My pet subject and the one that has fascinated my for most of my studying/working life is Strategy.

Reading the fantastic biographical and historical book; Lords of Strategy provided me a glimpse into how business strategy was created in the past few decades. The MBA taught me some and my extensive reading has provided me lots of tools, frameworks and corporate histories around strategy.

However, all that knowledge and understanding does not help fully when you work in the social sector. A lot of the strategy is around competition, cost reduction, differentiation of products, marketing and operations. In general they are all useful concepts for the social sector but they fail when we pick the frameworks from the business world.

My research currently is based on understanding the social sector (government, not for profit, beyond profit) better to modify some of the business frameworks or may be create new ones. Peter Drucker has written some fantastic stuff around this. His tome Management, has some great chapters on the functioning of the government organisation. His books on the not for profit management is great. And the Leader to Leader institute continue to do the work around it. These are some of the areas to start the research on.

I think that the business model canvas from Alex Osterwalder and Customer Development framework by Steve Blank are quite useful in this regard. I just need an opportunity to use them. A lot of people in the government would not understand it or are repulsive to it.

The one organisation that I am currently familiar with in Adelaide that will be open to this is The Australian Centre for Social Innovation or TACSI. They are doing some amazing work around thinking differently in the social space. Drucker once called social innovation one of the most important and needed areas in the 21st century. I never understood that when I read it many years back in India. However, working in Families SA and having stayed in Australia for more than 6 years I am starting to understand its significance.

I think that there is a great role for strategy in this space and I am determined to work on that.

In 2002 I first read about Edward Deming and the quality revolution. I started a mini-website at my job (almost a blog) on this called “Quality is Zero” or something similar based on Joseph Juran’s idea that the cost of quality is zero. I did not understand much about it but thought it made a lot of sense. That was my introduction to continous improvement, statistical analysis, toyoto production system, The Goal novel and its Theory of Constraints stuff from Goldratt and Lean Thinking. Over the years I learned about all of them and started adding various tools in my kit. 

Working in DFC I came across the Business Excellece team. They do a great job of teaching a governmental service organisation in the welfare sector to work on business principles especially around quality and project management. All my previous learning started triggering and I started to use them. A short project called the Business Improvement Challenge provided me more opportunity to use it. But I actually never got to use it fully in my real work.

In Families SA, doing the project management stuff I realised the value of using Agile techniques pioneered in the software world. They learned it from Deming and the quality revolution. Once I read The Toyota Kata, it all connected back to me. Agile is Deming for the non-manufacturing world but based on the improvements done by Toyota in a project management framework. It just made sense to use it that way.

My work over the years has always been a starter/fixer kind of work. I join new projects or enter into the current ones which are in a crisis mode. I have done that all my life. Over the years I have learnt by making many mistakes how to get these things going. My interest in technology start-ups and my two failed ventures notwithstanding that is what I have done. Kind of a intrapreneur.

The lean startup movement actually fits very well with all of this and I intend to use the tools in this area in my work with the social sector.

The good thing I am seeing is that I am actually meeting people now who respect business frameworks, principles and somebody like me to get the job done. That is making the entire difference in my ability to use my skill sets.

Steve Jobs in this 2005 commencent speech mentioned how you have to do things now that makes sense for you but you can only connect back to them in hindsight and it will all make sense. That is exactly what I am seeing now. A decade of learning built around what I found interesting and important is all starting to make sense now.