Turn Down the Noise and Turn Up Your Strategy
“There is more noise in the world than change.” Tim Cook, CEO, Apple Picture the scene: a group of executives is at an off-site meeting to discuss the company’s strategic direction. They begin with a review of the market, including patterns, trends and influential factors. Before long, the conversation is pulling them like a riptide, further and further out into…
Does Your Company Collaborate or Will it Disintegrate?
The colossal collapse of Sony in portable music and Nokia in mobile phones was directly caused by their failure to collaborate internally. Do you understand the goals and strategies of your colleagues in other functional areas? In this 4-minute video, Rich provides three practical principles to help your team strategically collaborate with one another.
Five Steps to Sculpting Your Strategy
Based on research on the strategy development process of more than 75 best-in-class organizations, Rich Horwath shares the five phases that comprise strategy development. Too often, organizations embark on “strategic planning” but fail to do any new thinking to generate the strategic insights that can lead to new value for customers. Missing any one of the five steps can lead…
Take a Deep Dive Into Your Business
For many organizations, strategy has become an annual event with little relation to a manager’s daily work. This video provides a concise strategic thinking framework to help all business people improve their performance.
The Deep Dive Strategic Thinking Framework
According to four separate studies on leadership, the #1 most valued skill in leaders today is strategic thinking. But only 3 out of every 10 managers is strategic. Learn how to make strategy a part of each day by using the Deep Dive Strategic Thinking Framework.
Simplify With Strategic Thinking
“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” Steve Jobs, Co-founder, Apple To simplify a business, one must first think and plan. However, for many people, the idea of simplifying through planning…
How to Span the Silos in Your Company
The word silo has its roots in the Greek term siros, which means “corn pit.” From there, the word was used by Western military units for underground chambers that were used to house missiles. Later on, management consultants borrowed it as an analogy to business systems, groups or processes that worked separately from one another. Silos can destroy a company’s…
Strategic Planning Best Practices
Is your strategic planning process creating real new value or is it wasting people’s time and effort? I’ve identified five phases that are common to the most effective strategy development processes.
Innovative Thinking for Real-World Results
“To not innovate is to die,” remarked Apple CEO Tim Cook. At first blush, that sounds a little melodramatic. After all, many companies don’t do a whole lot of innovating and they’re doing just fine. Fine is one of those words that’s supposed to have a positive connotation, but more often than not, carries with it an underlying sense of…
Injecting Strategy into Your Plan
When I’m asked to help facilitate strategic planning for an organization, the first thing I do is look at their current process. But here’s the kicker: research shows that only 19% of companies have a formal process for developing strategy. Why? Because in many cases, poor strategic planning has led to burdensome processes and plans that aren’t actually used to…
