Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting with Leanne Faulkner – Founder and Director of Billie Goat Soap.

As a parent, Leanne has had great success as a start-up.

Her son suffered significant skin irritation problems. After trying all the products Leanne could find, she tried with creating her own soap using natural products including fresh goats milk.

The results were fantastic and the rest is history - Leanne left her job in corporate HR and Billie Goat Soap has been growing ever since. Check out the video below...

However, the reason we had a chat was not to discuss her success as a startup (and now limited unlisted company).

What was my main interest was Leanne’s approach to responsible leadership and Leanne went on to explain the 7 areas where she believes responsible leadership has been an instrumental element of her business development.

The discussion that ensued was very interesting with implications for businesses of all sizes and I will summarise it here...

Read the rest of this post »

Here is a new way to generate some income from your car sitting in the garage.

Drive My Car Rentals has launched in Australia giving car owners the option to reduce the costs of their vehicle, offset depreciation or just make some spare cash by renting out their ride when its not being used.

DriveMyCarRentals.com.au is an online community that connects car owners with drivers looking for an alternative to traditional car rental companies. Car owners can choose the length of time their car is available for – whether it’s a weekend, a month or a year, and the price is set automatically for them with a rate calculator. They have the right to accept or reject lease requests and all drivers wanting to lease a car must provide a full RTA driver history.

DriveMyCar Rentals is backed by a comprehensive insurance alliance with Yellow Brick Road General Insurance Brokers, offering peace of mind to renters worried about handing over the keys to their pride and joy.

DriveMyCar Rentals offers consumers more makes and models than any car rental company in the world from sports cars to classic cars to Harleys, even caravans, with savings of up to 60% on traditional rental costs.

A sample of some of the vehicles available on DriveMyCar Rentals includes:
2007 Porsche Boxster – $70 per day
2008 Hummer H3 – $50 per day
2002 Mercedes E55 – $50 per day

“On an average day in Sydney, 185,000 vehicles are left at home by commuters costing them an average of $10,000 per year,” says Daniel Noble, Managing Director of DriveMyCar Rentals.

“If you commute to work, travel frequently or are away from home for extended periods, your car is costing more than just maintenance and upkeep.” he said.

“Depreciation rates can be significant, particularly in new cars where you can lose a third of the vehicle!s value before you!ve driven off the lot. With DriveMyCar Rentals, owners can earn as much as $24,000 a year on their vehicle. We also see the service as a great alternative to selling your car if you!re undecided or not getting the price you think it deserves.”

For an annual payment of only $25, the car is listed on the website with a photograph, full description and details of driver requirements.

There is also a premium service available for members who prefer to have the entire rental process managed for them.

Source:

Total Executive

http://www.TotalExec.com.au

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Astadia give some good background of how to integrate Google Apps with other systems in order to maximise benefits of the digital communication, technology and collaboration benefits

Many small businesses have been benefiting from using Google Enterprise apps.
This short video from Ekzact TV provides an explanation of how the key benefits work...

When you really think about it, collaboration is at the very heart of every business on the planet.  It’s very rare that you find someone that is isolated from the rest of the company.  Most people are a part of a team that needs to work together to achieve the best possible results; that team is a part of many teams that all need to work together to help grow an enterprise.  We collaborate in pretty much everything we do at work, it’s not always efficient and it’s not always effective, but what if it were?

Frost  & Sullivan along with Verizon Business and Microsoft conducted research around the impact of collaboration within the enterprise.  The results of the study showed that collaboration is a key driver of company performance (the study was conducted in 2006).  A global collaboration index model was developed which looked at variable factors that affect collaboration as well as several variables that affect company performance.

A culture of openness contributed 36% to collaboration quality whereas the impact of a structure of decentralization or use of collaborative technology in strategy implementation each contributed 16% to collaboration quality.  Again the largest factor for collaboration quality had nothing to do with technology but with people an culture.  Strategic planning and collaboration technology for strategic planning (not implementation) each contributed 6% and 5%, respectively.

The highlight of the research project was that 36% of a company’s performance was due to its collaboration index, 16& was due to strategic orientation and 7% was due to market and technological turbulence influence.  Here is how collaboration affected the various aspects of business performance:

From the key numbers from the chart, collaboration impacts:

• Profitability by 29%
• Sales growth by 27%
• Profit growth by 26%
• 41% of forces driving customer satisfaction
• Productivity by 36%
• Product quality by 34%
• Product development by 30%
• Innovation by 30%

I found the report to be very interesting and definitely deserves a considerable amount of attention in the Enterprise 2.0 space.  I haven’t found a report as comprehensive as this one yet (have you?).  This report was released in 2006 and it would be very interesting to see how these numbers have changed over the past four years.  If you ask me, this report needs to be placed in front of every key decision maker at every enterprise company.  This report is a great starting point to help build the case for Enterprise 2.0 and is greatly supported by the list of over 50 Enterprise 2.0 case studies that I have found online.  The question after all of this becomes, now what?

We have an analytical report supported by over 50 case studies and examples of Enterprise 2.0 implementation but this doesn’t change the fact that many collaboration challenges still exist.  It’s interesting to note that the report doesn’t once mention the term ‘Enterprise 2.0′ (perhaps not coined yet) but the concept and idea behind collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 is very much in sync.

At the time this report was created, many of the popular enterprise software vendors such as Blue Kiwi, Jive, Social Text, and Spigit were either yet formed or just getting started, yet collaboration wasin full swing.  Further evidence support the notion that collaboration is centered around people and not around technology.  Technology can facilitate more efficient forms of collaboration and knowledge sharing but its effectiveness is an issue of deep and widespread integration and adoption.  Collaboration needs to be addressed from and individual and an enterprise benefit standpoint.  The enterprise benefits have been discussed extensively and include things such as reduced costs, improved innovation and ideation, and improved company performance (see chart above).  However, there are also individual benefits of effective collaboration which Frost & Sullivan have clearly identified:

The challenge that I believe we are seeing today in Enterprise 2.0 is a very strong focus and push around tools instead of strategy.  Collaboration is nothing new and goes back to caveman days where teams had to work together to hunt animals.  Cavemen didn’t have an enterprise social software platform to discuss ideas around where and how to hunt, yet they still managed to do a fantastic job of hunting.  Why then today are we so focused on platforms and tools when the real issue is around culture and people?  I’ll talk more about some of the potential hurdles (as well as other topics) in the near future, but for now read and digest the report so we can discuss it.

What do you think of the report?  Is there anything especially interesting that jumps out at you?  Did I miss or overlook something?

I highly recommend that you read the full report on the impact of collaboration as there are several other key points of interest that are worth reading.

Source:

Jacob Morgan

This Brazilian has created a billion dollar business by letting people manage themselves, select their own managers, their level of pay and the only system - anonymous review

Source:

Total Executive

http://www.TotalExec.com.au

This video gives one example...

Chris Anderson (canderson@wired.com) is the editor in chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail. His new book, FREE, provides a powerful insight to the future of the Web. Watch the video and then read the more substantial article. Attend one of workshops - FREE: The Digital Future of Your Organisation.

In this interactive presentation—one in a series of multimedia frameworks—McKinsey alumnus Kevin Coyne describes how companies can use the business system to evaluate their choices at each stage in the process of creating and delivering products. Aligning conduct at every step with the company’s value proposition creates a truly integrated business strategy.

 

Business strategy involves an integrated set of actions designed to help companies gain sustainable advantage over competitors. The business system is a framework that allows a company to formulate the set of actions most likely to achieve this advantage. First introduced in a McKinsey staff paper in 1980,¹ the business system was later presented to the public by McKinsey’s Fred Gluck,² who stressed its usefulness in forming strategy. In 1985, Harvard’s Michael Porter introduced a similar framework—the value chain—and cited the business system concept in the book Competitive Advantage.³

The business system charts all the steps involved in creating and delivering a company’s product. At each link in the chain, from product development to sales and service, managers have a choice of how to conduct business. From a strategic point of view, the most important assessment is how the choices made at each step reinforce the company’s overall value proposition and, hence, its competitive advantage. The word system in business system emphasizes the importance of aligning conduct at every step with the value proposition.

Enduring Ideas: The business system A narrated interactive explores this classic strategy framework.

To develop improvements to any one link, managers can ask a series of open-ended questions about current practices and alternate possibilities: How does the company perform at this stage? Is there a better way? How do competitors behave? Who achieves lower costs—the company or its competitors? By varying the questions, examining scenarios, and evaluating all in light of the company’s total strategy, a company can discover new strategic moves to make within an existing business—for example, whether to expand or diversify. When used to evaluate acquisitions, the framework forces managers to look for synergies between the target’s own activities and the company’s current business system.

A surprisingly simple concept, the business system continues to be a serviceable tool. Deeper examination of current conditions and potential changes at each stage can reveal the forces likely to shape a business over time—and the competitive capabilities required to meet them.

Notes

¹ Carter F. Bales, P. C. Chatterjee, Donald Gogel, and Anupam Puri, “Competitive cost analysis,” McKinsey & Company, March 1980. This research was the basis for a 2000 McKinsey Quarterly Strategy Anthology article titled “The business system: A new tool for strategy formulation and cost analysis.” It is available in Carter F. Bales, P. C. Chatterjee, Frederick W. Gluck, Donald Gogel, Anupam Puri, and Don C. Watters, “The microeconomics of industry supply,” mckinseyquarterly.com, June 2000.

² Frederick W. Gluck, “Strategic choices and research allocation,” The McKinsey Quarterly, 1980 Number 1, pp. 22–33.

³ Michael Porter, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance, New York: Free Press, 1985.

Source: McKinsey

A conversation with Steve Owens, CEO of Colorado Premier Training

April 8, 2009. By Alice Bumgarner

Steve Owens and his team coach endurance athletes – cyclists, triathletes, and runners from all over the world. His innovative, state-of-the-art training equipment measures athletes' heart rate, power output, and energy expenditures, as well as a score of bike computations, such as speed and distance. His team then creates customized training programs.

What makes Owens work particularly innovative is that he incorporates "CNS scoring" into the data, which measures an athlete's physical, mental, and emotional stress. "No one really encompasses everything like we do," says Owens.

Alice Bumgarner (AB): What is the importance and the role of innovation in today's global economic environment? How is this role reflected at your workplace?

Steve Owens: With respect to sports, if you're not innovating, someone else is. We always have to be on the cutting edge and exploring things. Innovation means confirming which things don't work. It also means looking for certain principles that haven't been applied the right way to instruments or equipment. Also, for us, it means making innovation available to our clients.

AB: What is the most exciting innovation you've been involved in developing? What factors made it so exciting?

Steve Owens: Developing our test bed and software system, which accurately measure the force of drag on an athlete in a wind tunnel. It tells us how many watts an athlete needs to produce to go a certain speed on the road.

Within the wind tunnel, we have three cameras running so we can see a cyclist from all sides. We've integrated body-motion capture, so we can measure body angles on the fly – hip angles, knee angles, etc. – as we're doing a test in the wind tunnel. It's literally the most accurate measurement in the world.

The more information we can collect about an athlete at once, the better. For example, if we know that at a particular point of the ride, your drag angle is this, your knee angle is here, and your arms are here, we can go back and replicate a position based on that. Then we try to refine that baseline position, so an athlete can improve speed. It's all about overcoming wind resistance.

AB: What surprises have you encountered when you're training athletes?

Steve Owens: Here's one: We train a guy who's a formal world champion in the time trial. He puts his elbows pretty far apart on the handlebars, which is actually very counterintuitive. You'd think that would be slower. But we took the measurements, and it actually works for him. That's just how his body is shaped.

We can make assumptions about things, but they're not always correct.

AB: When an athlete hits a barrier, what do you recommend?

Steve Owens: We don't really believe in barriers. We're always breaking barriers. We have to find a way to creatively get past those.

I think when people talk about how they can't get past a barrier, it's maybe because they don't have realistic expectations. In endurance sports, in particular, it takes many years to develop an athlete. If you said, "I'd love to work with you; I'd like to run a marathon." I'd say, "Let's set up expectations. It takes a long time to develop, so we're looking at five years or whatever it is. Let's lay out some other goals to reach along the way."

When it's not a case of unfair expectations, it's simply that the person needs rest. As a coach, a lot of times I'm there to pull the reins back. These guys and girls are just tearing it up. They just want to go and go. As a coach, I have to hear the energy in their voice or lack thereof and know when they need to rest.

It's like someone at work managing a project and panicking because they don't know if they can make the deadline. In that situation, it can help to put the brakes on for a second, bring everyone into a conference room and lay out the problem: We need to get from point A to point B, so let's take a calm step back and figure out how we're going to do it.

AB: What are some of the obstacles that prevent your team from coming up with innovative ideas for the athletes you coach?

Steve Owens: There are so many rules within the sport for what you can't do, and for us, it's important to not feel so confined by the rules that we can't create new ideas or come up with that elusive widget that will revolutionize the sport.

A good way to do that is hiring someone who maybe doesn't know the rules. Someone who's a swimmer or skiier, who knows nothing about cycling and its rules. We've brought in the U.S. National Ski Team to work on a solution, for example.

AB: What, if any, problem solving, creativity tools or innovation software do you use or are you familiar with?

Steve Owens: We work with a tool called TrainingPeaks.com that lets us download pieces of equipment, like GPS power meters, heart rate meters, and so on. That's what TrainingPeaks is good at it. For us it's a good synergistic relationship.

AB: Are you familiar with virtual collaborative innovation communities and networks (such as IdeaConnection.com) that bring together experts, facilitators, and product developers for confidential collaborative creation?

Steve Owens: No, I'm not.

AB: What blogs or other media on the topic of innovation do you read? Are there any books on innovation that you recommend to others?

Steve Owens: I just try to keep with other like-minded people. I read all the online cycling publications, which sometimes include tech articles.

AB: What principles guide the training you give your athletes?

Steve Owens: We use three weeks of progressive training stress, then a week of recovery, then repeat. It's based on energy systems building from lesser intensity to higher intensity. And it has to do with monitoring overall stress.

The fact is, something always come up during training. People get injured or something comes up with their family. We need to integrate that into the training, and take into account how it affects them as a person.

Source: Idea Connection