Australia has the resources, and the higher-learning base to achieve great results in the APAC region. But all too often, as recent media reports and Treasury forecasts attest, Australian managers hold up the show..
David Gruen, head of Treasury's macro-economic forecasting network, contends that Australian business could lift productivity by as much as 8% with better management practices. International monographs regarding global management performance have appeared, to similar effect, in Forbes magazine and in academic publications.
My personal view is this: times are changing, and Australian management - particularly middle management - needs to get ahead of this change. Top-down, rule-focussed compliance can only deliver so much; there are attitudinal and resource limits to further 'squeezing the lemon'.
What front-line employees and senior stakeholders are desperate for is innovation and critical thinking. These skills cannot be driven by a moribund industrial model with a mindset of "sorry, not done here". As Jack Welch insisted in a recent podcast, large multinationals as well as medium and small-sized businesses require every 'mind in the game' to deliver exceptional performance and results.
And, unfortunately, Australia cannot afford the risk of succumbing to Dutch disease. There is only so long that we can rely, uncritically, upon the resources elephant to continue to watch our back. As Bob Hawke and Paul Keating argued, Australia can do much more than simply 'dig out of the ground'. We can, indeed, achieve resource diversification through alternative energy use and encourage innovation within the resources sector itself. In the process, we could diversify our equity and debt markets to handle more start-ups and green energy solutions. More diversification could be good for exposed super funds too.
In searching for the crux of this management problem - a national emergency, in some respects - I look particularly to the work of Donald Horne. We have the makings of the Lucky Country; in spite of our demographic limitations, Horne would agree, Australians could occupy one of the luckiest of continents if we embrace reform and structural innovation. By jettisoning the branch-mentality of being a colonial backhouse operating under the paradigm of the 'colonial cringe', Australia is positioned to lead at the frontier.
Asia-Pacific, as ANZ and Rio Tinto etc have discovered, is hungry for Australian resources and financial expertise. Market leaders, nevertheless, depend, to a great extent, upon dynamic followers. Large supply-chain effects and networks lead to increased regional activity, for example - something Gareth Evans intuits. We have economic expertise in Professors Ken Henry, Ross Garnaut and Saul Eslake, Shane Oliver et al.
Australian management can do this! Look at the micro-programmes business could institute. Greater rewards/incentives for new design and process improvement; better front and middle-line education in 'boundaryless' behaviour; improved communication at all levels of an organisation; innovation pipelines tied to explicit innovation goals and team targets/bonuses.
Or, quite simply, having fun at work :) Trying new things, inducting new hires to get excited about creative projects - not just the bottom line. Being willing to fail.. And, as Morten Hansen and Jim Collins lay out in 'Great by Choice', combining (and recombining) empirical creativity and discipline to achieve outsized financial results as well as pro-social gains. Reducing corporate inertia, unethical practice and worker absenteeism. Building the future.
C-mon, Australian managers, let's give this a go. In that long-haired, bad-boy entrepreneur, Richard Branson's words, 'Screw it, let's do it'...
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