New Captains of ADO, page-129

I’ve looked at both sides of this fraught upcoming AGM. Like many others, have been confused and confounded by the claims and counterclaims, and imputations in here. Until the last few days I had no idea how I was going to vote, coming down on one side and then the other.
Finally, I asked myself who from the management team, I absolutely trusted to deliver.

The answer was a single person: Joe Maeji and his science.

I tried to imagine what would he think about the issues being raised and what outcome he would like from the AGM.

Clearly, he has embraced the new approach as set out in the Chairman’s address (he has registered trademarks for Anteocoat, Anteobind and AnteoFix in Australia so far for one thing). Joe is responsible for all the IP registrations.

It was Joe who called for restraint on any battery spruiking, until he had lined up robust and wide ranging patent applications. This restraint and caution was wryly acknowledged by Geoff Cumming several AGMs ago, the one immediately prior to the Diasource ‘takeover’. Geoff admitted by implication, he was casting around for something to talk up when so many leads were failing.
(I don’t even want to think about where the shareprice was then, some things are just too painful to revisit...).

Let’s look at the historical context for where we are now. In this age of self-reinvention and short attention spans, memories are very fleeting indeed.

1. It’s self-evident that something went very wrong indeed very early on with the ADO business model.
   
   Where is the accountability?
   
   A telling comment made from someone who shall remain anonymous keeps haunting me: “people underestimated the cost of regulatory uptake”.
   
   Who are these “people”? Surely not the shareholders ....before management who have expertise on these barriers?
   
   This is our management we’re talking about with foundation decision-making. The A-team.
   
   Surely it would have been sensible to have been realistic about the likelihood of companies not wanting to apply Anteobind (consigning ‘Mix n Go’ to the dustbin of commercially inappropriate names is long overdue) on existing tests due to the cost of regulatory change, and factor that in with financial planning?
   
   Because as it turns out, the resistance was colossal. More importantly it was predictably so. Indeed, the cost barrier was so forseeable by anyone with industry knowledge, that it would have been obvious the most likely uptake was to target new developments. This didn’t happen early enough. Enter handheld devices and collaborative measures for new products. We all know how that went.
   
   Clearly some collaborations like Ellume and Atomo are going to finally bear fruit, and let’s not take that away from Geoff Cumming and the technical team, but the bottom-line delays and volumes of orders have been crushing. Making M&G available on line on a 'build it and they will come' approach, was never a realistic strategy with what we know about the regulatory costs. It was more blind optimism and we got some predictable uptake from researchers. This could not have been a surprise unless you were totally blinded by the science and not savvy enough about commercial realities on the barriers to adoption.
   
2. Where was management’s risk analysis? I guess we should ask the (then) CEO, CFO and the legal and compliance officer, in those early days, but they haven’t exactly been forthcoming on this issue or aren't around.
   Again, it was blindingly obvious early on that the attempt to externalise the regulatory costs wasn’t workable. Industry inertia was also overlooked.
   
   At what stage was this recognised? Far too late apparently. Ferghana Partners was engaged and the process was painfully slow. Ask yourself was the Ferghana Partners approach so intrinsically evil, or was it a stuff up due to their not being called early enough?
   
   The Diasource deal made sense in that it would be a platform to launch Anteo technology. But ADO was already in trouble by then.
   
   Given these urgencies, surely the terms of the Diasource takeover and their implementation must have in this respect, been fleshed out and made binding on the parties so that they had to meet implementation targets to apply ADO tech? Or binding that they would use income from Diasource to pay for the purchase?
   
   Apparently not! From what I can work out, by the time Diasource rebelled on the latter, and Geoff Cumming explained to the baffled unfortunates we couldn’t continue to use their earnings funds to pay for the takeover, (it was all ADO money by then, so surely legally that was a nonsense? Unless it wastn't nailed down properly in the first place?). Or was the problem was that by then their CEO was our CEO and they either didn't understand or didn't want to understand. In which case you have a cultural problem you failed to manage.
   
   Like they used to say in teenage pregnancy avoidance campaigns: Hope is not a method.
   
   Nice guys finish last in the business world and you must be able to think like an enterpreneur, have a certain amount of ruthlessness AND manage risks. Being a manager in a world with set parameters doesn’t make you a successful entrepreneur. Game-changing technology mandates risk taking but it must be calculated.
   
   Let’s consider the cultural risks again, Diasource had been a private company. Did anyone come in and radically change their thinking on this and make them clearly understand they’d been taken over and what that meant? It may have been a friendly takeover, but maybe it was a bit too friendly. Was there a cultural transition? Were there binding undertakings about application of ADO technology? Was authority being asserted?
   
   Apparently not. Otherwise they would have behaved like team players and taken us more seriously.
   
   We simply cannot have an oversupply of misfortune without attribution, and we have to be fairminded and courageous about it. This is a business environment not a summer camp of visionaries. Bad decisions were made, at least the people responsible should own up to making them. But somehow, it’s always somebody else’s fault. The baddies are now Ferghana partners and Diasource? Before that it was the lenders of last resort who management then claimed, acted badly. Hardly surprising they'd do otherwise. It’s like The Perils of Pauline.
   
   
   
   ...more following...