Events
A Vision for Australian Manufacturing
Thursday 17 February 2011
South East Business Networks, the City of Greater Dandenong's longest running business development program, is an exceptional avenue for learning about issues to do with Manufacturing. This week they provided one 'out of the box' with an excellent presentation by Professor Goran Roos, a worldclass expert on Manufacturing and currently South Australia's Thinker in Residence. With over 100 people in the room he explained some of the challenges Manufacturers face whilst simultaneously busting a few widely held myths about Australia's approach to Manufacturing. There's no doubt that the challenges for many are great and yet amongst them an idea emerged to me regarding Australia's Manufacturing future. We have an opportunity to make the next decade 'The Decade of Australian Manufacturing'
This is no Polly-Anna approach. It will require some serious work and more importantly it will require significant shifts in the way Government, Industry and the wider community think about Manufacturing and its role for Australia. All around Australia, and especially in the South East Melbourne area which is justifiably called Australia's Manufacturng heartland, we have worldclass capability across all facets of 'making' - that is in essence what manufacturing means - 'to make'. From biotechnology, clean room technology, nanotechnology, heavy steel fabrication and more, Australia has the core skills needed.
I sense though the future of manufacturing has a lot less to do with the skills and more about our understanding of how to best utilise those skills. A commitment to making the next ten years the Decade of Australian Manufacturing will see us position what we can do, how we think and what we can make at the fore front of world class manufacturing for many years to come. There is a clear opportunity if we are willing to see the future for what it could be, rather than focusing on what the future once was going to be. Things have changed and our Mannufacturing Future has changed whether we are willing to go there or not. The difference in our attitude will ultimately determine whether our future is more or less agreeable to us
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Events
Tuesday 8 May 2012
Have just spent a few hours discussing the Future of Money, hosted by James Bibby at Microsoft in Sydney and facilitated by Peter Vander Auwera from SWIFT/Innotribe. I'd like to flag that everyone understood that the session was way too short for such a big topic and everyone would agree that we just scratched the surface (not that the scratch would leave too much of a mark just yet). The session was a kick start for a group from a wide variety of interests: banks, payment providers' IT specialists and some specialty consultancies.
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Wednesday 2 May 2012
Ernst & Young and GreenBiz have completed a survey of business executives looking at the development of Corporate Sustainability around the world. The report shows that there has been a clear rise in awareness; that employees are a core source driving sustainability actions; that reduction of costs is a core appeal and that return on investment in sustainability actions is required to be judged in the same way as other corporate investments. For me this poses a dichotomy of thinking - the environment was built up over millennia and our use of it has taken just a couple of centuries yet we judge sustainability actions at the same 'speed of delivery' criteria. That poses a challenge and is perhaps an unrealistic set of expectations.
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Tuesday 24 April 2012
On the eve of ANZAC day here in Australia ABC Radio Darwin's Vicki Kerrigan chats with futurist Marcus Barber on the future of war - what the future triggers of war might be and how war will be fought
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