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Archive for March, 2011

Don’t Wait for Permission to Innovate

One question that comes up all the time is: “how can I innovate when my manager won’t let me?”

The answer is one people usually don’t want to hear: “Innovate anyway.” But it’s true.

Here’s a clip from the Management Innovation Exchange of Jeffrey Pfeffer talking about how to create your own job – it’s short and well worth watching:


Jeffrey Pfeffer: Punch Above Your Weight

Jeffrey Pfeffer’s recommendations are based on research, but they are awfully similar to those of Seth Godin, which are based on experience:

The number of people you need to ask for permission keeps going down:

1. Go, make something happen.
2. Do work you’re proud of.

3. Treat people with respect.

4. Make big promises and keep them.

5. Ship it out the door.

When in doubt, see #1.

My recommendations are based on a combination of experience and research.

When people ask me how to innovate when they don’t have permission, my answer is “how much can you get away with?” If you can sign of on projects worth $100 without your manager’s approval, then you can test out any new idea that costs less than $100.

When I started one of my management jobs a while ago, I read a few of books by Tom Peters and a few other people, and I wrote down 48 ideas that I could try with my new team. None of them cost anything more than time and energy to execute. Over the course of two years, we tested all but two of those ideas.

Not every one worked, but a lot of them did. Our team was responsible for recruiting students for a tertiary institute, and as we tried out those ideas together, our team got better and better at matching up people with the courses that interested them.

In our first year of experimenting, we increased enrolments by over 10%, which had about a $2 million impact on the bottom line. All from trying out ideas that cost nothing. That’s all that I had to work with in that job. After that year, I had a bit more slack.

The point here is that I didn’t ask permission. I was given the job to manage, and that’s what I did. I tried out as many new ideas as I could within the authority that I had. And I gave my team as much slack as I could so that they could try out as many ideas as they could. It was a collective effort.

That’s how you innovate when you don’t have permission.

So, how much can you get away with?

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The Biggest Innovation Challenge of All

We all get caught up in the day-to-day activities of work and life but have you really stopped to think about how extraordinary your life is? Don’t worry, I’m not about to do one of those self-help/motivational rants but I do want to make the point that we may be in the middle of a economic development bubble if we don’t address the biggest innovation challenge that is confronting all of us.

The long-term growth in world GDP per capita is a confronting chart. I first saw this in Eric Beinhocker’s book “The Origin of Wealth”. Really, nothing happened until the 18th century and then there has been an increasing rate of GDP growth that really takes off with the industrial revolution. This is the chart from “Origin of Wealth”.

We are living in extraordinary times and it’s very easy to take this development for granted. As Beinhocker puts it even more succinctly:

…over 97 percent of humanity’s wealth was created in just the last 0.01 percent of our history. As the economic historian David Landes describes it, “the Englishman of 1750 was closer in material things to Caesar’s legionanaires than to his own great-grand children.”

The trouble with this rate of growth is that it is both amazing and disconcerting at the same time. If I showed a curve like that to a finance colleague they might say that it looks like a market bubble. If I think back to the ecology classes in my science degree it looks like the population curve of a species that goes through boom and bust cycles.

Since the 18th century this growth has been underpinned by the use of finite fossil fuels, particularly coal and oil. There is a very close relationship between GDP and energy consumption and while economies are slowly becoming less energy intensive, this relationship is largely intact. The biggest innovation challenge of all is decoupling fossil fuel consumption from GDP growth. Food and water might be constraints to growth as well but these can be overcome with energy.

Energy Consumption and Economic Growth (The Economist)

The first energy crunch in the middle of the 17th century was due to the loss of forests around cities that provided wood. The winners were the nations and towns that could find and extract coal to power development.

The winners of the next energy crunch may not be the nations that own resources. Instead, it will be the innovators who can restructure economies to break the relationship between fossil fuel consumption and economic development.

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An Innovation Challenge: Learning From Failure

I’m still working my way through Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz. It’s a very interesting book, and nicely written. I’ll tell you more about it when I’m done. In th meantime, I’d like to share a fantastic quote from Schulz, which is in her review of Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World by Tina Rosenberg.

Schulz uses the review to critique Big Idea Books, and her argument applies to a majority of business books too. Here is one of the key issues that she raises (I added the emphasis):

Solutions are not one size fits all—they are, in fact, maddeningly bespoke. That’s because neither problems nor people are fungible. Rosenberg is a brilliant reporter, but here she exhibits the characteristic blind spot of the blind-spot-obsessed Big Idea books. Like totalizing religious or political stories, these books promise to hand over the master key that will unlock our lives. Or, more precisely, they tell us that we have had the key all along, but that we have been holding it upside down.

To which I say: key-shmey. There is no rule, process, peer group, leader, or best seller that can absolve us of the responsibility of thinking our way through life on our own two feet. What irks me most about this infinite parade of gigundo solutions isn’t their glibness or even the borderline theology (of some) and borderline Babbitry (of others) involved in promising audiences easy, happy, profitable ideas. Nope. What irks me is that when you rigidly apply grand theories to everybody, sooner or later everybody feels like nobody, whether you’re in Communist Belgrade or the local DMV. There is a reason we call such systems soul-crushing: They ignore or annihilate individual difference and inner life.

This is the problem we have in dealing with complex systems. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions. If anyone tells you that there is, beware.

Furthermore, there in complex systems, there are nearly always unintended consequences to action. These two things together make it very difficult to plan out actions in advance.

This is why I like Schulz’ advice to think our way through life on our own two feet – it’s the only way to go. A big part of this is experimenting. One of the themes of Being Wrong is that wrongness is a natural state. We can learn from error, in fact, we must learn from error as this is the only way to improve.

I ran across a great website today called Admitting Failure. They are trying to use the site to help international development efforts learn from things that don’t work in other contexts. Here is their reasoning:

The development community is failing… to learn from failure. Instead of recognizing these experiences as learning opportunities, we hide them away out of fear and embarrassment.

No more. This site is an open space for development professionals who recognize that the only “bad” failure is one that’s repeated. Those who are willing to share their missteps to ensure they don’t happen again. It is a community and a resource, all designed to establish new levels of transparency, collaboration, and innovation within the development sector.

Get involved – share failures, build knowledge and encourage others to do the same – so we all benefit, today.

We have to take failure seriously precisely because there are no one-size-fits-all solutions to problems. Contexts are always slightly different, so not all lessons will transfer from one arena to another. Nevertheless, if we embrace the messiness of the world, we’ll see that we don’t need grand theories. We just need to try things, and learn from what works and what doesn’t.

I’m pretty sure that this approach will work for, well, nearly everyone.

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There’s More to Innovation Than Novelty

When I went to visit Neil Kay last year, we talked a bit about novelty. He said that the way that we frame PhD research is all wrong – that it is a mistake when we tell people that they need to make a novel contribution to knowledge. Instead, we agreed that people should be looking to advance knowledge, which is a bit different than making a novel contribution.

For example, you could write an economics PhD connecting the theories of Alfred Marshall with those of Justin Bieber. That would certainly be novel (at least, I hope there aren’t too many people trying that), but would it materially advance knowledge? Probably not.

Here’s another example – what do you think this is? I’ll give you a hint – it’s a symbol.

It was on a door at the conference venue that I was in at the end of last week. Throughout the two days that we were there, we had a stream of people walk up, look at the symbol, pause, continue walking down the hall and then compare the symbol with those on two more doors. The women then shrugged and walked into the last door, while the men returned to this one.

Somehow, that’s the symbol for “Men.”

This is an example of bad innovation.

It’s a novel way to indicate which room the men should use, but it’s not a good way to do so.

There are a few innovation lessons contained in the cryptic symbol:

  • Novel ideas are not automatically innovative. Just because an idea is completely new, it doesn’t mean that it’s good. Like the Marshall plus Bieber PhD, novelty doesn’t tell us anything about the quality of the idea. You need more than novelty – in addition:
  • Innovations need to create value. The weird door sign creates negative value – it confuses people, it may lead to potentially embarrassing mixups, and it wastes time. All of these are bad outcomes. To innovate, we need to execute new ideas to create value. To create value, we must remember that:
  • Our innovations have to fit within the existing economic network. As Jeffrey Phillips pointed out in our discussion of flying cars, that is a technology that will only work when there are a large number of related technical and social innovations in place that are required to support flying cars.

    The problem with the “Men” symbol is that it doesn’t connect to any normally accepted method for communicating that this is the room into which men should go. This lack of specificity might be find in the signage for a trendy new nightclub, where part of the mystique comes from being difficult to find. I don’t know about you, but I prefer toilets without that mystique…

When you’re thinking up ideas, it is critical to think about how executing these ideas might create value. If they don’t create clear value for people, then it might be smart to spend your limited resources executing a different idea that does.

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How to Test a Business Model Like a Scientist

How do we decide what actions to take in business? Or in life?

In many cases, we base our actions on our models of the world. We think that things work in a particular way, and this determines the choices we make.

We can make a strong case for trying to make these choices more like a scientist does. Here’s an example.

The Nieman Journalism Lab pulled together a set of opinions on the new pay system that the New York Times has put in place, with thoughts from Steven Brill, Anil Dash and Megan McCarthy among others. Here is one of the points that Steve Buttry makes in his piece:

My friend and former boss Jim Brady says that you can’t build a business model based on what people should do (and newspaper people believe in their bones that people should pay for their content). You build a business model based on what people will do. This tortured maze of exceptions and trigger points is a laughable effort to collect because people should pay but to find a way not to lose the people who won’t pay.

This is a great point.

The really good thing about it is that we can actually set these up as hypotheses that can be tested. “People will pay for content” is an idea about which we can collect a fair amount of data.

There are a number of people that are starting to say that we should treat business models as a set of testable hypotheses. Steve Blank outlines how to do this very well in this set of slides:

His thoughts on the broader trends in start-up experience are well worth reading in full, but for our purposes, jump to the case study that starts on slide 72. He uses the Business Model Canvas to discuss the experience of a start-up called OurCrave, an online social shopping platform.

The case shows what the original business model was, and more importantly, how the assumptions underlying it were tested. Then he shows how the business model changed five times in response to data and testing.

This approach doesn’t necessarily guarantee success, but it certainly helps the odds. It demonstrates the reality that Peter Sims describes in a recent post:

The truth is, most entrepreneurs launch their companies without an brilliant idea and proceed to discover one, or if they do start with what they think is a superb idea, they quickly discover that it’s flawed and then rapidly adapt.

Thinking about your business model like a scientist can be a good scheme, provided you keep two warnings in mind.

The first is to beware of false precision. You want to test your assumptions with data, but you can’t always get the data you need. And the fact of the matter is that your plan will change yet again once you launch it and people really start interacting with your ideas. Usually, when testing numbers like these, you want to be within an order of magnitude with your numbers, and you want to remember that they are estimates.

The second caution is to avoid making models that say things like “social media always works” or “social media never works.” These absolute cases are never true. What we really want to figure out are the circumstances in which an approach works or doesn’t. Your business model may or may need need social media support, or six sigma in your production, or any other number of things.

Scientists are interested in finding the boundary conditions for rules – when do rules stop working? When testing business model hypotheses, you’re trying to figure out what is right in your particular case. So beware of absolute statements about what will or won’t work.

Experimenting is a critical innovation skill. If you can figure out how to experiment with your business model, you will increase your chances of success. Just remember to test it like a scientist.

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Markets are Innovations Too

Well…. I have finally discovered Ebay (please don’t snigger). A consequence of my children growing up is that that there is now a lot of stuff that we no-longer need in the house. Just to see if the Ebay thing would work, I put a baby bouncer on Ebay and to my amazement the bids came in and it was sold to a lady who lives on a cattle property in a very remote part of central Australia. I was very happy with the price and she was delighted to get something second-hand when the nearest township was almost a day’s drive away.

Impressed by this, I went through the garage and put many more things on Ebay. My little electric lawn mower went to a guy who had just twenty square meters of lawn and an old ceiling fan went to a lady who needed a fan on her undercover porch. It didn’t matter that it didn’t have the controller switch because her brother was an electrician and could easily get a replacement.

Ebay is a market and the example of Ebay shows how markets are actually calculating and connecting machines. We talk a lot about all sorts of markets on a day to day basis because they are a very important part of the economy. Just this morning I have had conversations about ‘the job market’, ‘the property market’ and ‘the stock market’ but do we ever really stop to think about what a market is and how it works?

Sociologist of technology, Michel Callon has done some nice work on the ‘engineering’ of markets. In one study he describes the creation of a strawberry market in rural France. The theory of markets states that several things need to happen for them to ‘work’. Buyers and sellers need to be brought together into a place to conduct transactions where they can indicate what they think something is worth by nominating a price. Information needs to be provided so that buyers can arrive at this decision and they also need to be able to compare alternative products. Both buyers and sellers need to be confident that contracts will be honoured and that the market machine is being operated transparently.

Jakarta Fish Market

Callon shows how this ‘theory of markets’ gets translated into the construction of an institution that is supported by rules and technologies. The market hall was arranged so that buyers could compare different boxes of strawberries with information about age, size and district of origin. Bidding was displayed on an electronic board and this recorded the results of previous auction lots. Rules governing behaviour were shared and enforced.

Why does this all matter? Well, as I hinted at with my Ebay example, well-designed markets are really good at connecting people and materials in a way that creates a valuable outcome. I was going to leave my lawnmower at the end of the driveway, hoping that someone would take it away. The engineering of the Ebay market with the information processing, sorting into categories and transparency of process means that my lawnmower goes to the person who had exactly the right job for it – and I got a part of that monetary value.

Putting my lawnmower to good use is a trivial example but it shows how the ‘market’ succeeded where my judgement would have failed. The key here is how well the Ebay market is designed to aggregate and process information. As I said in a post last week, IT is lowering the cost of information with increasing processing power. As markets become designed in better and more innovative ways to create the conditions needed for a market to work, we will see more of the economy organised by markets and less by hierachially-organized firms.

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Good Innovation Managers are Simply Good Managers

What happens when the people that are supposed to be creative and innovative in your organisation are neither?

I ran across an interesting quote from one of the people interviewed in the new book Herding Cats: Being Advice to Aspiring Academic and Research Leaders by Geoff Garrett and Graeme Davies:

The biggest thing that I have found through the years is that many people in research are actually bureaucrats. I would have expected them all to be interested in the future, wanting to change the world, brimming over with enthusiasm to get on with the job and deliver useful results. This took me a long time to realise and I think I would have been much more effective if I had understood that there are a lot of people who really do not want to see much in the way of change, and that includes a lot of people in R&D.

How do you deal with this?

It’s actually a really tough question. This is why effective change management is a critical part of innovation management. It’s also why in research studies, innovation success correlates with so many other good outcomes – higher profits, better firm survival rates, more engaged employees and so on.

The reason for this is that all of these things are driven by good management.

Garrett and Davies conclude their excellent book with a quote from another interview:

I reckon there are five key dimensions to leadership in a research and development or academic environment…

  1. Research leaders must have a vision of where they want the organisation to go – because, if you don’t, no one else will.
  2. You articulate it, and communicate it well, to get your people excited.
  3. You hire the best people you can find.
  4. You create the environment where they can excel, and succeed.
  5. You get out of the way.

Garrett and Davies undersell their book when they say it is only about managing academic-style research. Those are all the things you need to do to manage effectively anywhere.

Good innovation managers are simply good managers.

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Three Steps for Inventing the Future

The Future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. – William Gibson

That’s the idea that framed yesterday’s post – Where’s My Flying Car? I argued that as innovators, our job is to invent the future – and that in doing so, instead of trying to come up with something that has never existed before, like a flying car, we’re better off trying to figure out how things that already exist can be redesigned so that they mean something completely new.

It’s about innovating meaning rather than innovating stuff.

Some of the responses to that post triggered some thoughts about how to do this – so here are three steps to take for inventing the future:

  1. Make sure that what we’re doing creates genuine value: Yesterday I talked about how part of the problem was in defining potential solutions to our problems only in terms of ways of thinking that already exist. Umair Haque made a similar point in his post last week:

    What stands in the way of the future, most often, is the past. It’s yesterday’s sluggish institutions. Yet, instead of reimagining and rebooting those institutions, we keep reviving and resurrecting them — zombielike — hoping that by bringing them back from the dead, we can keep the status quo humming along for just a little while longer, that we can eke out the last meager, shriveled morsels of returns from seeds laid down during the industrial age.
    So here’s my question: Does what you’re doing have a point — one that matters to people, society, nature, and the future?

    This is the first step in inventing the future.

  2. Create value by meeting needs, not wants: Jeffrey Phillips made a very good response to yesterday’s post. He argues that we don’t have flying cars because while a number of people may want them, no one really needs them. Phillips says that the best way to create value is to focus on needs:

    Wants are interesting and may lead an innovator to potential value, but are often not deeply rooted or key to a person’s life. Additionally, wants often don’t scale, that is, they aren’t shared by a significant number of other people. Needs, on the other hand, are more immediate, more closely felt and more likely to be shared. Innovators must do a better job distinguishing between wants and needs.

    So that’s step two.

  3. Redesign things that already exist to create new meaning: Kevin McFarthing gave a great example of doing this in a comment:

    Very interesting post, Tim. A good example of disruptive technology and displacement of existing is the growth of mobile phones in places like India and Africa. People talking to each other is an “old job”. Mobile phone technology leapfrogs landline and cable to allow millions more to talk to each other. The language of the job and the technology exist, economics facilitate, and the innovative change in the market happens.

    That’s step three – innovate meaning. In this case, mobile phones in the west mean “I can talk anywhere”, but in developing countries, they mean “I can finally talk.”

I’ll take Kevin’s example one step further. Mobile phones have been revolutionary in Africa in several ways – for example, they have been used to create banking for many people that don’t have a bank account:

Disintermediation is also made possible by mobile money. Services to transfer cash by text message have been around for some years. One of the most successful, M-PESA, began in 2007 in Kenya, where it now has more than 13m users. It is now used for salaries, bills, donations: few things cannot be paid for via a handset. Similar services can be found in more than 40 countries. Though not yet on the same scale, this seems to be only a question of time: in most countries in sub-Saharan Africa, more people have a mobile phone than a bank account

This has it all. The mobile services are making people’s lives materially better. They do this by meeting a genuine need. And the value is created using technology that has been considered a failure in North America and Europe, but which is given a new meaning in the context of developing countries.

This isn’t just an innovation lesson that applies in developing countries though. You can use these same three steps anywhere. In fact, you should use these same three steps any place where you want to use innovation to invent a more meaningful future.

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Where’s My Flying Car?

When Paul Krugman and Charlie Stross had a chat at WorldCon a couple of years ago, the first question out of Krugman’s mouth was “Where are the flying cars?”

Krugman asked this because he knows that science fiction authors like Stross have been imagining the future for quite a while, and that currently impossible technologies like flying cars have long played a role in their speculations.

Like sci-fi authors, if we’re trying to innovate, our job is to invent the future.

But what does that mean?

Bruce Sterling has some interesting things to say about the future – starting with a paraphrase of William Gibson:

You see, the future is already here, it’s just not well distributed yet.

The future does feature some brand-new stuff that was technically impossible before, but, more importantly, the future has a different take on matters that are already here. There’s a change of emphasis. The future is like another culture, another country. We have to come to terms with the future’s language.

The Sterling piece has a lot of interesting ideas about design and inventing the future, and it’s worth a read.

His distinction between brand-new stuff that was technically impossible before, and figuring out the language of the future is a critical one.

It means that inventing the future isn’t simply about making flying cars and other cool stuff you find in sci-fi novels.

We can actually invent the future by figuring out new meanings for the things that are already here.

There’s a great example of what this means in Greg Satell’s post from today:

As I explained in an earlier post, disruptive innovation is crappy innovation. Crappy, that is, because it tends to do old jobs poorly. A truly disruptive technology changes paradigms by doing a new job entirely. (That’s what makes it so disruptive).

It’s also why so much of what we hear about digital marketing is wrong. The discourse all too often focuses on how digital stacks up against traditional media performing traditional tasks. It shouldn’t be surprising that, in this context, digital often comes up short.

The fact that so many people keep trying to square this circle shows an appalling lack of imagination and good sense. The true impact of digital technology in the marketing arena lies years in the future, possibly more than a decade. What will that impact be? To be honest, I don’t really know and I’m deeply suspicious of anyone who thinks they do.

People are trying to define the future of digital marketing exclusively in terms of what marketing looks like today. This is wrong. The innovation here isn’t coming up with shiny new web technologies. The innovation opportunity lies in taking the concepts that are already here, and figuring out a new language that will determine how they will work and what they will mean.

We can’t do this by simply extrapolating existing trends. Nor by taking new technologies and new ideas and hammering them so they fit into existing concepts and frameworks.

We won’t invent the future by inventing flying cars. Which in some ways is too bad, because I’d like one. We will invent the future by taking things that are already here, but which are maybe unevenly distributed, and giving them new meanings.

Innovating language by making new novel connections between ideas is the best way to invent the future.

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How Corporate Crime Starts with Failed Business Models

Every economic bust launches criminal charges against executives of failed companies. It’s been a few years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the onset of the Global Financial Crisis but the court cases in many instances are still ongoing. One of the most notorious cases in Australia was the child-care center empire of ABC Learning Centers. The entrepeneur-founder Eddy Groves and another director are facing charges relating to shifting money out of the business in the months leading to the collapse.

I do a lot of my strategy work with Kevin Hendry who has a keen interest in strategy and corporate failure. Kevin was the Asia-Pacific Vice President of Monsanto during its venture into GMO agriculture and has first-hand experience of the events that lead to a corporate blow-up. While we tend to focus on late-stage actions that end up in the courts, Kevin says that the beginnings of these cases often start with bad strategy. While ABC Learning ended in white collar crime charges, it started with the belief that education services could be made profitable through economies of scale that were achieved by multiple acquisitions. Anyone involved in education knows that relationships are the core of education and relationships are really hard to scale up. In hindsight the flaw was obvious but everyone bought the growth story, including the Singaporean government who bought half a billion dollars in shares in a 2007 capital raising to fund a major acquisition in the US.

In an excellent series of cases studies of corporate collapses after the 1990s boom, Grant and Visconti (2006) detected a consistent pattern in strategic misalignment leading to the corporate accounting scandals of 2001-2003. Overconfidence created by prior success leads to diversification into different products and countries where the model for success may not be valid. Here are some of Grant and Visconti’s examples:

-Enron expanded from natural gas into power, water, telecommunications and derivatives trading, and expanded its presence outside the US – notably in Europe.
-WorldCom transformed itself from a long-distance phone company into a diversified supplier of telecommunication services – including internet and data services with interests overseas as well as in the US.
-Adelphia grew from being a local cable TV company into a US-wide cable provider supplying not just TV but internet, data and other video services.
-Global Crossing expanded internationally to become a global player in telecommunications infrastructure.
-HealthSouth grew from being a local outpatient surgery provider to what its CEO described as ‘‘the Wal-Mart of outpatient rehabilitation’’ offering integrated surgery, rehabilitation, home care and pharmaceutical services throughout the US.
-AOL expanded from being an internet service provider into the world’s biggest and most diversified media company.
-Parmalat expanded from a Parma-based dairy into a diversified food products supplier with operations in 30 countries.

There are enough consistencies here to identify three links between all of the companies that ended in corporate fraud cases.
1) Strong orientation towards growth
2) Useage of mergers and acqusitions to accelerate growth
3) Reliance on debt finance

The fraud usually creeps in when the strategy fails to generate returns and the debt gets bigger. In these cases the temptation to ‘cook the books’ just long enough to let the turnaround happen is almost overwhelming. Small adjustments to reports become bigger and bigger until the receivers reveal the full horror of the failure.

The main takeaway is the fundamental importance of revisiting the business model and understanding what the key factors are that make it work. Kevin says that Monsanto could have made the GMO business work if they had invested more in building a public relations and govermment liaison capability rather than just investing more into the science.

Success and overconfidence are major risk factors for business. Some confidence is good but hubris is a destroyer.

Kevin runs a 4 day seminar in Brisbane on corporate governance and the skills that are needed to be an effective director. I would recommend it to anyone involved with boards as a manager or director.

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