Exploring Strategy, Creativity, and Leadership in Business
Who’s Minding Your Crown Jewels?
Maximizing the value of strategic assets and capabilities.
Why Would Culture Eat Strategy for Breakfast?
I have an exciting engagement right now with a client that is very intentionally integrating cultural development into its enterprise strategy and corporate narrative. This collaboration has led me to revisit the famous line attributed to Peter Drucker, that Culture eats Strategy for breakfast. I appreciate the wisdom in this statement: an organization’s culture is…
Refining Strategy Into Leadership
How can executive teams utilize their strategy to enhance their leadership capabilities and followership?
Right-Sizing Strategy Capability and Function for Mid-Size Companies
The nature and practice of strategy in mid-size businesses (say from $20 million revenue to $500 million) is fundamentally different than in both smaller and larger ones. On one hand this sounds obvious, but the practical application is a bit more nuanced, and not always appreciated in my experience. How can leaders in mid-size businesses…
Strategy Informs. Narrative Engages. Leaders Need Both.
Having a well-defined, coherent strategy is essential in a growing business to establish priorities and direct behavior across an increasing number of employees. Indeed, strategy is necessary, but by itself, it is insufficient from a leadership perspective. Why? Because even the most brilliant business strategy is transactional rather than relational. It is fact-based, data-driven,…
Cultivate and Harvest Strategic Acumen in Your Leaders, Teams, and Organization
Failure to develop this capability will constrain a company’s growth and exhaust its CEO.
The 2-Way Street of “Being More Strategic”
A few weeks ago I blogged about what it means to “be more strategic.” Over the years I’ve known several ambitious colleagues who have received this feedback in performance reviews, and also not a few leaders who have given it. My observation is that there is usually very little substance beyond the initial directive, as…
Mind the Gap: What Connects Your 2023 Operating Plan to Your Mission?
Welcome to January 2023! Most of us operating on calendar year schedules have a new set of annual performance objectives and a budget with approved resources to deploy. Let’s get busy! But what sort of organizational view do we have beyond the current year? And why does such a view matter? Most companies have some…
What Does Your 2023 Leadership Operating Plan Look Like?
Given the leverage that an effective executive leadership team can generate in a growing company – to say nothing of the friction that an ineffective team can create – I’m surprised so many teams seem un-intentional about team development, performance, and operations. It’s as if team performance is just supposed to happen because of the…
How Strategy Becomes Execution… and the Many Reasons It Doesn’t
Tight linkage between Strategy and Execution can be very challenging for a number of reasons. Sometimes the strategy is based on inaccurate or incomplete assumptions about the business’s capabilities and the opportunity being pursued. In other cases, unexpected developments make execution more challenging or even render the strategy obsolete. But even when the strategy is…
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Strategy, Creativity, and Leadership 