If you’re not managing for the win, it’s hard to get a winning outcome. In competitive sports like baseball or football, it is clear what winning looks like. When it comes to strategy execution, the definition of winning can be more ambiguous. Does it mean growth, profitability, market share, or some other metric of success? Many companies …
Effectiveness
7 Minutes of Wisdom From Jay Forrester
Forrester does a wonderful job of explaining the deep simplicity of systems, how this simplicity can produce powerful complexity, and the inherent challenge of leadership. "every system has in it, two concepts and only two. Now that may strike you as surprising. You may not believe it even after these lectures are over, but when you come to …
What Great Leadership Looks Like
In 2 amazing minutes, Steve Jobs reveals eight simple principles for running a great company. The Eight Principles: Organize like a startupEmpower leaders with clear & purposeful responsibilitiesFocus the top team on managing the "whole company"No delegation to committeesEffective teamwork based on deep trustLots of fast/frequent …
Marketing Is About Values
I recently watched a video of Steve Jobs talking about marketing. I pulled out a few excerpts to capture the essence of his talk. “… marketing's about values.This is a very complicated world. It's a very noisy world. And we're not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. And so we have to be really clear on …
Failure to Transform: It’s Time for a New Paradigm
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" --Upton Sinclair Transformation has become the buzzword for change. In the past, these programs have gone by various names such as re-organization, downsizing, turnaround, right-sizing, restructuring, and re-engineering. Technology and …
What are you going to do now? — How to get your team prepared for changes ahead
One of the challenges of working in a group is getting everyone aligned. We often refer to this as “getting everyone on the same page.” Getting everyone on the same page is one of the primary goals of strategic planning and budgeting processes. These processes help management teams converge on a shared mental model of what they will be …
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Nine Mistakes That Make Strategy Execution Hard
Does your company do a good job executing strategy? If so, your company is probably an exception. Executing strategy is hard. It is one of the top challenges facing CEOs and management teams. It requires direction, active communication, and lots of cross-functional coordination. Unfortunately, companies tend to make one or more of the …
Good CEO, Bad CEO – What’s the Difference?
What’s the difference between a good CEO and a bad CEO? The simple answer is effectiveness. Good CEOs are effective and use that effectiveness to build and lead effective organizations that build enduring companies; bad CEOs don’t. Good CEOs understand and promote the operational values that drive effectiveness. They value …
Don’t Just Strategize, Execute!
I have been helping companies develop and execute their strategies for over 30 years, and I am frequently asked to facilitate strategy off-sites. Early in my career I would almost always say yes, excited about the possibility to help a client build a great strategy. I was sure that getting a senior team together to build a vision and plan for …
Who’s Managing Your Strategy Implementation?
When companies decide to launch a major new product development effort or build a significant new manufacturing plant they assign a dedicated project leader to make sure everything that needs to get done is listed, tracked and reported on. If the project is important enough, the project leader will even have a staff of people forming a project …