Management Blog

Fast facts at your fingertips

Google's great, but when you need a quick answer to a question or a definition try Answers.com.

The searchable reference site draws on content over 100 encyclopaedias (including Wikipedia), dictionaries, and glossaries, providing concise, clearly presented results.

A free desktop version of the reference tool, 1-Click Answers, is also available to download. Simply Alt-Click on any word in any program for instant facts from Answers.

Score your company’s mission statement

Trivial, verbose, meaningless, uninspiring… Do any of these words describe your organisation’s mission statement?

Test it out via a free online tool from author, innovator and strategic thinker Karl Albrecht. The self-scoring assessment tool allows you to rate the mission statement on a scale of 0-100, using 10 dimensions, resulting in a printable report.

The questions are designed to help you look at the mission statement with fresh eyes, in order to assess, among other things, its relevance, value and realism.

How well does your mission statement do its job, really?

The lucky country indeed

A number of recent statistics appear to confirm what dyed in the wool Aussies have long held to be gospel; Australia is indeed smarter and healthier than most other countries. The latest Social Trends report from the Bureau of Statistics suggests, for instance, that Australian teens can read, count and comprehend scientific concepts better than their American, French, Swedish and Italian peers. 

Furthermore, the life expectancy of newly born Australians -  78 for boys and 83 for girls - is higher than in New Zealand, the US, Britain and Canada. This may well be the result of Australian health spending - $3300 per citizen per year –  more than NZ, Japan, Britain and Italy. 

At 6% Australia’s unemployment rate is lower than France, Italy and Canada, and the population’s median age of 37 is younger than Singapore, Canada, Italy, Britain, Japan and Sweden.

Insert 'Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!' warcry here.

The full report is available as a free download from the ABS.

We’ve had makeovers – it's time for workovers

Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life.

So said Confucius. It's an idea whose time may have come if Brian Kurth has anything to do with it. While stuck in a Chicago traffic jam, the ex-marketer came up with the idea of helping people to trial run their dream jobs so they could settle the troubling matter of their fantasies once and for all.

Kurth's firm, Vocation Vacations, sells test runs in 60 or more occupations ranging from auctioneer to TV producer to bootmaker. Depending on the occupation, the one to three day apprenticeships can cost anything from $350 to $9000. 

Of the company's 100 clients to date, one has actually made the change and started a new full time career as a cheesemaker. Two others are seriously pondering whether to make the break – one to be a vintner and the other to open a day care centre for dogs. 

Kurth's novel service has found significant favour, particularly with workers in large companies eager to leave the rat race and follow their dreams. Vocation Vacations has also spawned a whole new vocabulary says Kurth, "You know – 'I'm a vocationer, she's vocationing, we're on vocation.'"

Decoding corporate DNA

It comes as no surprise that top performing firms are organised and run in quite different ways to lesser performing enterprises. This has emerged from a year long study by the UK based Work Foundation aimed at discovering how UK firms can become more productive. 

The panel of Enquiry, headed by Will Hutton, CEO of the Work Foundation, included representatives from nine of the top UK firms. What they discovered in their investigation, entitled Cracking The Performance Code: How Firms Succeed, amounts to a sort of business genome, laying bare the organisational and operational dynamics which separate top performers from the also-rans. 

The most successful firms were found to have structures which enable performance, rather than drive it. Business processes in the better firms tended to be simple in essence and designed to assist decision-making and encourage risk-taking.  Structures allowing quick and easy changes of direction when things go wrong were also in place.

A further significant indicator was the way in which efficient firms manage communication. In the most successful firms, communication tends to be multi-directional, and knowledge sharing with unions, work councils, and workers in the field and on the factory floor is considered a critically important objective.

Web search advertising provides major advantages for small business

It wasn’t so long ago that "keyword bidding" or pay-per-click search-engine advertising seemed to be just another novelty sideshow in the online fairground. But recently there has been dramatic growth in the sophistication of the services offered and small businesses, in ever increasing numbers, have been quick to perceive the advantages. 

In 2004 the online ad market in the U.S was worth $9.6 billion, 40% of which was contributed by search advertising.  This year, according to eMarketer.com, that level will reach 42%. 

Hollis Thomases, an online marketing consultant and president of WebAdvantage.net, observes how important paid search has become, particularly for small businesses where, he says, "it helps level the playing field".

This effect becomes most apparent when specialised search terms are used, revealing small e-commerce sites and major retail stores in equal competition.

Improved export growth bodes well for economy

Access Economics, a leading Canberra-based forecaster, suggested recently to business planners that an expected improvement in exports should go some way to improving Australia’s output in the coming year.

Access director, Chris Richardson, suggests that output growth will be particularly strongly boosted by the export of commodities such as natural gas, copper and iron ore. 

"Basically," says Richardson, "the big increase in mining output that we have been expecting for a while should increasingly be evident over the next year or so and the Australian economy should pick up."

However, the company also warned that an export-assisted recovery may not last long and that many expect the current high commodity prices to fade over time. Richardson nevertheless expects that the less than 2% growth of the last year will improve appreciably over the next and be more in line with the strong 4% growth which has been such a feature of the Australian economy for a reasonably long time.

Cultured cow anyone?

Anything the mind can imagine, it seems, science may one day be able to do.
A study by Jason Matheny at the University of Maryland has concluded that it may shortly be possible to actually grow meat using new tissue engineering technology.

One method would be to grow cells from the muscle tissue of cattle, pigs, poultry and fish. This cultured meat would be produced in large flat sheets which would then be stacked to increase thickness and approximate the appearance of meat in its more familiar form.

Matheny suggests that the meat produced would actually be healthier, in that one can control the nutrients and the fatty acids while reducing the pollution usually associated with farming. The resulting processed meat would be particularly useful in the form of chicken nuggets or hamburgers.

Business and administrative talent getting harder to find

It appears that a significant number of organisations, including financial services, manufacturing and government, feel that they are currently lacking the level of employee skills and capabilities necessary to meet their future challenges. In some quarters the shortage of skilled, educated and talented workers is viewed as critical.

The fourth annual High Performance Workforce Study, carried out internationally by Accenture, has found that 41% of their respondents believed that the struggle to find new talent was about to have appreciable impact on their companies in the next 12 months. About half of that number considered their organisations were already suffering.

The comprehensive research, which took place between December 2003 and April 2004, was based on wide ranging interviews with 244 senior executives of 17 industry segments in the US, Britain, France, Germany, Spain and Australia.

The evolution of business structure

According to Joshua Epstein, the received wisdom of the rigid hierarchical business structure is being increasingly superseded by what he calls the ‘optimal geometry’ model. 

An optimal organisation, it appears, has no fixed structure. Rather, the unchanging organisational chart is replaced by a whole repertoire of flexible and adaptive structures. 

Organisations which are adaptable and finely tuned are more likely to produce optimum performance. Epstein suggests that an adaptive repertoire is actually a number of organisational charts – not a fixed wiring diagram. 

In effect, it means that running a business this way allows you to adjust for conditions. Sometimes high level intervention is necessary, while at other times local protocols and decentralised functioning is more appropriate and productive.

Epstein employs the analogy of a good jazz band in which you pass the lead around. If only one person takes all the leads, it’s not going to be a very good jazz band. In the optimal geometry firm, the centres of authority and decision-making move around in a flexible and targeted manner.