With clear acknowledgement that I am just one of millions of consumers impacted by the Takata Airbag disaster (recall), I feel compelled to vent. I of course vent not by screaming, but by looking for the management lessons in the mess. There are more than a few marketing and management lessons embedded in the industry’s handling of this potentially life-threatening problem.
Too often, we’re laser focused on the object in front of us; the next project or the person we’re working with, and our field-of-view is severely constricted. We fail to see the bigger picture until something from outside our narrow view of the world runs us over. Here are 8 ideas to help jumpstart your external scanning activities:
The Business Review meeting is a staple of large and small organizations everywhere. These can either be constructive opportunities to reflect on challenges and opportunities and identify needed actions, or, they can be destructive time-wasters. Sadly, in many organizations, these meetings resemble the latter. Here are six ways the group from corporate contributes to the destruction of what should be an important meeting:
We tend to reserve our thinking, writing and talking about leadership for the hierarchical relationships. However, peer groups represent great, untapped sources of problem-solving and improvement. There’s ample opportunity for you to assert as a leader of this group, if you take the right approach. Here are 7 steps to asserting as a leader of your peers without being perceived as a jerk…
Yahoo—a name left over from the boom and bust period of the dot.com world—has somehow managed to limp along in a world where many struggle to understand its value proposition. According to a recent article in Forbes, the exodus of talent and the frustration found in much of the remaining workforce has much to do with the lack of clarity around strategy and direction.
If you’ve ever dealt with a complex medical issue, you understand how difficult it sometimes is to identify the real problem. Yet, pinpointing this problem is essential to developing the best possible treatment regimen. It can be a matter of life or death. The same holds true in business, where it’s essential to put time and efforts into developing an effective diagnosis of your firm’s situation:
“Not miscalculation, bad strategy is the active avoidance of the hard work of crafting a good strategy.” Richard Rumelt—Good Strategy/Bad Strategy Consider: “Our strategy is to be more profitable than our competitors.” “Our strategy is to grow from 10,000 to 100,000...
We spend an incredible amount of time immersed in a world of our own fabrication—the world as it feels and looks and acts from inside our organization’s walls. It’s not the culture that will kill you, it’s the view. It’s time to change it. Take off the blinders and look up and out further. Extend your focal point.
Most businesses and most management teams flail and fail when it comes to the work of strategy. In today’s world, where the long-cycle strategy process has been replaced by short-bursts of experimentation and iteration, it’s essential to reduce the fail and flail by attacking the root causes of so much dysfunction with this work. Here are 7-Steps to to help the senior team get it right:
One of the worst uses of the term, “team,” is in relationship to the group of executives who report to the CEO. For many of the (less than $200 million in annual revenue) firms I work with, there’s little beyond the “report to” issue that binds these groups together as a team. This is often frustrating to CEOs who expect more from their highest paid lieutenants. Here are 3 areas where these groups can and must coalesce as a team:
