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Yearly Archives: 2020

Happy New Year, and what’s next?

Happy New Year! I hope you had a well-deserved Christmas holiday, ate and slept a lot and enjoyed your time with your family, and you're looking forward to a great New Year! After a pretty tough 2020, I think we all deserved the break! I'm pretty sure you don't want to be reading a lengthy treatise on New Year's Eve, so this is just a short note to wish you a Happy New Year and to provide some food for thought for later. Here are some ideas about what you need to think about as you enter 2021! (more…)...
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Principles of a Good Partnership For Indigenous Organisations

How well a partnership operates depends on people more than procedures. Good governance of a partnership rests on building structures around people. There are three components of what makes a good partnership: -
  1. Behaviours;
  2. Structures; and
  3. Governance and Management Processes.
Behaviours What you want to achieve from the partnership indicates the kind of attitudes you need to bring to the partnership. For example, if what you want to achieve is co-operation about the management of Country, then the attitude you need to bring is one open to co-operation. If you want to build a business that will carry on for the foreseeable future, then you need to bring an attitude appropriate to the building of a long-term relationship with your partners where you are open and honest and willing to negotiate fairly. There are, however, some keystone behaviours that you need to bring to any partnership, and these are: -
  • Respect and fairness – no relationship can survive where partners don’t respect each other, constantly work to “do one better” over the other and attempt to gain an unfair advantage. Your community or corporation has to understand that even if you gain a...
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Let’s Start Planning 2021 Now!

Well, that's another year about to finish, and what a year it was! From global economic uncertainty to political and international turmoil, from bushfire to Coronavirus. What haven't small business been through? But if you're not careful, another year will slip by you where you haven't really done much to make your business the success you want it to be. I'm not saying you're not working hard, in fact, I'm saying exactly that: "you're working too hard in your business, but not hard enough on your business!" It's time that you really did something other than work hard for no real progress toward your ultimate goal of a successful business that fulfils your passion and your vision, that gives you a great income and a balanced lifestyle. The start of a new year is just the right time to do something different. (more…)...
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Governance of Partnerships and Joint Ventures By Indigenous Organisations

Governance of a partnership, whatever form it takes, is as important as governance in a corporation. In fact, it is exactly the same. Governance is not the same as Management and the two should not be confused – it is critically important to keep them separate. Governance is about providing strategic oversight over an entity. Management is about coordinating day-to-day operations. Governance is like the Principal of a school making sure that all the teachers operate to an approved syllabus, to a required standard. Management is like the teachers deciding how to teach topics between Monday and Friday. If you mix the two up there is a risk that individual teachers will teach topics outside of the syllabus. There is a risk that the required standard of teaching will not be reached. There is a risk that individual students will receive special attention while others receive none. If the Principal decides to interfere with the teaching timetable, they run the risk of not being able to provide the correct standard of teaching within the time allocated. Having the Principal means that there is oversight over syllabus and standards. Having teachers do the teaching means that their role of providing the right type of teaching is applied. Governance...
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OTS Management