Societal & Organizational Performance

Entrepreneurial culture: Silicon Valley

2010-01-20T08:35:00.000-08:00

Performance culture concept is at the front and center of entrepreneurial ecosystems such as Silicon Valley

Let's look back at the 110-years of Silicon Valey history

And stories like those of Leland Stanford -founder of Stanford University-

Frederick Terman

Hewlett-Packard

Shockley and Fairchild semiconductors

What lessons can we apply to our PII ecosystem culture?

Business and culture: a view of Mexico

2010-01-20T08:31:00.000-08:00

This film presents a series of examples of how US and UK companies view Mexico's business opportunities:

How could we use these examples in our PII projects?

Culture dimensions: Fons Trompenaars

2010-01-20T08:20:00.000-08:00

Fons Trompenaars uses a seven dimensions model to define culture:

Trompenaars describe his 4-type typology of organizational cultures:

Culture: Gert Hofstede dimensions

2010-01-20T07:38:00.000-08:00

Gert Hofstede developed a model to analyze societal culture based on multiple dimensions

Power-Distance
Individualism
Masculinity
Uncertainity avoidance
Long term orientation

Power-Distance

Collectivism - Individualism

These cultural dimensions are particularly relevant when we engage in developing a new company based on a business model, ideas o practices that have been proven successful in a specific culture -usually developed countries- into a different one -frequently a developing counttry-

Understanding societal culture differences may be key for business success. Google managers discuss the difference between China and US negotiating styles:

Promoting Mexican food through cooking: Rick Bayless new restaurant in Chicago

2009-11-24T14:11:00.001-08:00

After succeeding with his Mexican restaurants Frontera Grill and Topolobampo, American chef Rick Bayless has just launched a new restaurant -aplty named Xoco (Aztec name for "litte sister" -whcib Xoco is sitting at the corner of Frontera and Topolobampo), to introduce Mexican sandwiches and sweets to Americans.

Thanks to Bayless constant promotion of Mexican cuisine through his two other restaurants and his Cable TV show Mexico: one plate at a time -filmed in different locations throughout Mexico-

Xoco has been a huge success, with lines of customers waiting for a taste of what probably Mexicans take for granted.

Bayless enthusiasm for Mexican food and culture knows almost no limits and contagiates viewers and his own personnel -that spends one month a year in Mexico, training and learning new dishes.

How can we use this example for our PII projects in 2010?

Ecotourism: transforming natural capital into social and intellectual capital

2009-11-24T13:37:00.000-08:00

This year documentarist Ken Burns produced a series of 5 films for television -Public Broadcasting System PBS- that are a good example of how art can attract tourism and support to promote, develop and also protect natural capital.

United States National Parks system started with pioneers John Muir and Gifford Pinchot included the development of lodges and touristic circuits as well as scenic roads and tourism and conservationism education.

Artists like photographer Ansel Adams -who captured the ravishing beauty of Yosemite with his photographies and introduced it to millions of Americans-, literally "opening their eyes" to the park and luring them to come and to preserve it at the same time through conservationist groups such as the Sierra Club

Or painter Georgia O'Keefe, who came to New Mexico from New York and built their home and studio there for 50 years, converting cities such as Taos and Santa Fe into art centers and developing communities and housing development following her art and the local traditions of adobe homes.

<O'Keefe and Adams collaborated also in promoting Taos

That created a style of housing and development that is today a prized characteristic of the town -Taos homes can command 500,000 dollar plus prices because of the appreciation generated by artists like O'Keefe and Adams-

How could we apply these lessons and examples to our PII projects?

The power of Mega and Intellectual capital: Innovation comes from BOP markets

2009-10-20T07:54:00.001-07:00

A new article on the Wall Street Journal illustrates the new flow of innovation from BOP markets to the global economy.

As C.K. Prahalad anticipated in his 2004 book The future of competition: co-creating value with customers, BOP markets invite and force to review and reinvent products and services moving out of the box of conventional business wisdom paradigms.

As we explained in previous articles (Bernardez, M. (2009) Sailing the winds of creative destruction: using educational technology during economic downturns. Educational Technology), in economic downturn times, a Mega focus must take over.

Under the concept of Globality (Sirkin et al, 2008), "companies have no centers. The idea of foreigness is foreign. Commerce swirls and market dominance shifts. Western business orthodoxy entwines with eastern business philosophy and creates a whole new mindset that embraces profit and competion as well as sustainability and collaboration." (Sirkin et at., 2008, Page 2)

Reengineering must be turned on its head: "outside-in": instead of focusing on saving money to the company at the expense of poorer service and reduced value to the customer, products and services cost- and performance-improvement must operate the other way around: saving oney and adding more value for each buck to the customer.

Here are some examples of Indian engineering ingenuity combined with the new BOP business paradigm:

Reducing healthcare costs - the BOP/ Mega way

The GE Mac 400 heart monitor works on batteries, can be transported to wherever the client is and costs just $ 1,000 -a tenth of standard models cost-

GE is planning to take the new technolgy developed by 300 Indian engineers to the US and the developed world to help bring down healthcare costs. there as well.

"Cooking with (less) gas" and CO2:

The portable, 23 $ dollar Oorja stove reduces CO2 emissions for indoor cooking by using gasifier technology developed for new plants miniaturized.

A fan helps keep a steady flame ti deliver air to the burning pellets with less CO2 emissions and at at three times more efficient performance.

3 million consumers in India already use these ovens in slums and modest homes.

Water purifier for the poor

Unilever's Pureit purifies water for domestic consumption for just $ 43 dollars -a third of the $ 150 minimum previous systems costed to Western consumers-.

The most interesting feature is not the product, however, but the innovative distribution chain: instead of costly machine-based, uniform distruibution chains, Indian Unilever uses 43,000 women-dealers that can reach the most remote villages, keep distribution costs low and increase the social impact by self-sustaining themselves.
The idea of direct sales initiated in the 1950s by Tupperware and Avon in the US is reutilized and redefined to bring down costs and add quality of life (and health) to 3 million families.

BOP cool -smarter and cheaper-

Using just 20 pieces -instead of the 200 in average for standard refrigerators- and reducing the size to 1.5 feet tall by 2 feet wide, Chotukool (Indian for "Small cool") brings portable refrigeration that lasts longer without electric power for 70 $ dollars to Indian villages -instead of the $ 200+ that conventional, heavier refrigerators require-.

Indian engineers replaced the noisy and prone to failure compressors with fans and chips like those used to cool computers' CPUs.

Zero "zeroes" on costs and access to banking: ATMs for BOP

Using the power and ubiquity of 20 dollar-cell phones technology, Zero -named to honor Indian invention of the zero in the 6th century- is an alternative Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) that can reach the remotest villages in rural India and provide BOP dwellers with instant access to cash and banking transactions 24/7 at the lowest cots.

Like in other innovations, supplyh chains are in charge of women that visit villages with the cell phones and help BOP customers to set up banking accounts using the cell phone screen and digital fingerprinting identification.

Once the account is on, BOP consumers can draw or deposit money in their accounts using their phones -or those rented per call by Grameen's "phone ladies"- . The banking ladies go to the nearest conventional bank branches to retrieve and carry back the rupees every day.

These and others are good examples of the power that can be unleashed by combining Mega vision, client-focused reengineering and innovation and using BOP markets as testing grounds.

How could we apply these lessons to our PII projects?

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References

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The power of the poor: the ideas and work of Hernando de Soto

2009-10-11T16:10:00.000-07:00

Back in 1979, Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto started a silent but powerful research project on poverty in Lima and the largest cities of the development world.

He found out that 2 thirds of the world population lives not only in poverty, but -and because of- without legal identity and property rigths, in what he called the "paralegal economy".

De Soto -author of "The mistery of Capital" and "The other path" -two path-breaking books on developing BOP population's standards of living wne further and his Foundation started to help actively the poor to gain access to social capital: property rights, microfinance, recognition and legal protection for entrepreneurial activities and commerce with astonishing results.

How can we apply De Soto's ideas to our PII ecosystems?

II PII Conference October 1-2, 2009: preparing ecosystems design with e-Performance

2009-09-25T10:57:00.000-07:00

The preparation of our coming PII Conference at ITSON (October 1,2) shows the use and application of e-performance to multiply the effectiveness and productivity of our team work.

PII project leaders -coordinated by Bernardo Flores- took over the task of hosting and recording preparation meetings using PII's Adobe Connect virtual classroom and effectively applying what they learned in the past semester Intellectual Capital & E-performance course to the organization of the coming conference.

You might want to check the examples by clicking on the images:

How was the experience for the online teams? What is it like for those who couldn't attend and saw the recorded meetings afterwards?

How can we use these tools for maximizing our impact?

Food for thought...

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References:

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PII New tools for ecosystems' design presented at ISPI St Louis Conference

2009-09-25T10:14:00.000-07:00

PII's presentation of new tools for designing ecosystem at ISPI St. Louis Conference was a success.
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Participants from US, India and the EU tested a new set of tools PII developed for improving our ecosystem design adn made enthusiastic comments inquiring for our program.

The session started discussing a new. outside-in paradigm to improve organizational performance:
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Considering organizational performance as a function of the ecosystem where the organization operates helps overcome the conventional -and distorting- "MBA" and "engineering" paradigms that -by focusing only in internal organizational processes- fail to address the true "value creation engine": the client experience and to realize that the value creation chain starts and ends outside single organizations.

Once we define the client experience, we might find that our organization can only deliver a part, a fraction of what is required by the client.

PII's new methodology allows to identify those processes and products that will be "farmed out" or provided by third parties and design and organize an efective value chain coordinating multiple organizations in a single, cross-organizational process required to deliver the client experience:

This model is, actually, not a "new" approach: its has been always the way reality works: multiple organizations provide a common, shared result, that Milton Friedman used to describe eloquenlty with the analysis of how a simple pencil gets in our hands:

The "novelty" in our approach is that it overcomes the distortion and oversimplification of conventional MBA and engineering models that start and end their performance analysis inside a single organization -usually a shop floor or a "single bottom line" business case-, failing to explain where the value comes from and promoting a myopic -and often self-destructive- approach to business.

Below you will find the reference materials we will discus and use at our coming PII Conference.

Questions? Comments?

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References

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G20 future goals open new opportunities

2009-09-25T09:46:00.001-07:00

An interesting article on today's Financial Times shows the relationship between vision and mission: the G20 vision of a 2050 with only 2 degrees of extra global warming and US proposal to reduce carbon emisions 12 percent for that date -a vision statement related to survival and well-being fo future generations in a shared planet- is directly libke to Macro-level business opportunities for alternative energy options and industries.

Some might argue whether alternative energy is in itself enough to offset the damage of global warming, and if this is caused only by human activity or also by cyclical, natural factors that are beyond human presence but -whatever our cause analysis migth be-.

Those arguments, however, do not deny the importance of alternative energy efforts and might also invite to consider additional "human action" to offset the risk to human survival and well-being posed by natural phenomena -cyclical or not-.

Moving the discussion about global warming from basic science and politically motivated debates -like those around nuclear , carbon or hidroelectrical alternatives' downsides- the G20 goals help develop "mission statements" for different energy industries as well as to measure the size of the potential market.

What could be the opportunities for Southern Sonora region and PII projects in those future markets and trends?

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Reference

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Intellectual Capital as value multiplier: Amazon poised to become Wal-Mart of the Web

2009-09-20T13:02:00.001-07:00

17 years after its foundation -and several times after his announced demise by conventional business wisdom- Amazon is set to become the Wal Mart of the Web; not only the dominant online retailer and a growing rival of brick-and-mortar conventional retailers but most fundamentally, the hub of a B2B ecosystem that thrives during economic downturns thanks to its unique combination of intellectual capital value and smooth delivery.

Amazon's stock is valued 65 times its earnings against Wal-Mart's 15 times, showing the impact of its intellectual capital valuation.

Amazon is not only offering an ever growing array of goods and services online: it is also provinding a unique e-business platform for thousands of small and middle new businesses around the world that allows them to access a global markat and compete.

And on top of all that, Amazon is also franchising its logistics and merchandising expertise to help small business to become globally competitive.

How could our PII projects use and benefit from Amazon's concept and resources?

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References

Stone. B. (2009) Can Amazon be Wal-Mart of the Web? The New York Times

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"Bottom line" management hits the bottom

2009-08-31T07:11:00.000-07:00

Today's Wall Street Journal wonders whether the current market can be sustainable. The reason: most of the companies have just resorted to the classic, "conventional wisdom" response during downturns: aggresively cutting costs seeking to show a "stronger" bottom line to stockholders.

The problem is -as WSJ points out- that companies' revenues have been also going down.

Companies are certainly facing the limits of downsizing, resizing, restructuring and reengineering -all the classic tools of what C.K. Prahalad called "bottom-line management"- in order to further squeeze their costs often at the expense of human and intellectual capital, quality of services and products -in short, value added to the clients-

Without revenue growth -the "top line" in the profit and loss statement-, as Prahalad put it in 1994 "downsizing, the equivalente of corporate anorexia, can make a company thinner: it doesn't necessarily make it healthier." (Prahalad, 1994, Page 11)

"Bottom-line management" is the default doctrine taught at most MBA schools and companies are increasingly looking toward its many and dangerous consequences.

Some concerned observers like Dirk Van Dijk, chief equity strategits at Zack Investment Research pointed out that "you cannot simply cut costs forever to have sustainable earnings. You need revenues to grow them over time" (Lauricella, WSJ, Page 1)

Which drives us back to the importance and scarcity of good "top-line management" and strategies nowadays.

As Prahalad said presciently back in 1998: "downsizing belatedly attempts to correct the mistakes of the past: it is not about creating the markets of the future" (Prahalad, 1998, Page 11)

Top-line management is focused on strategy, adding value to clients, reinventing industries and markets and competing for a place on the future.

As an example, as publishing and newpaper companies keep shrinking and shedding talented authors and journalists, Amazon and Google push ahead for e-books and online journalism and advertising, increasing their revenues and creating a booming new market with new rules: theirs.

Cutting costs can end in what a publishing executive described recently: "we cut our cocktail parties because after all the other cuts, we had not enough customers interested in attending to our book presentations".

How can we apply "top-line management" to our PII projects?

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References:

Prahalad, C.K. & Hamel, G. (1994) Competing for the future. HBS
Lauricella, T. (2009) Can Rally run without revenue? Investors wonder wether profits based on cost-cutting can long endure. Wall Street Journal

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Upscale Whole Foods prospers in the midst of the economic downturn

2009-08-27T11:29:00.000-07:00

Challenging all the gloomy forecast a year ago, Whole Foods' stock and sales are booming in spite of the global and US consumer downturn.

WF sales growth has outpaced Wal Mart and other low-price grocers, in spite of being up to 30% more expensive.

Consumers seem increasingly concerned with quality and health, even if they come at a higher price.

Advocates of reducing US healthcare cost coincide in finding prevention the best if not the onbly way to reduce HC cost at the time that the largest postwar generation -the baby boomers- reaches middle and retirement age -"payback time" for unhealthy diets and habits-.

What lessons can we extract from Whole Foods success?
How can we apply them to our PII projects?

Shall the small inherit the global market?

2009-08-27T11:10:00.000-07:00

UAV stands for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, a new category of military (and civil) aircraft that is quickly becoming the fastest growing segment in US military contracting.

More significantly, the top contenders in this new category of smaller, intelligent, pilot-less distance-controlled flying machines are new, small and medium-size companies, which -according to a recent WSJ report- are beating behemots like Boeing and Northrop in develiping new models and solutions at a faster pace and at a lower budget.

The Reaper

Other success story -Brazil's Embraer- has captured the regional jets world market rising from very humble origins.

Sonora seems to be in that trend for the coming years

And Guaymas is one of the hot spots

How can our South of Sonora ecosystem seize all the potential and business opportunities being offered beyond the obvious "comparative advantages" (such as location and lower wages)?

Food, health and e-performance

2009-08-27T10:11:00.000-07:00

Carlos Peral sent this example of an e-performance application -an EPSS- that helps customers in building or checking recipes or ways to combine food products.

How could you use this type of application in your project?
How would you customize / adapt / "tewak" this product features to better meet the requirements and / or constraints of your PII project audience?

Tools such as Macromedia Captivate may be used to create in minutes an EPSS like the ones shown in screen and install it on a touch-screen PC or Laptop as a "kiosk" (a PC unit that can be used by customers by touching the screen)

Captivate might also enable you to create a cell-phone or iPhone application that can be accessed from cell phones (m-learning)

Here is an example

Here are some examples of touch screen devices

HP

HP tablet

iPhone

Online diet generation and weight loss Websites and applications

Fitness and diet Websites

Globalization and emotions

2009-08-18T13:33:00.000-07:00

Browsing through materials for our inminent program on Performance Coaching and Management, I found two very interesting pieces for discussion.

The first one is a short insight from Peter Drucker on globalization

In the second Harvard and Sorbonne professor and diplomatic Dominique Moisi explains what he calls The Geopolitics of Emotions:

1. Emotions and world politics

2. Humiliation, hope and fear

How could you apply these concepts to the development of your project and its ecosystem?

Social networks: visions on the future of e-commerce

2009-08-11T08:59:00.000-07:00

As conventional commerce plummeted at the onset of the current recession, Amazon and other e-Tailers experienced a surge in sales and stock price, as 20% og global retail moved online.

Let' s listen to two gurus -and businessmen- of the Web 2.0 era comment on their visions of the shape global commerce and for-profit enterprise will take:

Chris Anderson on "how to form the long tail":

Anderson on "free" as the future price for the e-economy

Anderson discussing it more in depth with Charlie Rose

Jeff Bezos and a different view on the future of Amazon and the e-business.

Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO

Food for thought?

How can we use these concepts on our PII projects benefit?

Social Networks pros and cons

2009-08-11T08:35:00.000-07:00

Initially a passtime started among campus students at Harvard (see Facebook) , social networking has evolved into a huge variety of person-to-person, real-time, segmented communication tools that are used to post resumes or advertise businesses (Facebook) or coordinate 100,000 people rallies (such as happened with Twitter during Obama's presidential campaing in the US and the Iranian rallies for reform currently in place).

The videos below (another example of the power of sharing knowledge and using intellectual capital as social capital) explain how to start a Facebpook marketing Web page:

Introduction

Second part

How to create a Facebook group

How to create a Facebook homepage for business

Of course, there are several downsides on using social networks and not a few failures -most notorious using Virtual Worlds for adult education-

Check Facebook and discuss how could you use it for your PII project

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References

The Economist (2009) Using social networks for business.

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Doing some good and making some money for ISPI

2009-07-27T07:59:00.001-07:00

One of the very best conferences I ever attended (and was a presenter) was one designed by Roger Addison and Don Tosti on change. Every presentation was excellent and I found myself attending all of the session I could. Perhaps this could be done again...and the timing is certainly right.

..on Yoowe Santana's post on coaching

2009-07-13T15:13:00.000-07:00

First, I do have to suggest that my objection to using "need" as a verb is not casual. When one does so, they are allowing a confusion between means and ends.

Second, coaching is a viable process and ends up often in individual and group performance improvement and reward. It is also important to link all of that to measurable health, survival, and self-sufficiency as well as to quality of life. Measurable.

building on Alberto Felix's insights

2009-07-12T14:53:00.000-07:00

Felix is right. And this film show much of the power of Mega. We might do well to remember that a system approach starts and ends with societal value-added while a systems approach falls short of that. Also, while understanding the magnficient interactions of all parts--internal and external--let's not forget that Mega from the outset starts with societal good.

2009-07-12T09:24:00.000-07:00

Yoowe Santana is making some very good points.
Interestingly, both India and China are deviating from Mega while they are leaping ahead economically: they both have abject poverty and are polluting enourmous amounts in their leap forward.

Cosmic Zoom (National Film Board, Canada, 1968)

2009-05-31T10:51:00.000-07:00

I wanted to introduce you to this resource: an animation film produced by Canada's National Film Board in 1968.

This is just an example of a "discussion starter": what concepts and ideas concerning our PII and conceptual framework makes you this film think about?

Corporate Global Citizenship

2009-05-29T08:59:00.000-07:00

Mega planning -in the form of corporate global citizenship- has become part of the agenda of Davus 2008 Global Forum.

Michael Porter, global firms as Pepsico and Cisco and the PMs of Grean Britain and Jordan discuss what CGC means for their societal performance:

How could our PII projects benefit from these lessons and ideas?
How can we attract CGC corporations and governments to our South of Sonora ecosystem?