Marshall Place Associates Live More of Your Life

Here are 10 new ways to think about time:

1.
Managing our sense of time and investing in a longer-term sense of
vision and mission is both a local requirement for sound business
planning and a measure of our national capacity to move beyond
electoral cycles to longer-term industry development cycle times.

2.
Every small business in the country should by now have become aware of
the way that the nature of time is changing. I have already drawn
attention to the declining quantity of the ephemeral quantity that is
left to pump funds into the Costello “once in a lifetime” offer of
tax-free dollars open to those who can lay their hand on a spare
million before the end of the financial year.

This means that time management becomes more than having a daily plan to squeeze in a few more things to be done before selling the family business or
deciding its time to pull up stumps and head for the pavilion. The
famous Graham Freudenberg/Gough Whitlam slogan – “It’s Time” – is the
force for change again across the nation.

3. Of more than passing interest is a very different time phenomenon – the impact of time compression on the need for greater innovation, creativity and
entrepreneurship as the nation generates a massive store of savings
from that superannuation flood of funds for the majority of the
population who now rely on fund managers to create magical returns on
their invested deferred consumption.

4. Every firm must now face some months of massive turbulence that will place emphasis on their time perspectives about personal careers, investment schedules
and the time it takes to deal with offers of takeover, merger and/or
risk of insolvency or having to give up the family farm or home.

5.
In the private sector, every CEO of a public company is facing ever
greater time compression as the proportion of the population that
demands assurances about disproportionate and unsustainable rates of
dividend generation becomes a new generation of shareholders courtesy
of Bob Hawke’s and Paul Keating’s Accord and manipulation of national
savings ratios.

6. John Howard and Kevin Rudd are in the process of extending the phony war of a non-declared electoral war that is shaping up to be a massive time compression for new ministerial appointments and termination of commissions in the hunt for probity and electoral productivity.

7. State governments are making short work of the average time that ministers hold their portfolios, and public servants are being taught to bide their time and avoid the potential of placing their boss in the difficult position of being
informed about the truths of their failure to achieve stated objectives.

8.
Small business is becoming more export-oriented, opportunity seeking
and striving to reach new markets for their existing products and
services whilst under-investing, relative to the longer time horizons
of start-ups around the globe that are investing more in the growth of
elaborate manufacture and futures oriented foresight projects.

Many Australian firms have yet to spend the time to change their competitive
emphasis from commodities based upon natural resource exploitation and
capital-intensive production to intellectual resource deployment to
gain sustainable prosperity.

9. While initially, managers concentrated on reducing manufacturing cycle time, recently managers and researchers have come to realise that manufacturing accounts for only a small proportion of total cycle time. Managers and academics have also recently realised that purchasing and supply
management can play a critical role in reducing total cycle times.

Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer and executive vice president of
research and development at Sun, says:

“It takes time – years in fact – for any company to completely change its view of the future, regardless of how fast the individual technologies and products are evolving. Once a commitment is made throughout the organisation, such as Sun’s view that computing is a utility, it takes time for the R&D guys to
design, develop, test, and ultimately release new products and
technologies that dovetail with this new organisational mindset.”

10.
A time delay in making more creative and developmental strategic plans
will have ripple effects on the divide between those with funds to
invest and those with time on their hands through underemployment and
over-investment in domestic housing to prop up the economy rather than
extend the time for national infrastructure investments that require
governments to protect against short term myopia and market failure

CONTACT: Dr Colin Benjamin, Marshall Place Associates

Marshall Place Associates offers a range of strategic thinking tools
that open up a universe of new possibilities for individuals and
organisations committed to applying the processes of innovation,
creativity and entrepreneurship.
CONTACT
Dr Jane Shelton
Chief Executive Officer,
Marshall Place Associates
Level 15, 461 Bourke Street
Melbourne 3000
Ph: +61 3 9640 0099 
Fx: +61 3 9640 0009  Email: contact@marshallplace.com.au