Home to Chatham House Now that I have completed the weekly sessions of the Australian Company Directors Course, I run the risk of sounding like a paid advertisement… BUT if you have contemplated doing this course, don’t hesitate, just do it. The quality of presenters and the work that has gone into preparing the course material is utterly first rate. I must say I have also learnt a great deal from the participants who are all business leaders in a wide range of fields.  As in any learning, you only get out what you put in. There is a lot of reading material and preparation for every week. The case study material is really strong and gives you a very good grounding for all facets of directorship. The participants have agreed to continue to meet monthly, so we have called the group Chatham House, based on the application Chatham House rule. If you are after the original Chatham House group here which is home of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, is a world-leading institute for the debate and analysis of international issues.

Techramp is an exciting one day session as part of the Transaction 2.0 day at Cebit. There is a great cast of first class presenters.  The speakers are people have been there and have got both the scars and rewards to prove it. I’ve been lucky enough to be invited to chair the Techramp sessions.So if you are a startup Web 2.0 business, whatever stage your idea is at now - whether just a concept – or building user base and customers – to making good profits and cashflow - the sessions are designed to address the most important issues you will be facing.  

Entrepreneurial people often like to learn by doing and by asking questions of people that have been there. Techramp is absolutely focussed on the practical rather than theoretical and heavily case study driven. Plus there are panel sessions with loads of time to ask questions and draw on the knowledge and experience of these people that have been along the journey. 

The first session is all about setting the scene – have you got what it takes to be an entrepreneur and how to go about build a winning web business. Is this a road I want to take, and what does that road look like anyway?

The next session discusses the challenges in creating and dealing with rocket growth cycle and marketing a business. It also elaborates on issues such as funding, product development phases and human resource management, as well as technical issues like development environments and project management. Attention will be given to marketing of a new, exciting service or product, and how to get through the “Nuts and Bolts” of every startup (office space, overheads, online billing, hosting and more) - a session every start-up needs as I found it was something that can consume lots of time and distract you from getting on with the main game. 

After lunch TechRamp will get into the some of the technical stuff, with a panel discussion on designing the user experience. This session is so important – if you get usability and design wrong, forget it. Sign up and product ease of use are just critical for to keep sales moving forward and driving satisfied customers. Commercial software where once a deal is done, customers are stuck with it no matter how bad it is. Web 2.0 is much more opt in and opt off like mobile phone plans. Then we will get into the more nitty gritty technical issues, again get this wrong and you are done for.

Transaction 2.0 will be capped with the TechRamp 2008 competition. In addition to recognition, the winning startup will be awarded with an excellent and relevant stack of prizes, on behalf of the TechRamp supporters and sponsors. 

This is going to be an exciting day, and I am looking forward to meeting the people involved. Thanks to Vishal Sharma who will be on the judging panel for the introduction to Gilad Greenbaum, Director (IT) Hanover Fairs… See you in Sydney. 

Last week I attended, along with around 1100 other people, a presentation given by Kerry Stokes as part of the Business News Success and Leadership breakfast series.

Kerry and Peter Gammel approached Business News to hold the breakfast with a key aim in mind - to attract solid support from Perth’s business community for his bid to obtain two board seats on the West Australian Newspapers’ board. Judging from the support and response that I heard from the room, I got only the view that his approach had worked.

He made some interesting points, which I quote here from memory:

• The West Australian Saturday edition is likely to be outsold by The Sunday Times very soon - something I never would have dreamed would ever happen when I was involved in buying significant press for clients in my advertising days pre-2000
• Distribution to regional centres is solidly falling due to deliveries arriving far too late
• The supply chain is just not getting a fair share of the revenue slice, with no increase in payment in many years

His personal contributions and business success have been very positive for Western Australia, and innovations, such as giving media training to apprentices working at Westrac so that they could effectively communicate with customers, are simple and clever.

So, what of the strategy - effectively attacking the board for not driving better performance with the underlying message that management isn’t innovative enough, customer focussed enough, nor is the content interesting enough.

Much of the criticism can be laid at the feet of editorial direction, which has taken a real issues driven approach. The Sunday Times has made leaps and bounds in improving its product (which frankly used to be terrible) and deserves the success of improved readership.

However, some of the issue is the changing demographics of the readership audience. The West used to be compulsory reading for me daily - but my readership habits have changed.

I now getting my morning fix of news from:

• A news site such as www.news.com.au or www.smh.com.au
• Snippets off my 3 mobile phone if I am out using Planet 3 business or m.businessday.com.au - but mainly sport related news
• The excellent Business News email service
• The Financial Review - which I do read cover to cover
• And for more in depth stuff, well good periodicals like the Company Director magazine

As you can see it is the business stuff that I prefer to read and need to be across. I lost my faith in The West when I heard a journalist ask the CEO of Coca-cola Amatil if they were looking at the then Peters and Brownes milk assets. The CEO responded, “we are not particularly looking at them, but if something were presented to us, and we felt it was a fit we would consider it”. Guess the headline, “Coca Cola Amatil eyes Peters and Brownes milk assets”…

Having had my shot there (bearing in mind that in dealing with the advertising folk at The West, I found them very helpful, very customer focussed and keen to ensure results - I didn’t have a negative experience with anyone there at all), perhaps it is worth looking at the other side of the argument.

Copied directly from the West Australian site:

• There is a significant risk that Mr Stokes and Seven Network may gain effective control of WAN without paying a control premium
• Seven Network is a direct competitor of WAN, creating potential for recurring and systemic conflicts of interest
• The criticism of the board and the company by Seven Network and Mr Stokes ignores WAN’s strong underlying performance and profitability
• The focus by Seven Network and Mr Stokes on recent results ignores the fact that WAN’s recent dividend payment was affected by abnormal events and that the final dividend for the 07/08 year is expected to be significantly higher than the interim dividend
• The company has a clear strategy in place to generate significant value for all WAN shareholders

The above points are explained in more detail here and worth a read, particularly given the similar approach taken by Kerry Stokes to secure his place into Seven would appear almost identical, and that there is absolutely no question that Seven and WA News compete for media dollars and increasingly will be competing more and more online.

Whatever the outcome, there will be plenty of pressure on the board and management to improve results.

The author does not have shares in either The West or WAN, nor Business News.

This week I had the great pleasure of meeting Professor Bob Garratt, author of the above book amongst others. He was in Perth to present on “Directors and their homework: developing strategic thought”.

The presentation was interesting and through provoking and particularly highlighted the ever growing demands on directors, as the scope of what is considered to be doing an appropriately thorough job continues to grow and the essence of what constitutes good governance becomes clearer.

One of the many things covered that I found refreshing was his bias to jargon free simple statements of strategic direction and intent, and using tools such as PPESTT analysis as a board developmental tool.

PPESTT is:

• Political environment
• Physical environment
• Economic Environment
• Social environment
• Technological environment
• Trade environment

His suggestion was to work in buddy pairs with a director and senior executive and address one of each of the above in real detail with quarterly feedback sessions to the board to constitute no more than 4 sides of A4 paper, thereby covering all of the above over 18 months.

The real purpose in doing so is to get quite a different macro view of the world and really lift up to another helicopter level. Further it will make board members consider the daily news intake in a different light in relation to the critical job of setting and guiding strategy.

A good idea - and also a book worth reading.

I asked him at the close of his presentation about how the nature of board relationships had changed since he published “The Fish Rots From the Head”. Interestingly there are now organisations that are monitoring board interrelationships, which is important in assessing independence. He went on to say that whilst there was a big improvement in this area, nurturing new talent is an important and ongoing job. In addition, the evolution of corporate governance is far from complete with financial market players, their machinations and their impact on share price being a key issue needing addressing by market regulators.

I’d go one further and ask how the role of independent audit by the top tier firms still leaves only the directors exposed in a meltdown, even if the auditors should have uncovered the issues.

The Startups Carnival runs from March 3 to 17 2008 and is a great opportunity for those people trying to get a new initiative off the ground in the technology space. With an initial focus towards Web 2.0 / Social Networking but also inclusive of other technology environments, initiatives in green technology, it will be a good opportunity to showcase some of the new great ideas that are on the verge of fruition.

So how does it work? Here is an extract from the Startups Carnival site:

How it works:
It’s an online (web based) carnival, starting on March 3, 2008.
On receiving the applications/registration from various startups/ventures, profiles/information will be compiled in a web format. These profiles /information will be published on the carnival portal, starting March 3, 2008. Three/four profiles will be covered everyday on the portal.

So please keep watching the space and make sure you have got your feeds subscribed as we have some grand plans on this to take it further.

In terms of what participants get are:

• New ventures learn about other ventures and people behind these across Australia.
• We are finalizing Judging Panel of 3 to be announced by Monday Feb 18, 2008. The panel is going to judge all the ventures on originality, simplicity, technology and marketability. They will select the top three. They will also provide some suggestions to all participants.
• We are also working on with some sponsors on offering some form of prizes to the top three ventures and few freebies to others. Once finalized it will be published on site.
• We are also working on getting some famous global bloggers to write about this initiative and people/ventures who are participating.

I’ve been fortunate enough to be invited as a judge along with Duncan Riley and Ross Dawson

So if you have a venture, then check it out and be a part of it.

I’ve been looking around at some online timesheet tools and Miles Burke at Bam Creative suggested 88 Miles from Mad Pilot

Having looked at a heap of timesheet tools, this looks like a really good tool - and by good fortune developed in Perth.

Some of the features I was looking for included:

1. Web based (a given really)
2. Allow multiple clients
3. Allow multiple projects
4. Allow multiple consultants to work on any mix of the above
5. Provide individual timesheets
6. Provide team reporting
7. Be easy to use
8. Fairly priced

Some new features coming are likely to include additional reporting and adding your own logo to timesheets.

So far I’m impressed and have started using it, worth giving a try….

You can get the gist of medical insurance if you have been through life insurance quotes. However to comprehend something like a cheap car insurance, you will have to read the relevant insurance quotes.

It is a real pleasant surprise to once in a while get really good service. Yet with the tonnes of business material written about service, you would think that everyone would have got this by now. And yet….

Bad service drives us insane - and I am certain drives so many people to make negative comments online to help others avoid bad experience. Good service is much better to share….

… so it was a nice touch that today I received a gift basket out of the blue from my finance broker. It made me reflect on the service I’ve had in finance over the years direct with banks and that of my previous broker, and how this was so different. Much better attention to detail, continual follow up - I never had to chase him. And so unusual in many service encounters, seriously good follow up after the deal was done.

If you would like similar, then I’d happily recommend my broker John Zaninovich to you.

(no, this is not a paid announcement - good service deserves a plug!)

I was flicking through one of my old journals (if you want to read up on the value of keeping a journal or how to, then check out 5 Steps to Journal Writing by a friend of mine, Todd Hutchinson), and came across 4 quotes I noted after reading a book of Shakespeare quotes.

• We work by wit, not by witchcraft - Othello
  Some in the IT industry would argue the modern day equivalent twist on this is where there is mystery there is margin! In terms of people, process and technology, demystifying process and making technology more simple aids greatly to project success….
• The force of his own merit makes his way - Henry VIII
  Enough said, you’ve got to be good at what you do…
• To business that we love we rise betime and go to it with delight - Anthony and Cleopatra
  Would an internal staff satisfaction survey get lots of these kind of responses?
• Too swift arrives as slow as too tardy - Romeo & Juliet
  There is always enough time to do it right the second time…

And as a bonus, not sure of the author:

• If in doubt, fall back on the truth

Great quotes are always interesting to share - they often provide succinct insight or expression of a situation. If you have a moment to share your favorite quotes, please do!

When you are borrowing loans, it does not matter if it is for car finance or is being borrowed as a student loan. You should pay it back according to a foreseen plan. Do not take any risks specially if it is an unsecured loan.

In receiving another invite from a colleague on Plaxo I wondered if anyone else had the frustration that comes from too many digital persona’s….

In summary, there are too many email addresses (work, home - via blog name, new service provider, old service provider, old company, new mobile phone company, Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail etc etc….).

So what I’d like is a service that redirects ( like the Post Office for physical mail) but kills any spam, and provides my contacts with updates. Plaxo kind of meets the bill but the key is less about the web based services (that can be partially fixed by just using your email client), and more about the fixed emails with internet service providers that you cut off when you change provider. Potentially a service could be created that forwards the mail to an address you nominate, provides an auto update service to contacts that you have provided, and halts some of the dead traffic currently hitting ISP’s. Sounds good for all parties…

Social and online profile information is another area - in creating and managing your own digital brand, there is a bit of work to do if you use a couple of areas eg your blog, Facebook, Linked In, Plaxo, Myspace etc etc. Whilst it will take some time for the smoke to clear and rationalization to occur in this area, mashing up a consistent means of keeping digital profiles consistent will help. Likely scenario? 1. Lots of half started blogs, profiles and more, and 2. a select few will emerge that just seem easier than others to keep current - and make it more fun to keep current and up to date.

Whilst I’m on the wish list, I’d love an easy way to consistently sync my work and home tasks, contacts and calender with my mobile - current technology mix is Outlook on Windows at work, Mac at home and Windows Mobile (dopod) pda to give me the choice of using which machine I want to anytime I want and keeping it all current. Publishing calenders is one way… but will do some searching on this to see what I can find.

For you road warriors out there, let me know what is working for you…

Feeling iPhone envy? Yes, not release in Australia just yet….

However, while you are waiting, why not jazz up your Windows Mobile with a fantastic application from Pointui. You can also check it in action at Utube

I have downloaded it onto my Dopod D810 and it works great. There is some getting used to the finger movement in the menus and also it dives into the Windows Mobile interface for applications and not always easy to get straight back - but with practice it should be fine.

Pointui is available for FREE download so give it a go