Month: August 2018

Compromising to produce Excellence

~ dan

compromiseI’m working at the moment with another cohort of MBA students on their capstone projects. Its a quite a challenge as the term is short and by necessity there is a strict word limit (thank God). Their ideas are often BIG as they want to hone their newly developed MBA skills and solve something they are passionate about!

So I remind them of the secrets from project management (with a little Pareto on the side), that it is all about finding the right balance between resources (word limit), time (the term) and cost (them). 

While some, in their initial proposal, come out of the blocks with at least 3 PhD’s worth of work. As they progressively focus their ideas down to something achievable (often data driven) …the end result of this compromise is often excellence!

Its a sage reminder for me that less can be more….but it takes hard work and quite disciplined thinking to get there, I guess that is part of the crucible of graduate study!

Triple bottom line Politics.

~ dan

triplebottomline1There is a real nice idea in accounting called the triple bottom line. The idea here is that you measure in three areas financial, social and environmental and try to achieve a good outcome for all three. Its a really nice idea and gets back to what ‘accounting’ is all about, that is to account for all things, whereas mostly its used as a bit of a dirty work because its most often associated with financial matters only. 

I guess finances are the easiest thing to measure …how much have you got? and you get a nice round number. Measuring social and environmental indicators is a bit tougher. There are some indicators such as Bhutan’s happiness index (rather than GDP) but thats another story. 

So onto the political area and in Australia anyway we might easily pigeon hole the LNP, Labour and Greens into each of the triple bottom line areas of  financial, social and environmental respectively. Whats interesting is that each party might over time seek to reach the triple bottom line of balancing all areas ( and ultimately snag more voters ) by steadily iterating towards the centre. We certainly see this with the LNP and Labour parties, with at times, their policies at times being almost indistinguishable. The Greens however, maintaining a somewhat more evangelical stance on the environment, seem less interested in persuing a triple bottom line approach.

For example when we look a compromise agreements around carbon emissions we can certainly LNP and Labour have put forth remarkably similar policies with the Greens  steadfast in not supporting anything that has the remotest sniff of compromise. Sadly as a result carbon emissions are a work in progress…

Interestingly as majors (LNP/Labour) drift slowly to a more balanced perspective, it seems to allow space for more room for the purists focusing on the core areas of financial and social. This room has left opportunities and the rise of the the alt right/ alt left movements, advocacy groups and parties seem to be a direct response to this.

Anyways thats about all the political analysis this swinging voter has in him for the moment.