The Advisory Firm - July Advisor Newsletter - Premium Strategic Consultants

A Warm Welcome for 2006,

Let's hit 2006 ground running with insights that refocus organisations to start producing vigor and energy!

In this month's Review we focus on a selection management ideas and mind sets that show you how 'dispersed management' can work throughout your organisation, learning that every person - especially in a small organisation, has a responsibility to manage.

STOP PRESS: Last Chance to Get Your R&D Tax Rebates
Think about what you could be missing before you submit 04/05 returns!

Lodgment of your research and development tax rebates closes in May – projects to claim this entitlement must begin now.

The AusIndustry Research and Development Tax Rebate/Concession works to reward investment in research and development by offering a tax rebate on your R&D spend. A company can claim up to $1 million in spending on R&D projects, as you pay the corporate tax rate on that investment (approx $300k) – eligible expenditure is then allocated including, direct employment, on costs and related infrastructure – taking the % of eligible spending, typically our clients would receive a concession/rebate nearing $300k.

This is a concession you are entitled too receive – make sure you do by having The Advisory Firm experts develop to full entitlement.

If your organisation is in a loss making situation then AusIndustry will issue a cheque for your expenditure (forgoing a future tax concession) or if you are profitable in 2004/2005 you receive a tax concession from your tax bill.

The process of claiming such rebates forms around adequately identifying and describing eligible R&D projects in your business. If you require assistance in putting together your claim –The Advisory Firm works on a success fee basis.

In the end it’s your money – waiting for you to claim it. Just ask.

We spend some time looking for exciting investigations to drive your business
- if you think we should be looking at something new for you why not let us know

STOP PRESS :
Last Chance for
R&D Tax Rebate
More info - Go here

The BUZZ:
Success Lessons for 2006:
Making Management Culture Work
See the insights to make it
happen - Here

Round The TRAPS:
Business Owner?
When are you going to leave?
What can happen to make you
- Click Here

The THEORIES REVISITED
Hot Technology Trends for 2006
The Areas on the Move - Click Here

The Advisory Firm
Level 2, 17-19 Queen Street
Melbourne (03) 8610 2400

"People, like water, flow along until they find their place"
- Old Chinese Proverb

Success Lessons for 2006: Making Management Culture Work

Lean company's with dynamic cultures will always have a place in the market. Here's the concepts you need to consider to shape your organisation or business units in today's vibrant workplaces.

Make Yourself Redundant
It is the responsibility of each member of the organisation to champion technology, process, innovation, and collaborative efficiencies to gain efficiencies and allow space for growth. Each member of the organisation must realise that ‘making yourself redundant’ doesn't mean you are no longer of value to the organisation. It means you are developing the organisation. It frees people to pursue other challenges or make the same changes in other business units.

Don't be afraid to be your customer's advocate.
If you truly know your client, and if you truly know a process is not appropriate for the situation or hurting the relationship with the client - then fight the right battle (but don't kid yourself.) Better to be at war within your team in the name of customer service and improved performance than it is to be at war with your customer in the name of outdated process and bureaucracy.

Your Organisation Doesn't Care Who Is Managing It
Quite simply, the efficiency and effectiveness of your organisation does not depend on who is managing it or on who is making decisions. Your organisation's effectiveness depends only on the quality of the decisions being made and the actions they invoke. Always remember that the original purpose of management was to coordinate separate but related activities which resulted from the division of labor. The key to management is this coordination. There should be no risk that management reduces individual responsibility and accountability.

You can't tell people both 'What To Do' and 'How To Do It'
(and then judge their performance)
Competence Beats Process. Organisations have to accept that if somebody is truly competent in what they do they will do it better then somebody who simply follows a process - however perfectly. Processes assist in coordination not development.

Employees as Customers
Ever increasing workforce mobility and ever increasing work choices, options, and access to information for employees, means that choice theory applies to your employees as well as your customers. They key is to be aware, to challenge and engage employees through a dynamic organisational culture – this will produce employees that will advocate the excitement of your organisation to everyone they meet.

Use the Network. Not the Hierarchy
The leaner the business the more consultative overlaps your organisation will have – this makes rolling things up into a hierarchy an unnatural abstraction. The view in 2006 is that we are no longer creating control mechanisms, we are creating dynamic organisms that don't die. In order to accommodate rapid change your structures, processes, business units, people, etc, must be adaptable. They must be able to adapt and improve without explicit, formal, intervention with guidance and facility to do so.

The Document is Not the Requirements/Design/Project
The document is not the requirements - knowing the requirements requires a shared understanding. The document is not the design - the design is only complete after the neurons in peoples head have been rearranged. The document is not the Project - and it is the project that must be managed.

Don't be too quick to judge - respect those you don't fully understand.
When you are 'far away' from somebody you evaluate their results - when you are 'close' you are more likely to evaluate only their processes. Recognise the politics and BS of this are different. The 'politics' of your organisation is simply the actions required to get things done within the organisation. If those actions are purely filling out forms, nepotism, deceit, and fear, that is more specifically bad politics. Separate the good politics from the bad and name them as company policy.

Want to workshop these constructs in your workplace - get in touch

Return to the top menu - click here

He who postpones the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.
- Horace (65 BC - 8 BC)

Business Owner. When are you going to leave?

Noam Wasserman’s latest research explores the frustrations experienced by business founders – a wide eyed must read for those in the trenches and those looking to make entrepreneurialism work.

Organisation building – “growing pains” – distract founder’s that are looking to bring something new to the market. These growing pains can bring down the business very quickly.

Typically, early in the life of a company – when it is developing its first product or service – the founder who conceived of the idea and began developing it is the perfect person to lead the company, to ensure that it will be able to succeed at hitting the core milestone of completing initial development. However, when that milestone is reached—when the founder-CEO has successfully led the company in its most important task—the chances that that founder-CEO will be replaced also increase dramatically.

The challenges within the company change so dramatically that the person who was best suited to lead the early stage of company development is no longer the best person to continue leading the company. Now, the product has to be sold: You have to create a sales organization, manage multiple functions, deal with customers, handle more complex financial issues, and deal with a very different set of challenges for which many founder-CEOs are not equipped.

In large companies, when the CEO doesn't do well, the CEO gets replaced. When the CEO does do well, there is almost no chance that person will be replaced. The paradox according to Wasserman is that in small companies, if the founder CEO is successful then chances are they’re going to be replaced and if they perform poorly key staff will leave.

Objectively, many founders might agree that the CEO's job will require skills they don't have, but emotionally, they are very attached to the companies they started, they've grown to like the CEO position, and the success that they have enjoyed so far makes it much harder for others to convince the founders that they need to be replaced. However, it is precisely their success that has increased the need to replace them at this point.
This pattern is exacerbated when the founder-CEO brings in outside investors. VCs, in particular, often make the assumption that the person who started the company is going to have to be replaced along the way, and may therefore have a quicker "trigger finger" than the founder-CEO wants.

Wasserman calls it the "Rich versus King" test. It gets to this essential trade-off around what drives an entrepreneur: Is it the need to control the company (that is, to be King), or is it the drive for success, particularly financial success, which may require that the entrepreneur step aside once certain business milestones have been reached?
TakeAway: Successful founders of businesses must have one eye on succession from the start. Look to move on not to stay.

If you would like to make succession part of your success The Advisory Firm can show you how others have navigated this legal and often emotional path.

If you have to investigate complex constraintsclick here and we can show you how.

Return to the top menu - click here

Hot Technology Trends for 2006

For the second consecutive year, the editors of R&D Magazine performed a survey of our readers in late-November 2005, asking what technologies they expect to be “hot” in 2006. This year’s survey results, looking at more than 70 different technology choices.

The top five technologies chosen mirror the relevant technology issues driving many of today’s research funding programs—that being concerns about terrorism, energy dependence and increasing pollution, and the ability to take commercial advantage of dramatic new technologies (i.e., nanotechnology).

There has been some shifting, however, among technologies that were “hot” last year and have since “cooled” down, and vice versa. Proteomics (Protein Sciences), for example, which offered a lot of initial hype, dropped to No.29 this year. Genomics (Gene Sciences), on the other hand, appears to be a more practical and shorter term solution to many of the same life science issues. Genomics was ranked No.22 in 2004 and rose to No.15 this year.

A number of “basic” technologies retained respectable, although non-dramatic, rankings. These include bioinformatics (biogenetic information storage), Bluetooth technologies, cell biology, high-performance computing, Internet technologies, microarrays, OLEDs/flexible displays, sensor arrays, and systems biology.

More mature technologies such as chromatography, spectroscopy, optical microscopy, rheology (matter sciences), and telecommunications are not considered hot

So what makes a hot technology?
Quite obviously, it’s not always a new technology. One of the questions asked in this survey was how long it took a particular technology to become a “hot” technology. It should be obvious to most researchers that discoveries take a very long time to become useful tools or technologies, let alone commercial products.

The average cycle from discovery to commercial product is often 15 years for everything from ceramics to drugs to golf balls. The fact that these respondents indicated that it took an average of six years to become a hot technology, in this light, may even be wishful thinking on the respondents side.

In the same vein, the likelihood of one of these hot technologies becoming a successful technology was only indicated as being 56%—just slightly more than 50-50.

Finding value in technologies
Again, these are hot technologies and likely only about a third through their normal product development cycle. A significant number of them will not likely make it to become commercially viable products, although the majority of them will to varying degrees of success.

Only 21% of the survey respondents indicated that they found it relatively easy to obtain investment funding for the development of new hot technologies. The political, technological, social, and economic climate can change very rapidly in just a very short period of time.

There is a lot of support out there for people who are developing in these fields of technology, how to apply them and how to take them to market is much of what we do at The Advisory Firm. Click here to submit your ideas about Hot Technologies

Return to the top menu - click here

Quote of the Month:

If you ever get sucked into do the designated driver job, have fun with it.
At the end of the night, drop them all off at different houses.

- Jeff Foxworthy

This Edition's contributors:

Drew Le Grand - 03 8610 2400
T.A.F. Chairman
drewl@theadvisoryfirm.com

Brett Galvin - 03 8610 2404
Judge, Jury and Executioner - (The Advisor, Editor)
brettg@theadvisoryfirm.com

Unsubscribe Information
lf you wish not to receive further Editions of The Advisory Firm Newsletter please click here and you will automatically be removed.

www.theadvisoryfirm.com (03) 8610 2400


			A Warm Welcome for 2006, Let's hit 2006 ground running with insights that refocus organisations to start producing vigor and energy! In this month's Review we focus on a selection management ideas and mind sets that show you how 'dispersed management' can work throughout your organisation, learning that every person - especially in a small organisation, has a responsibility to manage. STOP PRESS: Last Chance to Get Your R&D Tax Rebates Think about what you could be missing before you submit 04/05 returns! Lodgment of your research and development tax rebates closes in May – projects to claim this entitlement must begin now. The AusIndustry Research and Development Tax Rebate/Concession works to reward investment in research and development by offering a tax rebate on your R&D spend. A company can claim up to $1 million in spending on R&D projects, as you pay the corporate tax rate on that investment (approx $300k) – eligible expenditure is then allocated including, direct employment, on costs and related infrastructure – taking the % of eligible spending, typically our clients would receive a concession/rebate nearing $300k. This is a concession you are entitled too receive – make sure you do by having The Advisory Firm experts develop to full entitlement. If your organisation is in a loss making situation then AusIndustry will issue a cheque for your expenditure (forgoing a future tax concession) or if you are profitable in 2004/2005 you receive a tax concession from your tax bill. The process of claiming such rebates forms around adequately identifying and describing eligible R&D projects in your business. If you require assistance in putting together your claim –The Advisory Firm works on a success fee basis. In the end it’s your money – waiting for you to claim it. Just ask. We spend some time looking for exciting investigations to drive your business - if you think we should be looking at something new for you why not let us know
	STOP PRESS : Last Chance for R&D Tax Rebate More info - Go here The BUZZ: Success Lessons for 2006: Making Management Culture Work See the insights to make it happen - Here Round The TRAPS: Business Owner? When are you going to leave? What can happen to make you - Click Here The THEORIES REVISITED Hot Technology Trends for 2006 The Areas on the Move - Click Here The Advisory Firm Level 2, 17-19 Queen Street Melbourne (03) 8610 2400




"People, like water, flow along until they find their place" - Old Chinese Proverb		Success Lessons for 2006: Making Management Culture Work Lean company's with dynamic cultures will always have a place in the market. Here's the concepts you need to consider to shape your organisation or business units in today's vibrant workplaces. Make Yourself Redundant It is the responsibility of each member of the organisation to champion technology, process, innovation, and collaborative efficiencies to gain efficiencies and allow space for growth. Each member of the organisation must realise that ‘making yourself redundant’ doesn't mean you are no longer of value to the organisation. It means you are developing the organisation. It frees people to pursue other challenges or make the same changes in other business units. Don't be afraid to be your customer's advocate. If you truly know your client, and if you truly know a process is not appropriate for the situation or hurting the relationship with the client - then fight the right battle (but don't kid yourself.) Better to be at war within your team in the name of customer service and improved performance than it is to be at war with your customer in the name of outdated process and bureaucracy. Your Organisation Doesn't Care Who Is Managing It Quite simply, the efficiency and effectiveness of your organisation does not depend on who is managing it or on who is making decisions. Your organisation's effectiveness depends only on the quality of the decisions being made and the actions they invoke. Always remember that the original purpose of management was to coordinate separate but related activities which resulted from the division of labor. The key to management is this coordination. There should be no risk that management reduces individual responsibility and accountability. You can't tell people both 'What To Do' and 'How To Do It' (and then judge their performance) Competence Beats Process. Organisations have to accept that if somebody is truly competent in what they do they will do it better then somebody who simply follows a process - however perfectly. Processes assist in coordination not development. Employees as Customers Ever increasing workforce mobility and ever increasing work choices, options, and access to information for employees, means that choice theory applies to your employees as well as your customers. They key is to be aware, to challenge and engage employees through a dynamic organisational culture – this will produce employees that will advocate the excitement of your organisation to everyone they meet. Use the Network. Not the Hierarchy The leaner the business the more consultative overlaps your organisation will have – this makes rolling things up into a hierarchy an unnatural abstraction. The view in 2006 is that we are no longer creating control mechanisms, we are creating dynamic organisms that don't die. In order to accommodate rapid change your structures, processes, business units, people, etc, must be adaptable. They must be able to adapt and improve without explicit, formal, intervention with guidance and facility to do so. The Document is Not the Requirements/Design/Project The document is not the requirements - knowing the requirements requires a shared understanding. The document is not the design - the design is only complete after the neurons in peoples head have been rearranged. The document is not the Project - and it is the project that must be managed. Don't be too quick to judge - respect those you don't fully understand. When you are 'far away' from somebody you evaluate their results - when you are 'close' you are more likely to evaluate only their processes. Recognise the politics and BS of this are different. The 'politics' of your organisation is simply the actions required to get things done within the organisation. If those actions are purely filling out forms, nepotism, deceit, and fear, that is more specifically bad politics. Separate the good politics from the bad and name them as company policy. Want to workshop these constructs in your workplace - get in touch
		Return to the top menu - click here

He who postpones the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses. - Horace (65 BC - 8 BC)		Business Owner. When are you going to leave? Noam Wasserman’s latest research explores the frustrations experienced by business founders – a wide eyed must read for those in the trenches and those looking to make entrepreneurialism work. Organisation building – “growing pains” – distract founder’s that are looking to bring something new to the market. These growing pains can bring down the business very quickly. Typically, early in the life of a company – when it is developing its first product or service – the founder who conceived of the idea and began developing it is the perfect person to lead the company, to ensure that it will be able to succeed at hitting the core milestone of completing initial development. However, when that milestone is reached—when the founder-CEO has successfully led the company in its most important task—the chances that that founder-CEO will be replaced also increase dramatically. The challenges within the company change so dramatically that the person who was best suited to lead the early stage of company development is no longer the best person to continue leading the company. Now, the product has to be sold: You have to create a sales organization, manage multiple functions, deal with customers, handle more complex financial issues, and deal with a very different set of challenges for which many founder-CEOs are not equipped. In large companies, when the CEO doesn't do well, the CEO gets replaced. When the CEO does do well, there is almost no chance that person will be replaced. The paradox according to Wasserman is that in small companies, if the founder CEO is successful then chances are they’re going to be replaced and if they perform poorly key staff will leave. Objectively, many founders might agree that the CEO's job will require skills they don't have, but emotionally, they are very attached to the companies they started, they've grown to like the CEO position, and the success that they have enjoyed so far makes it much harder for others to convince the founders that they need to be replaced. However, it is precisely their success that has increased the need to replace them at this point. This pattern is exacerbated when the founder-CEO brings in outside investors. VCs, in particular, often make the assumption that the person who started the company is going to have to be replaced along the way, and may therefore have a quicker "trigger finger" than the founder-CEO wants. Wasserman calls it the "Rich versus King" test. It gets to this essential trade-off around what drives an entrepreneur: Is it the need to control the company (that is, to be King), or is it the drive for success, particularly financial success, which may require that the entrepreneur step aside once certain business milestones have been reached? TakeAway: Successful founders of businesses must have one eye on succession from the start. Look to move on not to stay. If you would like to make succession part of your success The Advisory Firm can show you how others have navigated this legal and often emotional path. If you have to investigate complex constraintsclick here and we can show you how.
		Return to the top menu - click here

		Hot Technology Trends for 2006 For the second consecutive year, the editors of R&D Magazine performed a survey of our readers in late-November 2005, asking what technologies they expect to be “hot” in 2006. This year’s survey results, looking at more than 70 different technology choices. The top five technologies chosen mirror the relevant technology issues driving many of today’s research funding programs—that being concerns about terrorism, energy dependence and increasing pollution, and the ability to take commercial advantage of dramatic new technologies (i.e., nanotechnology). There has been some shifting, however, among technologies that were “hot” last year and have since “cooled” down, and vice versa. Proteomics (Protein Sciences), for example, which offered a lot of initial hype, dropped to No.29 this year. Genomics (Gene Sciences), on the other hand, appears to be a more practical and shorter term solution to many of the same life science issues. Genomics was ranked No.22 in 2004 and rose to No.15 this year. A number of “basic” technologies retained respectable, although non-dramatic, rankings. These include bioinformatics (biogenetic information storage), Bluetooth technologies, cell biology, high-performance computing, Internet technologies, microarrays, OLEDs/flexible displays, sensor arrays, and systems biology. More mature technologies such as chromatography, spectroscopy, optical microscopy, rheology (matter sciences), and telecommunications are not considered hot So what makes a hot technology? Quite obviously, it’s not always a new technology. One of the questions asked in this survey was how long it took a particular technology to become a “hot” technology. It should be obvious to most researchers that discoveries take a very long time to become useful tools or technologies, let alone commercial products. The average cycle from discovery to commercial product is often 15 years for everything from ceramics to drugs to golf balls. The fact that these respondents indicated that it took an average of six years to become a hot technology, in this light, may even be wishful thinking on the respondents side. In the same vein, the likelihood of one of these hot technologies becoming a successful technology was only indicated as being 56%—just slightly more than 50-50. Finding value in technologies Again, these are hot technologies and likely only about a third through their normal product development cycle. A significant number of them will not likely make it to become commercially viable products, although the majority of them will to varying degrees of success. Only 21% of the survey respondents indicated that they found it relatively easy to obtain investment funding for the development of new hot technologies. The political, technological, social, and economic climate can change very rapidly in just a very short period of time. There is a lot of support out there for people who are developing in these fields of technology, how to apply them and how to take them to market is much of what we do at The Advisory Firm. Click here to submit your ideas about Hot Technologies
		Return to the top menu - click here
		Quote of the Month: If you ever get sucked into do the designated driver job, have fun with it. At the end of the night, drop them all off at different houses. - Jeff Foxworthy

			This Edition's contributors: Drew Le Grand - 03 8610 2400 T.A.F. Chairman drewl@theadvisoryfirm.com Brett Galvin - 03 8610 2404 Judge, Jury and Executioner - (The Advisor, Editor) brettg@theadvisoryfirm.com Unsubscribe Information lf you wish not to receive further Editions of The Advisory Firm Newsletter please click here and you will automatically be removed. www.theadvisoryfirm.com (03) 8610 2400