Eric Tachibana

Advice on how to fire employees - a presentation for Founders Institute Singapore

This is an old progress report from 1999 that I dug up while I was looking around some old file servers. Man, e-banking has not gone that much further than where we were in the days of the wild-wild-web

This is an example of a dashboard that could be used to monitor performance the regional technology and operations functions of a large enterprise

This is an example of a Run Book that could be used for the COO office of a Regional Business Technology function

Article about the history fo the database (written for non techies)

This is an example of the type of dashboard that could be used by the cross-departmental operating committee of an offshore/nearshore center.

Sample of an operating charter for an offshore service center

This deck offers advice on best practices for setting up and managing an offshore/nearshore service center that provides technology, infrastructure, or operations support to a regional or global client base.

This is a deck to help parents teach primary school kids creative writing skills

Like any functional department, sales & marketing can benefit from the clarity that is provided by a simple run book, which defines the rules & responsibilities as well as the strategically aligned operational goals of everyone in the group. This is an RFC: I’d like to hear about any best practices out there that may not be reflected in this deck.

Most firms talk about the need to engage employees, yet most of them approach the goal in random, ad-hoc ways. Employee engagement is sometimes interpreted as middle managers buying drinks for their team once a month at the local pub and setting up special, disassociated, interest groups like Women in Technology or doing CSR. This random, uncoordinated, IMHO, approach yields ineffective results. A better approach is holistic, and one that is based in the personality, context, and state of mind of its customers: the employees themselves.

Whether you are in a small start-up or a large MNC, learning how to effectively manage a matrix is key!

Over the course of my career, I’ve sat on a number of small-company boards. Looking back, it would have been nice if the managing directors had a baseline dashboard they could riff off of so as not to waste so much time on dash boarding. So the purpose of this document is to offer a baseline template dashboard that a start-up firm could use to update the board of directors. All the data would need to be filled in with real data, of course. And, the dashboard would have to be customized to meet the reporting requirements and operational uniqueness of the business. That said, baselines can save time and spark thought-threads. Remember that reporting should be for the sake of strategic enlightenment and to drive transparent discussions, and not for the sake of reporting. If anyone out there has some additional points of data they use effectively in their small-business management reporting , I’d love to hear about it!

This document is a Request for Comment. By way of background, the document came about as I was preparing to teach a course on “Organizing for Innovation” in an MBA class called “Technological Innovation.” As I was reading through the material, it occurred to me that I was having a hard time finding practical advice on how one would realistically setup a holistic Innovation Program. There was lots of, “best practice advice”, but little concrete models. In the field, I’d seen several companies try to roll out Innovation Programs, but because they only focused on one small part (such as Ideation), the programs ultimately failed to deliver real business results. My hypothesis was that you cannot run a Corporate Entrepreneurship program piecemeal, it needs to be holistic. So the basic question is: Suppose you had to build the ideal holistic innovation program from the ground up for a large company / MNC. At some point, you would need to define a tangible operating model with specific streams of work against which, you would staff actual people. The Operating Model would need to cover the scope of the functions and a set of activities to deliver against goals over Period X. So what would the Operating Model look like? This deck is a strawman. PS: I also happen to be in Asia Pacific, so my context is a regional organization in a global MNC.

The purpose of this deck is to give the executive technology management team of a large company / MNC a quick snapshot of opportunities for external sources of innovation in Asia Pacific. Where should the company look in the region to source external inspiration. This is an RFC, and I am looking for suggestions on how to improve the material to make it more useful for purpose. Note to the reviewer: Don’t get caught up in the “Innovation Potential rating.” Each company would need to do the ratings themselves relative to their specific context. For example, an investment bank would have very different ratings than a pharmaceutical firm. The deck hopes to make that analysis easier, but the analysis would still need to be done.