Management Blog

Organisations need to 'loosen up'

High-value workers will be increasingly attracted to more loosely-structured companies, according to the 'Disorganisation' whitepaper [PDF] by telco Orange UK and Demos.

The paper, based on a survey of UK business leaders, focuses on how organisations can manage employees' desire for more autonomy and individual flexibility in an increasingly competitive and complex environment.

It also includes an interesting appendix on the 'typology of future organisations', describing such workplaces as the democratic firm, navigator organisation, live/work organisation and public value company.

IT horror stories

In honour of Halloween tomorrow, CIO magazine has listed some IT horror stories that are sure to give any technologist goosebumps.

The cautionary tales serve to remind us what can go wrong when system changes and administration go awry.

RFID use in Australia

Many Australian industries are using radio frequency identification tags (RFID) as they take advantage of the technology's ability to track assets and people, according to The Australian. Easy-to-formulate business cases have led to an explosion in the use of the technology in sectors that include healthcare, corrective services, mining and agriculture.

"There's a lot of imagination being applied to the use of RFID and it has caught the attention of the most unlikely industries," says Accenture senior supply chain executive Mark Reynolds.  "Australia has an enormous number of RFID tags out there on sheep and cattle in the livestock industry."

GSI, a global standards body, has been working in Australia on a test regime that includes Chep, Linfox, Gillette, Visy, Procter and Gamble, Metcash and the Australian Food and Grocery Council.

However there is a lag in adoption of RFID in the retail sector as costs of imlementation are considered.

Australian wine growers suffer from worldwide glut

Australian wine growers are drowning in a glut of red wine, according to a recent article in The Times. Though Britons drank a record 272 million litres of Australian wine last year, they paid less for it.

The average price Australian wine fetched in the year to August fell 2% to £1.40 a litre while, at the same time, exports to Britain grew 3%. Worldwide, average prices dropped 8%.

Industry analysts say the huge over-supply will persist at least until 2008, and probably 2010.

Generational spending power

Generation Y, in recent years the darling of marketers and advertisers, has no spending power according to research featured recently in The Australian.

Marketers have discovered this is a generation of teenagers and twentysomethings with little or no income and no spending power beyond keeping their mobile phones charged. But advertisers have been aggressively targeting this market, often forgetting the "cashed-up, debt-free thirtysomethings and older".

"...People always want to be on the cutting edge, so over the past couple of years it has all been Gen Y, Gen Y," says social researcher Mark McCrindle. "But as for getting them to spend money, when it needs to be justified, people are taking a few steps back. Generation Y has no spending power."

McCrindle also believes that "fickle" Gen Y have no brand loyalty, another reason why advertising dollars may be wasted on them, unlike older generations who have the spending power.

"You just have to look at boomer women," says Gill Walker of advertising agency Evergreen. "Boomer women have doubled their consumption of alcohol in the past 10 years. The same goes for overseas travel. Generation Y are simply not as profitable as the boomer generation."

Gawen Rudder of the Advertising Federation of Australia believes age-shifting will have a profound effect on media and marketing.

"We have basically age-shifted in a way," Rudder says. "Ten-year-olds are what 15-year-olds and 16-year-olds were a decade ago. Fifty is the new 30."

Focusing on 3-D negotiation

Many negotiators focus solely on tactics when deal design and set-up are the two other crucial components of most effective negotiations. This is according to a new book by James Sebenius and David Lax - 3-D Negotiation: Powerful Tools to Change the Game in Your Most Important Deals.

Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge site includes a Q&A with the authors, discussing the common mistakes of negotiators, the power of a three-dimensional approach, why negotiating is an essential skill, and where the science of negotiation is headed.

Manufacturing continues to grow in Australia

Production growth and an increase in employment allowed Australia's manufacturing sector to continue to expand in September. PricewaterhouseCoopers' Australian performance of manufacturing index (PMI) rose 1.4 index points to 53.5 during the month following a 2.4 point rise in August.

"The survey shows an improving trend for the manufacturing sector, where activity has been hampered by a sluggish housing sector, increasing global competition and a relatively high Australian dollar," said senior economist Adam Carr.

IT Governance takes centre stage

IT governance has moved to centre stage everywhere, according to a recent article in CIO Australia. It’s about involving as many people as possible, rather than just committees, processes, forms and procedures, with IT supporting them.

MIT's Peter Weill has published a book simply entitled IT Governance, there are conferences devoted exclusively to IT governance, and an IT Governance Institute conducts research on the subject.

The University of Texas M D Anderson Cancer Centre has discovered it makes a difference if investments are viewed as projects belonging to IT or projects belonging to the business and enabled by IT. Thus, there are "business projects" for which IT is an enabler. Only infrastructure investments are called "IT projects".

Customer confidence buoys small business

High customer confidence and easing labour market pressures meant business conditions among Australia's small to medium-sized businesses remained strong in the September quarter, a new survey has found (WA Business - reg. required).

The National Australia Bank SME business conditions index rose six points to 20 index points in the quarter, compared with 14 index points reported for their larger business counterparts.

Good or very good business conditions were reported by 33% of SMEs, while just 13% stated poor or very poor conditions.

The executive general manager of business and private banking at NAB, George Frazis, said conditions were strongest among SMEs with annual turnover of $5-10 million.

Male births on the increase

Australian women in some age groups are in a majority. Those in their 30s outnumber the men in their age group by about 14,000, while there is a surplus of 16,000 for those over 40.

However, new research by The Weekend Australian indicates these numbers will reverse over the next two decades. By 2026, there will be an excess of 60,000 males in the 30 to 39-year-old age band, and an extra 38,000 men aged 40 to 49.

There are already 57,000 more men in the 20s age group. This is expected to rise to 73,000 by 2026. There has been a surplus of boys born over the past 20 years.