The price of heavier cars

A great article in Slate about the price of heavier cars in terms of road safety. As a long term driver of small, lightweight vehicles, it makes disturbing reading, even before one considers the environmental damage associated with 2T four wheel drives.

I think that the idea the author proposes of increasing fuel duty to account for the additional health costs makes perfect sense. I fail to understand why in the UK we feel the need to pay for a vehicle licensing body like the DVLA (at the cost of 100's of millions of pounds) to (ineffectively) police road tax, when we could save a huge amount of money and gaurantee compliance by putting additional fees on fuel. Oh, and it would actually target those who pollute the most.

Anyway, back on road safety, I remain really excited by the potential of self-driving in this area, even if it is only allowed on major trunk roads. British roads are quite safe but if one death can be avoided by mass adoption radar cruise control, brake assist and increased vehicle intelligence, then in my mind its worth legislating to make them compulsory. The advantage of smoother driving will also be realised in fewer traffic jams (human beings are terrible at maintaining distance) and therefore increased fuel efficiency. Seems like a more important area for legislation than insisting that everyone has DAB in car.

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Impacts of a handset leasing model on mobile telcos

Following yesterday's post, here's some related thinking on the impacts on operators of handset leasing. Handset sales represent around 25% of operator revenues in a typical European market, but generate only around 5% of margin. It may therefore be the case that the scenario described would lead operators to a more profitable structural model than exists today. Oil companies are consistently and acceptably profitable, despite being (literally in some cases) the ‘dumb pipe’ that operators are so desperate to avoid becoming. One of the reasons for the oil majors sustained profitability is clear focus on their role in the value chain – to supply the fuel that enables transportation, relying primarily on location, then brand and finally product innovation to compete. BP or Shell do not need to subsidise the purchase of a car in order to drive consumption of fuel because consumers are ‘hooked’ on it (it gets them from place to place) and there are many credible car manufacturers an

Value drivers for telecoms retail

I've been doing a really large number of driver trees recently - we've taken to using them on every project to get really into the guts of value creation for businesses and thus decide where to focus initiative development (How To Win, if you're keeping score). Anyhow, I had to pause for thought recently to work out how to represent the subscription aspect of telecoms retail for a client. Since it took me a minute, I thought I'd share... its lack of elegance suggests that its not quite right, although it was enough to demonstrate that there was a certain lack of coverage in the initiatives that my client was pursuing and thus spark a debate. Enjoy.

Chief Strategy Officers II - Career Development

Here's a follow up to my earlier post on the starting point of Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) careers in the FTSE 100 and S&P 500 companies - a visualisation of two steps in their careers: their first employer or job and the job they had before they got their current position. Lots of work went into this... so any insights that you glean from the visualisation would be great to hear about :). The CSO is a crucial strategic role on the executive (!) and the owner of the tone and philosophy of decision making across much of the business, knowingly or unknowingly. Scrutiny of their experience in defining the process and language of strategic management is therefore appropriate not just amongst their executive peers, but in my view amongst shareholders. The days when being very smart and able to analyse large amounts of data were enough to be a CSO are basically gone... has the profession moved on enough to cope?

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