Pacific Strategy Partners Featured Thinking

Risks of Management by Ambition

Ambition is a condition for business success. Concepts such as 'Stretch' and 'Blue Ocean' push the thinking 'outside the box'. But, how often do these visionary ideas remain visionary? And what unintended risks do they invite? For example companies that trail their ambitious vision set themselves up for a spiral of increasingly risky bets; CEOs who miss and review their budgets too often loose credibility with their Boards, setting up a culture of leadership turnover.

Strategy Diagnostics

Most organisations have written a business strategy that provides guidance for the business direction and operational decisions. Often these business plans have some weaknesses that only become apparent after major shocks like the GFC; some basing actions on:

Opinions rather than a rigorous fact base
Assuming the future will be like the past, and not considering other scenarios
Focusing on current operational problems not long term opportunities

Corporate Carbon Abatement Portfolio

Though it takes 5-10 years for manufacturers to start delivering carbon sequestration through reforestation, tree based carbon suppliers are anticipating a surge in demand in the next 12-24 months, following greater clarity over carbon price paths from the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009.

In this article we look at the forestry and agriculture abatement curve and how planting new forest sinks will be a commercially justified part of the carbon abatement portfolio for large companies.

Profit Improvement Programs

Most of us have been through profit improvement exercises - programs with acronyms like TPI (Total Productivity Improvement), PIP (Profit Improvement Program), Delta P (Change Performance). Some we umbrella brand as continuous improvement, others are focussed on turnaround or survival. They can be cost, productivity or revenue focussed - or the lot. We may give them positive spins by adding innovation and growth targets, but ultimately they are about improving cost, efficiency and productivity.

A Prescription for Real Health Reform

Despite the comprehensive NHHRC review little seems to have changed in the health debate. While its goals were laudable, we seem to be sliding inexorably into a consensus that its all about more money, despite evidence that pumping cash into an unreformed system is doomed to fail. Reforming health is hard, and will only be delivered by thousands of initiatives to drive performance improvement not big ideas or spin. Done right using management tools common in other sectors, this can deliver improved health outcomes with no increase in delivery costs.

Agribusiness - Key Lessons

With strong agricultural outputs returning, improving weather and the emergence of industry restructuring, Australian Agri-Businesses are looking to a period of change and renewal. Whilst short term fundamentals are good, industry structural challenges remain and players will need to manage a range of issues, including:

Managing pricing and output demand
Increasing focus on climate change
Managing input pricing and volatility
Participating in the changing industry landscape

Optimising IT Investment

Why do so many IT projects fail? Our view is that the fatal decisions are made at the design phase of a project by selecting the wrong design philosophy. Often, a project is initiated due to a perceived business need, but by inappropriately following an IT centric design approach the project eventually loses sight of the original business problem.

The potential results are, at best, more cost and lower benefits than anticipated and, at worst an abandoned project with nothing to show for it.¹

IT Economics - Services Model

Reshaping the technology business unit to better meet business priorities of speed, flexibility and cost containment is a major problem for many companies. On the demand side the business does not see how they can understand and control the technology part of their operational budget. We have assisted a number of large organisations design and transition their IT department to a technology services model and summarised some key lessons from our experiences.