May 2005 Archives

I still walking -- which is good. The daily graph was getting a bit busy, so I thought I'd do a monthly summary, showing the last year.

The red line shows my average during the period, and the top of the blue bar represents my goal. At the moment I'm trying to get the months to display in the correct order.

And this is the walking I've done in the last month.The Bottom of the blue band is my minimum target. If I don't make that, I feel I've not achieved the goal at all.

Besides walking I play squash once a week with my brother, and I do boxing training twice a week. It all helps.

PS: The graph is built automatically using JPGRAPH from data stored using MySQL. The whole thing is glued together using PHP.

As part of the Integrating Strategy course that our MBA students do, we did a case McKinsey & Company: Managing knowledge and learning. As part of "doing" the case I thought it would be interesting to use McKinsey's own 7S framework to look at the case (see below). My purpose in using the 7S framework wasn't as an exposition on its usefulness as a tool (I thought we had got beyond that), but as a little bit of playfulness to enliven the dicussion.

Well it seems that at least one person has taken this the wrong way saying "I wish we had this [framework] 12 weeks ago. This course hasn't been about applying frameworks (or cookie cutters, as they often become). Each firm's situation is unique, and too many people forget that when they try and do strategy -- Ken Simmonds and I have made a serious attempt to get away from a formulaic approach to strategy. Instead with tried to get people to think about what is going on in the particular situations we have encountered. I guess that I didn't get that across as well as I had hoped in class.

We are only allotted a certain amount of time to do what we want to do. There will never be more than 24 hours in the day. But sometimes, I feel like there isn't enough time.

For some time I've been saying I'd like to do more reading. Of late most (all) of my reading has been linked to my research and teaching. There has been little time for "recreational" reading.

That was before I got my iPod and before I found out about Audible. Now I'm hooked on buying and downloading audio books. The beauty of audio books on the iPod is that you can listen as you are walking from place to place. Now I can get through two or three books a month extra -- it doesn't sound like much, but it really makes a difference.

Consequently, I'm taking the opportunity to "read" things for which I would normally not have time. For example, I've just finished The life of Pi, and I thoroughly enjoyed The white Russian (Thanks for the recommendation Leone). Of course, sometimes I drift back into research mode, and so I'm currently listening to Jack Welsh's biography Jack: Straight from the gut.

I'm a bit of a market research participant junkie. Whenever, I'm at home and they (market researchers) ring up and I fail the qualifying questions (say, for not being the person with the next birthday) I'm always disappointed. I enjoy doing surveys because they tell me a lot about what businesses are thinking. So, I'm usually happy to participate. I also like to give the researchers some feedback on their survey instrument--in fact I'm not shy about doing that at all.

As it happens, in my intray I have requests from two different New Zealand tertiary institutions who wish to survey the students in the Auckland MBA program. The difference between the two "packages" is striking.

The first package is well presented. The covering letter, participant information sheet, and the survey itself are well presented, with problems. The documentation clearly explains what is required and answers all of the questions I have about the research and the researcher. They survey instrument is well constructed and (based on my own experiences) will get a fairly good return rate, and allow some robust analysis. In many ways, it is everything a solid piece of research should be (from the participants' point of view). Generally, I feel very positive towards this researcher and their research.

The second package is not well presented. The participant information is missing; and so, many important questions, such as "how long will this take?" are not addressed. There are errors in the grammar and syntax of both the covering letter and the survey itself. The survey reads like a fishing trip and request quite sensitive information from both students and me. Some of the questions are quiet weak, e.g. "What are the criteria for your school to choose best quality MBA students and faculty?"--this is really two questions, and it is making a whole raft of assumptions which can invalidate the question.

Unlike the first package, the second package makes one question the professionalism of the researcher, and I'm left feeling unsure about the researcher--there is an issue of trust here--which makes me tentative about agreeing to the research especially when the sensitive nature of the questions are considered. Do I really want to tell someone like this the answer to "How would you design a strategy for your business school to compete with others in New Zealand?"