Every company has a culture, just like every company sells something–a product or a service. However, just as in products, there is a wide variety of cultures. The two most important categories are purposeful cultures and default cultures. If you don’t have one, you definitely have the other. Based on observation of hundreds of small …
Unlike internet surfing at work, gambling at work is a vice that has been around for many many years. Even with modern day management practices, we have not eliminated this troubling habit. In fact, it seems more and more leaders are playing the odds—and don’t even know it! The truth is that leaders are making …
If you are like most business leaders, you are focused on the dollars and cents. More and more CEO’s get paid based on how well the company performs against expectations–whether it is stock price, revenue growth or valuation. While that may be a viable way to reward and compensate, it does nothing to increase the …
Did you know that the odds are against you? Only 1 in 4 strategic growth projects actually return value. That strikes me not only as a low number but one of the reasons strategic planning execution so rarely accomplishes the intended goals. So why is the return so low? There are lots of reasons and …
Leaders are faced with more change than ever before, leaner staffs and budgets, and many more decisions with less time to make them. As a leader it is hard to find time to take a step back from fighting fires to think about where the business is going, where it should go, and how to …
There are many definitions of strategy. One of them is: strategy is how you spend your money. In lieu of a written strategy, one could look at your budget and determine what the company values. Does the company spend to hire the best talent, have the best R & D lab, state of the art …
How many of you would jump in the car for a family vacation to the Grand Canyon without a map? A GPS? A reservation for a place to stay and maybe a guide book about what to do when you get there–either online or paper version? Probably very few of us. Especially if we are …
How do you know if your strategy is good or bad? Chances are you don’t need me to tell you. There are many indicators and you can usually look around you in the organization and figure it out. However, just because strategy is not implemented effectively doesn’t mean the strategy is bad and just because …
All of us face hardship at one time or another. Usually our goal is to move through it or find a way to end it as fast as possible. But harness it? What does that mean? Essentially, harnessing hardship is about engaging challenges and embracing change in order to achieve transformational improvements. Big benefits don’t …
Many clients tell me that the strategic planning experience they have with me is different than they have had before–better, more comprehensive, drove team work, more focused on outcomes, and much more action-oriented. When I ask how to better explain that in proposals, they tell me it is not the words used in the proposals–the …
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