Behind the Scenes at Global-Roam

My twelve year journey with this company – seeing it grow its customer base, and product range, from nothing to be quite substantial – has been one of great learning for me.

Of my greatest areas of learning has been with respect to others within in the company.  I have struggled, at times, due to my lack of prior experience and preparation.

For some time I’ve been pondering the apparent paradoxes across a variety of books and other materials I’ve read – with respect to the concept of Strengths and Weaknesses.

Where I have read this, it has been with respect to an individual’s own strengths and weaknesses – however I believe that the pointers that I’ve learnt are also applicable at an organisational level (where a strength is more commonly termed “competitive advantage”).

After quite a bit of reflection, it currently* seems that to be truly strong, an individual (or a company) needs to have the right combination of all three of the following factors:

* I say “currently”, as it seems that the learning journey I am on almost guarantees that my view will become even more nuanced in future.

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I was speaking with someone today, who stated that they had inferred I would have a tattoo on my butt reading “Agile Rocks” (or something like that).

I do apologise for any misconception caused by posts such as this one.

I also apologise for the images inadvertently conjured up by the first sentence.

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It is a loaded term – it means different things to different people (here’s the Wikipedia reference, for instance).

To me, it seems that there are two competing “innovation camps” which I sum up as follows: read more »

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I posted recently about how I have fallen down, sometimes, in the establishing a shared understanding about the ways in which our business needs to operate.

See aside below**

Recently I ran into another of these internal points of confusion …

What should I be working on?

This is a key question I have been asked numerous times in the past 10 years.

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Will add more details here, as time permits.

At this stage, this is just a placeholder for my view which is that a model can certainly be of some value, so long as the users of the model (whether it be economic, technical, behavioural or other) recognise that it is a model of reality, it is not reality itself.  Hence it has limitations.

Unfortunately, it seems, this is all-too-often forgotten!

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In the book “The Myth of 9-to-5” the authors note that it is a mark of growing maturity when an individual can reconcile the truth in two apparently paradoxial points of view.

Given this is aligned with my own personal philosophy, and the fact that I’m likely to need to refer to this point again-and-again, I thought it would be easier to extract this point to a separate post (here). read more »

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Having previously written about my views of the differences between the cultures at the Tarong and Stanwell power stations in the 1990’s, the former manager of the Stanwell station and inaugural CEO of Stanwell Corp (Ted Scott) sent me a copy of this book in order that I could gain a fuller view of his philosophy.

1)  Binary Review

I am very grateful that he chose to do so.

The Book	What we thought
“The Myth of Nine to Five”by Ted Scott and Phil Harker	.Great content (lots to consider)

Unlike the Richard Branson book, which I read in a couple of hours during the same holiday, this one is a small book that takes longer - as there is plenty of food for thought.

The tagline for the book = “a little book with a big message” does (in my view) reflect the contents.

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This post was originally written to be part of a (lengthy) Book Review:  The Tale of Two Systems (an overview of Lean & Agile software development).

However, I thought I would need to refer to this numerous times in future, so have placed it on our blog as a separate post…

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At the tail end of my ES Cornwall Scholarship, I ended up working with the Electricity Pool of England & Wales in London for about a year (in 1997 – coinciding with the time the Pool was canned).

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What is an electricity market?

Back at that stage, that was an important question to me. read more »

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Within 4 years of leaving uni, I had the opportunity to experience, for myself, two distinctly different management philosophies.

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