Regenerate!

I came across this:

So let me tell you why. Designers suck because they are arrogant. The blogs and websites are full of designers shouting how awful it is that now, thanks to Macs, Web 2.0, even YouTube, EVERYONE is a designer. Core 77 recently ran an article on this backlash and so did we on our Innovation & Design site. Designers are saying that Design is everywhere, done by everyone. So Design is debased, eroded, insulted. The subtext, of course, is that Real design can only be done by great star designers.”

Full text at
Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog: Designers Are The Enemy of Design

Now my experience is different. I work with Design Directions, Pune for brand & communications strategy. I do not find arrogance at all. I find openness and willingness to learn there.

But yes, I have come across designer gatherings where they have tended to be verbose (strange!) without getting anywhere.

But the blog makes more relevant point about need for design process to be democratic ( I prefer broad based).

Hemant

Innovation is strategic for India Inc.! That’s what this survey says. Read this

Far ahead of other developing and developed economies of the world, India Inc is assigning strategic priority to innovation. Around 91 per cent of the Senior Executives put innovation among the top 3 strategic priorities,” a joint India Innovation Survey by CII and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) revealed. more at
Innovation: Key for India Inc

Now what does that mean? They must have a comprehensive suite of processes to succeed with innovation. How should that suite look like?

Hemant

You thought navigating an ocean would be difficult. Now you have to think that Red Ocean is may be energy sapping and blue ocean would be easy! We are talking about strategy! Here is low down BOS (Blue Ocean Strategy).
Companies & Industry
There are two ways to create Blue Oceans — create completely new industries or create a Blue Ocean from within a Red Ocean by expanding boundaries of the existing industry and making competition irrelevant. Delivering to an unserved set of customers a compelling new value proposition creates a Blue Ocean. The Blue Ocean Strategy BOS is, thus, the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost.

The problem is old. Most companies have no systematic way of gathering information. Their ideas of the value chain they work in are hazy. The second problem is their value sets (behavioral values) may be different than what is needed to implement a BOS.

As my experience shows the real problems are of implementation of BOS when the organization needs different kind of decision making rules and different kind of processes. The exiting embedded value systems, mostly implicit, are too difficult to dislodge.

BOS needs a full scale transformation effort. How many companies are ready for this? How many have necessary strategy and coaching support?

Hemant

I came across this question. Here is my answer, serious, even if the question was innocent or rhetorical!

Excellence needs to converted into behaviors in the context of business processes. These behaviors can be used to assess / counsel / educate people involved.

At Exponeint Consulting we provide business process breakthrough services (possible remotely through net).

Please see the Exponient web site

Hemant

Starbucks has been a darling of management schools and business magazines for creating best practices in experiential branding, social responsibility etc. So what went wrong, that its CEO has to complain that the brand is turning into commodity?

Follow this post for a good lowdown on Starbucks
Global Dashboard › Tag Surfer — WordPress
Fortune says this about Starbucks:

That was all just worth noting.

Hemant

In these days of heady growth, I come across people and companies planning to do many things at once, e.g. CEO of a medium sized engineering company showed me his strategy for next three years. He planned to

-create innovative products & systems which would take advantage of gaps and in-efficiencies in its value chain in three verticals. (They had not yet completed and commercialized their earlier innovation)
-grow original core business that concentrated on part of the value chains for a large number of verticals
-get into trading and projects activities for some money

Phew!

I found all this quite mind boggling.

What would you advise this CEO?

Hemant