Eliminate Strategic Overload
Summary. As companies respond to intensifying competitive pressures and challenges, they ask more and more of their employees. But organizations often have very little to show for the efforts of their talented and engaged workers.
By selecting fewer initiatives with greater impact, companies can make their strategies more powerful. A strategic initiative is worthwhile only if it does one or more of the following:
It creates value for customers by raising their willingness to pay. As your company finds ways to innovate or to improve existing products, the maximum price people will be willing to pay for the offering rises.
It creates value for employees by making work more attractive. Offering better jobs lowers the minimum compensation that you have to offer to attract talent to your business.
It creates value for suppliers by reducing their operating cost. As suppliers’ costs go down, the lowest price they would be willing to accept for their goods falls.
As companies expand the total amount of value created for their customers, employees, and suppliers, they position themselves for enduring financial success.
^ADJ: This is a great model, and I encourage you to read the book!
Structure of chip industry hinders supply chain recovery
"In large part, the chip supply chain is snarled up because of the concentration of producers in a few countries, a situation that limits the dispersion of risks"
^ADJ: This is going to be an on going issue for quite sometime
Cyberattack Forces a Shutdown of a Top U.S. Pipeline
^ADJ: Good article on the Colonial attack, but why did it happen, a few observations:
Cyber-attacks are increasingly targeted, complex, and difficult to detect. We are dealing with sophisticated well run and resourced opponents, who are ‘hacking’ and ‘ransoming’ as a business. They use high levels of automation to seek out vulnerable firms – they very much use risk / reward frameworks, to leverage their resources (mostly time bound).
A thorough cyber security review will often highlight legacy applications and business processes, these require significant change management capability, so it becomes a battle between the urgent and important.
Cyber security is typically lumped into the IT budget – prioritising the spend becomes difficult when the business benefits are hard to quantify. We suggest that cyber security needs to be its own separate line item or moved to Insurance – as it is now a cost of continuing to do business.
Unfortunately, I have rarely seen cyber security projects reduce cost (they can when combined with removing legacy or duplicate systems). Therefore, a reluctance to carry out this work is often seen due to concern for what may be highlighted and the associated remediation requirements.
Between supply chain difficulties, Covid-19 impacts, and growth demands – increasingly all IT resources are consumed with business priorities, and cyber remediation work, whilst on the to do list, never gets completed.
Getting external validation of cyber preparedness is sometimes seen as a pass/fail exercise, rather than a focus on continuous improvement and a quality assurance process – some mindsets need to change.
Many businesses do not have a complete understanding of their application and infrastructure landscape, meaning they are not fully aware of what their most valuable data is, where it is located, and to what extent it is protected.
‘I’d Never Been Involved in Anything as Secret as This’
Great read on the planning that went into the raid and how they kept it secret.
What is the future of commuting to work?
"Around half the UK labour force is currently working from home. Surveys of employees conducted in March and April 2021 suggest that spending two to three days a week at home is the most common expected working pattern after the pandemic."
^ADJ: it is clear that work patterns are going to change, the challenge that I see is organisations managing that change, providing systems that allow the team to be really effective when working offsite (so just not home). This brings new challenges, and new thinking is required - not just adaptions on how we use to work.