Tag Archives: Creating Value

Visualisation: Part 1

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Positioning

As an Engineer, I have been educated to think in Engineering Concepts. One of the old jokes about education is that it narrows the number of people you can have an intelligent conversation with.

 

Today’s blog post image was provided courtesy of Dr Marc Dussault, The Exponential Growth Strategist who is always on the look out for examples of antimimeticisomorphism, which I am sure you’ll agree this is!

 

Engineering Visualisation

Engineering Visualisation

There is a marketing concept known as Positioning. This refers to the way others perceive you and your offering and how you assist them to understand it. As Engineers we have been very bad at this. The picture above shows that depending on how you look at something, you get a very different impression. From one end it looks like three bolts on a bar, from the other is is only two. This is a trick of course but a cursory glance fools the eye. And so it is with value. If we don’t take the effort to present it well, a cursory look doesn’t show it for what it is.

 

Creating Value

As an Engineer, I firmly believe we create a tremendous amount of value with the work we do. The world we live in could not exist without the Engineering Design that made the technology we all take for granted possible. Looking at this from the Engineers’ perspective, we added a lot of value. But because we don’t explain that, it is taken for granted.

 

So it is not just necessary to create value, but to Position that value so it is understood as valuable. This builds on from my post on Creating Value where Edward De Bono is explaing why we are not so good at this.

 

I attended an IEEE Victoria chapter meeting Monday night and was blown away by the work done at CAWCR, The Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, where they model, report and forecast on weather and climate. The presentation was excellent and I appreciated the Engineering and Science behind what they do, but I also realised that almost no one knows how hard they work and how smart the technology they create is. They create enormous value, but it is mostly invisible.

 

Successful Endeavours specialise in Electronics Design and Embedded Software Development. Ray Keefe has developed market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years. This post is Copyright © 2012 Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd

Edward de Bono: Creating Value

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Edward de Bono

I was invited to the VECCI Business Leaders Luncheon for an interview with Edward de Bono. It was a conventional interview followed by a brief question and answer session with questions from those attending. He spoke about a number of topics but the one that caught my attention was on the Creation Of Value. It was a question from one of those attending that sparked this off. The question was about how we can be more innovative in developing our businesses.

 

Edward de Bono

Edward de Bono

His answer, as usual, showed an amazing depth of perception. Here is how I remember it.

 

The western world, and particularly due to the influence of The Church, has done an excellent job of teaching people how to think about finding the truth. But what we have not done is to teach people how to think about Creating Value.

 

That is a pretty hefty thought and I would have attended the luncheon just for that challenging insight alone. But he followed with this.

 

So when something happens, and particularly when a problem or setback occurs, instead of asking “How do we go forward from here” or “What does forward look like from here”, we get stuck on who is to blame and who did right or wrong instead of focussing on how we Create Value or move forward from here.

 

Double header. Now I am really challenged and encouraged at the same time. My business mentor, Dr Marc Dussault, is on about the same thing; Creating Value. So now I have 3 things to think about:

 

  • “How do I create value”?
  • “What value do I want to create”?
  • “How do we go forward from here”?

 

I am going to be giving that a lot of thought as we prepare for 2012. I encourage you to do the same.

 

Successful Endeavours specialise in Electronics Design and Embedded Software Development. Ray Keefe has developed market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years. This post is Copyright © 2011 Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd