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Leadership Caffeine™-Teach Your Team to Make Better Decisions

Mar 14, 2010

If you were to embark upon a rugged and lonely journey to the top of the mountain to ask for enlightenment from the Oracle of Management, I suspect that you would be left with the words “decision-making” to ponder on your long walk back to civilization. And in spite of the lack of a concrete answer from this journey, I’ll throw in my two-cents worth that decision-making is in fact the essence of management. It’s also darned hard to do, difficult to teach and challenging to get right more often than not.

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Leveraging The Power of Value Discipline Thinking

Jan 6, 2010

From the list of, “Books that I truly wish had updated editions” comes one of my top 10 favorites, the 1997 book, “The Discipline of Market Leaders,” by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersma.

I re-read this book…or at least parts of it every year and I still carry through the concepts in my academic and client strategy work. While the examples are brutally dated and some of the companies have moved from good to great to gone, I find the framework of Value Discipline thinking to be a powerful tool that is easy for students and clients to digest and one that is useful in guiding strategic choices.

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Leadership Caffeine™-Develop a Big Picture View or Risk Becoming a Carp

Jan 4, 2010

Far too many leaders that I work with lack awareness of the broader forces swirling around their firms, their customers and those shape-shifting clusters that we describe as industries.

Given the hurricane like market and societal forces buffeting our globe today, a strategy of boarding up the windows and hunkering down is tantamount to committing corporate suicide. Yet, mostly by the sin of omission, this is exactly what I’m observing inside too many organizations.

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Increase Your Team’s Global Awareness or Risk Being Run Over

Dec 16, 2009

Too many of our businesses, business leaders, citizens and politicians fail to understand, pay attention to or even appreciate the impact of the ever-changing global business environment. Or, if they do appreciate the impact, many are caught like the proverbial “deer in the headlights,” staring as the global competitors approach at an accelerating rate.

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Leadership Caffeine™: Five Simple Suggestions for Minimizing Management Myopia

Nov 29, 2009

Participate in or monitor enough management team conversations and you will invariably conclude that it’s darned hard for these teams to spend quality time discussing external issues. The gravitational pull of internal “stuff” is overwhelming and resists all attempts to move the conversation to topics outside of the firm’s four walls, preferring instead to keep managers focused on the nuances of their own operations. The result is a self-fulfilling management myopia where the view on the world is grossly limited to the immediate surroundings…and ranges as far as the eyes can see outside conference room windows.

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Leadership 2009 Style-What We Learned

Nov 24, 2009

Mix one part global economic crisis with ample quantities of uncertainty and ambiguity. Stir in two-parts ever-changing global competition and a dash of geopolitical instability and you’ll end up with something that looks and feels a lot like the world of today, complete with the mild aftertaste of fear. You’ll also end up with a remarkable living leadership laboratory, where the best leaders are rediscovering the importance of leadership blocking and tackling while simultaneously developing the new skills and approaches required in this complex environment.

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Once More On the SoapBox: Strategy and the Leader

Nov 4, 2009

There is no more mystical and in some cases mythical concept in all of business than the word, “Strategy.” Perhaps because it has been long claimed by academics and expensive consultants and bandied about exclusively by executives in boardrooms, while everyone else waits for the CEO to come down from on high with the clay tablets and of course, clarity, firmly in hand. Here are some suggestions for beginning to take the myth out of strategy in your organization:

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Leading in the Trenches: How Well Do You Know Your Customers?

Sep 30, 2009

If you don’t know your customers at a sufficient level of detail, including their hopes, dreams and emotions, everything you are doing includes a high degree of guesswork and randomness. Your messaging likely includes a great deal of blah blah about your firm. Promotional activities are fired from a shotgun, and while they occasionally hit something, there is no viable, sustainable marketing system in place.

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Looking for A Framework to Rebuild Your Business? Think Baldrige

Aug 25, 2009

My own personal observation is that the Baldrige National Quality Program is one of the most misunderstood, unknown and poorly marketed great programs for organizations seeking a framework for business performance improvement. You owe it to yourself and your organization to become familiar with the program and the many great low and no-cost tools available to help you improve your business.

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Sales & Strategy Playbook: Competitor Acquired? It May Be a Gold-Plated, Gift-Wrapped Opportunity

Aug 11, 2009

In talking with a CEO friend running a smaller tech firm, he indicated that there is increasing buzz about various potential combinations and roll-ups that will impact his specific sector. He said this with a smile, and an interesting observation that “when my competitors are acquired, our business spikes and new opportunities are uncovered.”

That’s an Interesting way to look at the situation. I know a lot of people who fear the outcome of Competitor X merging with Firm Y.

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