Being Strategic
A study of 60,000 executives showed that having a strategic approach to the business was 10x more important than any other leadership behavior studied. When you consider the strengths and areas of improvement for your executive team, what improvements can be made in their strategic thinking and strategic planning capabilities? Help your team develop their strategic thinking and planning capabilities…
Winning the Mental Game
“The physical aspect of the sport can only take you so far. In the Olympic Games, everyone is talented. Everyone trains hard. Everyone does the work. What separates the gold medalists from the silver medalists is simply the mental game.” Shannon Miller, U.S. Olympic gymnastics gold medalist Does your mind at work feel like a business pinata, minus the candy…
5 Strategy Traps to Avoid
For many managers, the word strategy conjures up thoughts of gigantic PowerPoint decks, binders collecting dust and general confusion. A survey by Roger Martin of the Rotman School of Management found that 67 percent of managers believe their organization is bad at developing strategy. Harvard Business School professor David Collis is even more direct: “It’s a dirty little secret: Most executives…
Does Your Strategy Make Real Trade-offs?
Take a good, hard look at your strategies and ask, “Are we making real trade-offs?” In this new video, I’ll share questions you can use to stress test your strategies and develop future strategies that use the element of focus to create greater value for your customers and outperform your competition.
Prepare Like a Champion
“My opponent did not understand preparation. He had little idea of the weeks, sometimes months that I spend in lonely isolation preparing my case. What he saw, without knowing it, was a lawyer who had been freed by acquiring a fund of eloquently prepared facts.” Gerry Spence, Trial Lawyer who has never lost a criminal case When we see the…
Drop the Gavel and Stop Judging
“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” William Shakespeare Good night’s sleep. Bad dream. Good weather. Bad storms. Good meal. Bad service. Our lives are peppered with the good, and the bad. But they don’t have to be. In fact, they shouldn’t be. Constantly assigning things with the designation as “good” or “bad” wastes both…
What Does the Future of Your Business Look Like?
“Friends congratulate me after a quarterly earning’s announcement and say, ‘Great quarter!’ I say, ‘Thanks, but that quarter was baked three years ago. Today, I’m working on a quarter that will happen three years from now.’” —Jeff Bezos, Founder, Amazon Are you working on a quarter that will happen three years from now? How about three weeks from now? Three…
Happy Strategy Fool’s Day
Happy Strategy Fool’s Day! Do you and your team have a common language and understanding of strategy? Research shows that 54 percent of organizations do not. Watch and learn three techniques for getting your team on the same page and help your business avoid becoming a member of the Strategy Fool’s club.
Fear the Fire Drill
Think about how you’ve spent your time this week at work. How much of that time was consumed by fire drills? Since you’re not a Russian physiologist named Ivan Pavlov and you’re not one of the dogs he was doing research on, it would be good to break the habit of dropping everything to attend to things that are artificially…
Does Your Team Make Good Decisions?
Great strategy is built on trade-offs and trade-offs are the product of decision making. Make better decisions and you have the opportunity to create more effective strategies. Strategic thinking and business acumen can help clarify the key trade-offs to make. In this video I’ll share 5 questions to assess your team’s decision making along with 7 steps to clarify decision…
