understanding is that the VC firms have not been very helpful, so they are making some inroads with high net-worth individuals.

4)   Finally, Col recommended that we read 3 books:

(a) “Crossing the Chasm”, which I read a while ago.

(b) “Wikinomics” – which is on the bookshelf in our library, but is yet to be read…

(c)  “The Ascent of Money” by Niall Ferguson, which I have added to our shopping cart at Amazon now.

In due course (if we remember) we will link our own reviews to these other two books above…

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From someone still in the trenches

Evan Fortune (Executive Director of Vision 6) was next on the stage.

I found Evan’s case study of their own long (12-month long?) navel-gazing exercise very useful.

Evan took us through the story of he and his business partner (Matthew Myers)  built Vision 6 from its first days (I think 1998-99) to the point where they now employ about 33 staff (I think all in their offices in the Valley).

He told us the story of how they found they had essentially “lost their mojo” due the the rapid growth they had been working their way through.  He recounted the initiatives that they had to put in place (more formalised structure, processes and procedures) in order to increase staff morale and have everyone rowing in the same direction – Evan’s story reminded me of the 3rd stage of growth (adolescence) talked about in “Ready, Fire, Aim”.

Evan talked about how they utilised the services of 2 external consultants to assist them in their introspection:

1)  Evan mentioned that they had used the firm Shirlaws during this period, as they had at several stages in the past.

2)  Evan also mentioned that Jeff Kaplan of THINKstrategies had helped them determine that their focus should be on Operational Excellence – as Evan talked, it seemed to me like this framework had been taken straight from “The Discipline of Market Leaders” (later discussions with Evan confirmed this).

Having just been through our own company autopsy (which was intensive/painful enough over a single day), I can’t start to imagine what it would have been like for Evan and the others during that lengthy period!

There may even be some synergies between our two firms at some stage in the future. We wish them all the best!

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A view from Big Blue

Glenn Wightwick (Chief Technologist at IBM Australia) rounded out the day.

To be honest, Glenn’s presentation was a little off the mark (in terms of where our business is at), though I still did make a few notes:

1)  Glenn talked about the leadership role IBM had taken upon itself in the area of patent reform.  In particular, Glenn mentioned the approach they are trying to take (that of peer-review of patent applications) in order to increase the quality of patent applications submitted.  Though it was a little off-topic for us, it did bring to mind the project an ex-colleague of ours is cooking up in the area of academic papers, that might have parallels in the patent universe as well.  Will let him know about this separately.

2)  Glenn also mentioned the “Innovation Jam” that IBM initially held back in 2001 as a way of facilitating a sharing and collation of ideas about how to improve the world.

(a)   Back in those days (pre-Web2.0) the technology was much cruder, but the results (so Glenn recounted) were still significant.

(b)   Since those days, Web2.0 has come along, and the IBM Jams have grown to become a massive, structured and facilitated, online sharing of ideas - amongst the thousands of employees internally, and partners, suppliers, customers, and others externally.

(c)   Being a company that seems to generate far more ideas than we can hope to implement, and with a somewhat-altruistic view of our purpose in business, and operating at the intersection of ICT and energy, we’ll keep an eye out for the next event.

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Impromptu Survey

Having a number of business owners/managers from about 40 companies in the room on the day, the IIB was quick to capitalise on the opportunity presented by nabbing us with a quick quiz.

Some simple stats were read out at the end – I did not write any details down, so please excuse me if my recollection is faulty:

1)  Almost all companies said they were looking to hire more staff in the next 12 months or so.

2)  What staggered me, particularly, was that there was such a high proportion (above 50% from memory) of companies that noted that the state Government(s?) were their primary clients.  Whilst we are pleased to be able to serve a large number of government departments across most eastern capital cities, I would be concerned if our business was majority reliant on them for our long-term security.

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Quite a day, and we certainly would like to thank the IIB for organising, with the assistance of

Yes, there are plenty of challenges for us in our own little petrie dish - and yes, I have learnt (after being burnt before) that you need to keep one eye on the present.

However one thing’s for sure - we’re aiming for much better than just resilience!

Tags: business growth, innovation, strategic planning

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 1st, 2009 at 3:46 pm and is filed under Event Review, Vision. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.