Understand your costs – at all costs

“I can make more generals, but horses cost money” – Abraham Lincoln Revenues have always dominated the interest of the business community. Costs, on the other side, are reported and monitored, but in most cases they’re not as well understood. Functional Costing There are many ways to look at a company’s costs; perhaps the most prominent view is the functional one. For instance, costs for HR, marketing, sales, IT, raw materials, facilities and financing, are estimated and reported during budgeting cycles. This view of costs is a well-structured, vertical one, neatly tied to the organizational structure of most firms....
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Doing business in a bankrupt state

There’s a lot of debate and – perhaps justifiably – a lot of desperation in the private business sector about the fortunes of the Greek economy. Regardless of each one’s political and emotional views on the matter, I think we will all be better off if we spend less time hoping that the government will magically fix the broken Greek state and a bit more time thinking what we can practically do to help our business survive in our predicament.  Many will not survive but they will fail more gracefully if they at least make an effort to change...
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Why managers can rarely be makers

After reading Paul Graham’s post and Seth Godin’s post about makers and managers I couldn’t help but think that a manager at any level of an organization operates on a manager’s schedule by definition, not by choice, and that for a manager to operate more as a maker it takes a lot more than finding the time for it. A manager’s day-to-day reality is ruled by an endless stream of cross-domain issues such as coordination of resources, purchasing decisions, crisis management, conflict resolution, approvals, people management & mentoring, cross-team collaboration, etc.  By definition a manager’s schedule is ruled by...
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It’s All About Value, Stupid!

It’s the “Unbearable Lightness of Being” all over again. Having read a semi-sarcastic and justifiably fair assessment of the state of “professionalism” in the service industry and specifically the field of coaching, I thought back a few decades where a similar debate was going on. Several years later, and the issue of regulation in some service oriented fields has not been resolved. Anyone can claim to be an expert in some fields where there is no scrutiny, no accountability, no regulation. But I am ambivalent on the issue. Can regulation and – I am specifically referring to state versus...
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The Intersection of Disciplines

The next wave of value creation will increasingly occur at the intersection of disciplines. Such convergence is the foundation of many “new” industries – the child of a marriage of equals. A classic example is in the area of technology, where IT and telecommunications have joined forces to form the “ICT” domain. Another flourishing union is that between medicine and statistics, leveraging the vast amounts of data becoming available to health professionals working on disease diagnosis and treatment. An evolution is also forthcoming in the energy sector, as technology allows it to borrow more concepts and applications from operations...
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Important But Not Urgent

After a couple of years worth of work as a solitary and lone soldier, following more than a couple of decades of more traditional executive life, yesterday was the one of these extremely rare days I stayed away from my daily world of emails, tweets, blogs and e-news. To a regular, non-wired person the statement may seem clearer than blue sky. To me and all of those who feel there is no such thing as information overload, it was something remarkable. But, all of a sudden, I woke up and wanted to do something else – something new, something...
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