Strategic Planning in the Groovy 1970's Last month we covered strategic planning in the swinging Sixties and I discussed Peter Drucker’s philosophy “Management by Objectives”. MBO still has concepts that have survived the decades and continues to offer some value to modern information age companies. However, in the 1970’s, “strategy” started to become a popular [...]
Strategic Fashion Through the Decades, The Swinging Sixties The 1960’s Before we turn our attention to the future of business strategy, I want to start by looking back to the past, starting with the swinging sixties: Elvis Presley, landing on the moon, the Cultural Revolution. The first application of an industrial robot was even introduced [...]
Corporate Politics Attacks Strategic Vision Strategically Disengaged We run into this time and time again while talking to businesses about the challenges they are facing when motivating their teams around the strategic plan, and aligning the organization around vision. We understand the concerns of change, as each of us have a way we go about [...]
3 Key Elements to Navigating the Strategy Maze Complexity vs Clarity Organizations are faced with a trade-off when considering how they operationalize their strategic plan. Many complex businesses have elements of a matrix structure with multiple lines of accountability; therefore, a department or project may be an ‘enabler’ of multiple high-level strategic goal areas or [...]
2018, An Interesting Year For Strategic Execution Throughout 2018 we had many conversations with organizations from a wide range of industries, geographies and sizes, and they all had a similar theme: they asked the same questions, and raised the same concerns about the approach they were taking to strategic execution. Real-time execution The ability to [...]
3 Key Factors in Automating Objectives and Key Results (OKR) What is an OKR? OKR (Objectives and Key Results) relies on setting a framework for near and mid-term goals, where the goal is defined as a clear, specific, and achievable objective. It describes “something I am going to do”, which in itself could form a [...]
The Single Most Critical Change Required to Maximize your Corporate Strategy Strategy as part of your culture I have heard it a number of times, from different clients, when they say that “StrategyBlocks has formed part of the fabric of their organization”, or “part of their corporate culture”. Regardless of technology, it means the [...]
The 5 Qualities of Disciplined Strategic Governance The 5 qualities of disciplined strategic governance: Clarity of Communication If people can’t clearly understand the path forward, they will make their own decisions on how best to proceed in business; not all of those decisions will be the right ones. Clearly telling the story of strategy, that [...]
How Versus Why - Comparing Strategies to Focus Areas Last month I introduced our concept of a 3 dimensional strategy pyramid. To be a complete graphical representation of the complex world of strategic execution, the pyramid requires depth as there are multiple variables needed to measure the quality of execution performance (what we call “strategic [...]
Everyone Needs a Strategy Pyramid When you Google image search “strategy pyramid” not surprisingly you get a vast amount of results; your browser will be chocka with an array of multicolored representations depicting the best way to illustrate a business strategy. So what do they have in common? Apart from the rampant use of [...]
