There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to most managers. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between art and science, between the qualitative and quantitative and it lies between the pit of a manager’s fears and the summit of their knowledge. That’s the signpost up ahead–your next stop, the Strategylight Zone. The time: 5:30 pm. The place: a company, any company, maybe… READ MORE
Here’s a quick quiz you can share with folks in your group to see how strategic people are (answers follow the quiz): 1. At the heart of business strategy is: A. The intelligent allocation of limited resources. B. Distributing resources across all potential growth opportunities. C. Working to be better and faster than the competition. 2. Successful business strategy is about: A. Being better than the competition. B…. READ MORE
How often have you and your colleagues completed a SWOT Analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) and asked, “So what?” What did you actually do with it? Too often SWOT Analysis become a “check-the-box”; exercise, adding little or no value to your business planning efforts. I’ve created a sequence of three steps to go from SWOT Analysis to strategy. Step 1 is the SWOT Analysis. Step 2 is to use the Opportunity and… READ MORE
If strategy were a physical summit in your company, business unit or functional area, would you be the only one standing at the top? For many leaders, the depressing answer is ‘yes.’ While you may have built a mountain of expertise shaped by strategic insights, the great leaders are the ones who help the rest of their team scale those heights from tactical to strategic thinkers. The process of helping managers develop their strategic thinking… READ MORE
As with any business model, the reason a SWOT analysis is performed is to generate insights about the business and drive planning efforts. There are five SWOT traps that we need to be aware of to prevent our efforts from being an exercise in futility: 1. The Laundry List When listing the individual elements under each category, careful thought should be given to the importance of each item. A laundry list of 7-10 factors for each category… READ MORE
Like most things utterly familiar, SWOT analysis has been taken for granted to the point that it has become perhaps the most misused tool in the manager’s box. A good SWOT analysis is one of the cornerstones of sound strategy. A half-baked SWOT analysis (and most of them are) prevents businesses from realizing their full potential and weds them to mediocrity. The acronym SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and… READ MORE
What stops us from thinking strategically? During the past ten years, I’ve asked thousands of managers from around the world this question and their strategy challenges can be grouped into three areas: #1. Resources—most people simply don’t have enough time to get things done and in many cases, the organization doesn’t support people taking time out to think. We’ve replaced the Gordon Gekko Wall Street motto “greed is good” with… READ MORE
