August 30th, 2009 — miscellaneous
A couple of months ago I attended the opening of UWA’s new Business School. One of events held that day was a presentation/interview with Trevor Eastwood, the former CEO of Wesfarmers (which is a massive conglomerate corporation that owns companies like Bunnings and Coles to name a couple). It was interesting to hear from a CEO level some of the management practices that had been used to run such a massive company.
Tips from Trevor:
- Get someone better than you to do your job.
- Translate goals so that they are meaningful to every decision making level in the organisation.
- Use the Argenti System – it is a great delivery tool.
- Don’t track performance annually, you need to do it continually/monthly. You have to know if/when different areas of the business are doing good or falling off the perch.
- Honesty and integrity in business is essential.
- When making acquisitions the discounted cash flow method was used to assess the purchase price. You need to know how you are going to add value because if you don’t change anything it discounts your value (since you paid a premium to acquire the business).
Keeping the above in mind, Wesfarmers recently purchased the Coles supermarket stores. Woolworths, as the stock market will tell, has been outperforming Coles for a while now. In fact, I’ve been watching their share price throughout the whole Global Financial Crisis phase. It has been consistently hovering around the mid-$20 mark. In comparison, Wesfarmers stock has gone up in value by about $10 since Feb 2009. A big part of this has been them finally managing to turn Coles around, minimise their debt and move forward with its growth strategy.
The video below shows current Wesfarmers CEO Michael Chaney briefly describes how Argenti was used successfully over 25 years at Wesfarmers.
Download the PDF publications onthe Argenti System from Harvard:
August 21st, 2009 — careers, management
People get assigned management positions through a number of different ways, including:
- They do their current non-management tasks/role very well
- They “walk the walk” & “talk the talk” (ie dress in suits and can interweave buzz words in conversation)
- They have been with the company or in their field for a long period of time
Notice that none of the above is a reliable indicator of how a person will perform as a manager (even if they look the part).
A lot of companies still use this “sink or swim” method of Management Training. I’ve also noticed that management training is often given to people who have been managers for a couple of years and less often to potential managers.
Some people get pushed into management and end up asking for their old job back. Management is not for everyone and you’ll be doing your company and your manager a favour by telling them you don’t want to be a manager up front (especially if you have decided this already or if you just don’t have the passion).
Other people want to get into management and get overlooked because they may not have certain leadership skills that area required in such a position. Then again, there are people who get into management and think they are doing a good job even when it is clear to everyone that they are not… this is why we have performance reviews…
Read The First-Time Manager by Loren Belker & Gary Topchik <- everyone should own this book
Follow me @marcofratelli on twitter & hubpages.
July 12th, 2009 — careers, training
Recently I’ve been browsing through the corporate website and discovered a Training Calendar detailing certain courses that are held each month. A lot of these courses are (only recently) mandatory for Graduate Engineers to attend. Other people who have been there a while (like myself) have to get approval. But I think they are available to anyone, provided they have a signed Training Request Form from their boss.
I actually applied for a few of these courses during June/July in advance, taking the window of opportunity available at the time. In the last couple of weeks I’ve done some Excel courses (advanced and macros) which was good for a number of reasons:
- I’d never had any formal training in Excel before, everything I know is self taught
- I got to learn about Macros and Pivot Tables which I never really used before
- I discovered I am actually working at a level above “Advanced” (sweet)
- It meant I could get out of the office for 2 days each time which meant I could actually stay awake during work hours for 2 days in those weeks
- I could meet new people at the same time.
This week I’m attending a Contracts Management course. This lot of training will be the first proper study I have done since uni and while it may not be particularly exciting, at least my career will be advancing for these 2 days and not “going backward” (as I lose more and more brain cells and begin to forget knowledge – why does the office do that?)
By the way, thanks for the email Steve! I feel your pain! I no longer work any more hours than I have to. I might have even walked past you in Borders, I go to Boffins as well a lot. I need to get out of there for an hour a day! 
Here’s an interesting video on How To Stay Awake, it’s presented by a good looking female (probably like someone in your procurement department) and it may assist you in staying awake. I’ve watched it twice, but not for the content, haha.
Be proud of who you are. Get yourself a “World’s Best Project Engineer” Mug.
April 4th, 2009 — management
Dilbert is everyone’s favourite Project Engineer.
