A question was recently put to me by everyone’s favorite futurist – Thornton May: “Most people don't put innovation and infrastructure in the same sentence. They simply tend to view savings derived from optimized infrastructure as a funding source for “other” innovation investments. My thoughts?” My thoughts initially circled in
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This quote from Gandhi (similar to one made centuries earlier by Lao Tzu), is the typical formulation we learned in Psychology 101: beliefs precede attitude, which precedes behavior, and the conclusion typically arrived at is that in order to change behavior you need to get to the root cause and change beliefs.
I worked at the General Dynamics (now Lockheed-Martin) F-16 jet fighter plant in Fort Worth, Texas, during the mid-1980’s, where they subsequently manufactured the F-22 and now the F-35. My tenure there spanned the era of the $400 hammer and $700 toilet seat scandals in the military procurement world. While
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. If we’ve heard it once we’ve heard it a thousand times. I even wrote one of my early posts on this topic (“When metrics collide”). Consultants, analysts, academics and other thought leaders have examined and questioned its veracity, but still the consensus seems to be that
I have been privileged to have had the opportunity to contribute to the recently published, “Positioned – Strategic Workforce Planning that gets the Right Person in the Right Job”, co-edited by Rob Tripp, Workforce Planning Manager at Ford Motor Company. The list of contributors is a Who’s Who of strategic
Dateline: October 4, 2012 – Facebook reaches one billion users! One billion people connected on a single platform; one-seventh of the world’s population. If you assume 40,000 BCE as the start of modern humans, it took the planet 41,804 years to reach a population level of one billion; it took
… and any fool will mind it”. ~ Henry David Thoreau. The EPA was in my neighborhood several weeks ago testing well water - never a good sign. It was determined that the subdivision just north and upstream of us had once been the site of a farm contaminated by
In case you are wondering, yes, I am reusing the same graphic from last week, but this time to make a contrasting point. Last time, in “The Skeptical CFO” I was focused on the VARIABILITY in the data and the forecast. This week, however, we’re headed in the opposite direction,
During a recent presentation on performance management I had an audience member ask me if perhaps I had minored in cynicism along with my degree in finance. I replied that, with the science, psychology and philosophy I’d taken, I probably had minored in skepticism, but that the cynicism came later,
I remarked in an earlier post (“BI and Better Decisions”) that, prior to joining SAS, while I understood analytics and performance management just fine, the phrase ‘business intelligence’ was not in my vocabulary”. Turns out I’m not the only finance professional so inflicted. I was invited last week to give a