I am in a writing mood tonight, so thought I would do an update about some things coming up and what I’ve been up to lately.

The most exciting thing I am preparing for at the moment is a trip to London and the South of France, departing in 10 days time, as part of the Masters of Commerce programme at the University of Sydney. I am doing a winter intensive course called, “Managing Corporate Renewal in the French Wine Industry.”

We will spend a week in London doing buyer visits and workshops on customer and value chain analysis, strategic thinking and recovery and the role of branding before heading to Carcassonne for briefings on the wine industry and regional history of Languedoc. Once we arrive in Carcassonne we meet with the companies we have been assigned to and spend 10 days working with the client company to develop a turnaround strategy for their business, focused on the management of corporate renewal and organisational change. As this article highlights, for wine producers in this region “sales are unjustifiably sluggish, while costs continue to escalate.”

What am I looking forward to most? The experience of being immersed in a completely new culture, economy and history and meeting some great people. I think there is something beautiful about people with a passion for food and wine and I love being around such people. The amazing history of the Languedoc region is intriguing and rich, I feel quite an affinity to this place just through reading about it in preparation for this trip. I think this project has the potential to be a life changing experience. I hope to make some life-long friends and come back with a different world-view as tends to happen in the most positive of ways some time when you go somewhere and have completely new experiences. I want to go back there already and take my loved ones, something we have already penciled in for next year.

Something else I have on the go at the moment is the launch of a web business that I have built with some friends over the last 6 months in evenings and weekends. It is soon to be set free to the world and I can’t wait. I’ll blog about it here, but all going well I am going to be really busy with that when I get back from France and my blogging here might be at minimum! Fingers crossed.. Although hard work, not luck, will have everything to do with it.

Life at University of Sydney so far is going well, and over three months in I have to say that the Masters of Commerce programme there is outstanding. Across both my Strategic Management and Marketing modules I have found the content to be up to date, relevant and incredibly useful for work and life and the lecturers are top notch.

I have enjoyed the Strategic Management side of my course a lot more than I expected to and as such I am taking some additional modules in this area in the next two semesters to come. Within the first phase of the Strategic Management programme we learned about the different theoretical perspectives of strategy from Whittington: classical, processual, evolutionary and systemic, and were encouraged and assessed on our ability to come up with a view of strategy that works and makes sense for us.

I found as a huge believer in the power and potential of a company’s human resources my beliefs aligned with a lot of thinking out of the processual approach. The processual view, which sees as strategy as more emergent than deliberate, sees resources and capabilities as a source of competitive advantage. It also acknowledges that strategy makers are not ever going to be able to think of everything in advance as the world is too complex and uncertain to plan for everything. A quote I liked from academic March (1976) was “strategy is discovered in action”. Being involved in the technology sector I threw in some ideas from the evolutionary approach into my view of strategy, the evolutionary view reminds you that we operate in dynamically, rapidly changing markets and elaborate, rigid plans will likely not lead to success. In addition I had some systemic approach thinking in my view of strategy, as I think you cannot escape the fact that strategy is a child of the society in which it is created. I found having the opportunity to get deep into the different views and frame up my view of strategy by calling upon the parts of each strategy theory a very worthwhile exercise and think I will use this knowledge for years to come. If you are interested in reading more a lot of this thinking comes from Michael Porter at Harvard  and Henry Mintzberg at McGill University. Read more about the four approaches to strategy here.

Another thing that really resonated with me out of this programme was a strategic approach called, “Strategy as Simple Rules” developed by an academic by the name of Eisenhardt. In brief, this approach is based around identifying the strategically significant processes in your business and crafting “simple rules” around them. I think this is a great tool for startups to use, read more about it here. Apologies for getting all academic and theoretical, I just really did find all of this learning useful and wanted to get it down and share it while it was fresh.

Over the next two weeks I have an exam on Intellectual Property Management and one on Marketing. Geekily enough, they are both really enjoyable to study for, I think because, as I said above, I am in the process of building a web business I can relate everything back and apply learnings to things we are doing and thinking about as a startup team.

I find the Intellectual Property area fascinating and it is great to get a solid understanding of IP Strategy, Management and Enforcement at this point in my career. We had a guest speaker along who is currently engaged in a lawsuit with large company based on IP issues, and when he said to us he wishes he had done a course like we were doing early in his career it really resonated. The Intellectual Property Management course has a large focus on innovation strategy also, where we have looked at open and network-based innovation approaches used by companies to source (from outside their company) new ideas to bring to market. The driver for these new approaches is an understanding that innovation is the best avenue to revenue growth that is sustainable, the existing R&D model isn’t delivering the goods and that there are more ideas and smart people out in the world that your company can ever hire and have generating ideas internally. Open Innovation is a really exciting area, and one I plan to get more involved in both from a sourcing and contributing perspective.

That is all from me for now. I am not sure what kind (photos, video, blog, tweets…) of updates I’ll be sending from France, it will completely dependant on time and connectivity as we move around, but I will be keeping a journal that I will publish in some form either as I go or when I get back.

Tags | France