‘Innovation’, ‘big data’, ‘the cloud’, ‘sustainability’, and the list goes on. Business loves buzzwords. There’s no two ways about it, every technology wave, or generation has it’s lexicon. I came across a great quote from Henry Ford’s autobiography in which he speaks about ‘making to order’: Ask a hundred people how they want an article…
Are you really walking the talk? Can you measure your actions and see improvements? This article reveals survey results that cover issues like these — results that might inspire a second look at your organization… As organizations, we believe the future of the professions we represent will be greatly enhanced by our ability not only…
It’s estimated that the hospitality industry in the UK employs about 6% of the total working population, some 1.7m people, and accounts for £55-60bn pa. Just under a half of that figure ~£25bn relates to restaurants, ~56,000 of them if the latest estimates are true. It’s an industry sector that we all probably encounter more…
I’m sure you’ll all have picked up the recent stories around Amazon and Google relating to delivery drones and driverless taxis. Whilst it’s too early to tell whether these are pure fantasy or will one day be a normal part of life, it does raise an interesting topic from an online retail business model perspective.…
The process of making a cup of coffee is about as simple as a task gets. That’s not to say producing the perfect crema doesn’t have its fair share of innovation, science and technique, but ultimately it’s a repeatable, mechanistic process. It’s a market which from the last available research, which was for 2012, grew…
In one of my sessions at the recent IACCM EMEA conference which looked at contracting skills I posed the question that whilst we would rarely let a product get to market without some form of testing or prototyping, how many commercial or contract management professionals consider testing their contracting structures or agreements? If we look…
We would all acknowledge that the retail business model has changed massively over the last decade. In the UK there have been a steady stream of casualties over the past couple of years and it is easy to blame the economic environment or the growth of online business model as the reason. These are often…
Earlier this year the IACCM published ‘The Future of Contracting’ which was the culmination of inputs from 2,000+ practitioners as to what contract management would look like in 2020. There were many themes that came out, however, two of them were: the role of automation and tools; and the area of skills, organisation, and proceses.…
I recently read a great article titled “Why good design is finally a bottom line investment” on the FastCompany website. The article focused mainly on the tech world and a product-centric view of design which is what most people think of when you mention the word ‘design’. To most people design makes them think…
As anyone who has worked in a consultancy, law firm, accountancy practice, or the like will know only too well, to keep your position you have to bill as many hours as possible. Managing a firm that runs a consultancy or partnership model relies on balancing order intake, sales, utilisation, and margin. Order intake and its…