The acquisition of Dollar Shave Club by Unilever highlights the need for all of us in our businesses to look beyond our traditional approaches. We focus intensely on what we do and how we do it and we fail to see simple alternatives that upstarts can easily exploit at our expense.
Helping a group align on the hard work of strategy is...hard work. Here are 3 ideas in my latest video update to help you get people working together early in the strategy process:
Helping a once successful business navigate to new markets is one of the most difficult acts in all of business. The deck is stacked against us in many places, particularly when it comes to the issue of leadership courage.
A bit of commentary on the month that was January, 2016 and a recap of my leadership and management writing around the web. Enjoy and have a great weekend!
For this week, I served up articles on avoiding a leadership meltdown, succeeding with your first presentation to executives, conducting difficult conversations, achieving your leadership goals this year and wrapping your brain around the concepts and vocabulary of strategy. Enjoy the articles and use them in great leadership, management and career health!
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:
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:
Strategy processes mostly disappoint. That’s too bad, because there are few things more essential to an organization’s success and security than getting strategy right. Here are (at least) 17 ways your strategy process will break bad:
When it comes to the forward-looking issues around talent, team and strategy development, the uncomfortable answer to the question in the headline for this post for just about all of us (myself included) is, “Not enough.” Here are 4 ideas to help you manufacture time for the critical developmental and strategy discussions needed to push your business forward:
