Maximizing the value of strategic assets and capabilities.
Category Archives: Practice of Strategy
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 businessesContinue reading “Right-Sizing Strategy Capability and Function for Mid-Size Companies”
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.
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 theContinue reading “What Does Your 2023 Leadership Operating Plan Look Like?”
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 isContinue reading “How Strategy Becomes Execution… and the Many Reasons It Doesn’t”
What Could “Being (More) Strategic” Look Like?
Throughout my career, I’ve seen surveys where business leaders bemoan the lack of time available for strategic thinking because they’re always stuck in the day-to-day. Even meetings that are supposedly dedicated to Strategy (capital S) have a tendency to revert to immediate issues and opportunities. I freely acknowledge this “tyranny of the urgent,” but I’veContinue reading “What Could “Being (More) Strategic” Look Like?”
Strategy and Change
Practicing strategy ensures the diffusion of the strategy into the organization through defining long-term and supporting short-term goals, aligning performance management against those goals, and creating budgets to support the achievement of the goals.
Strategy Debt
Recently I have co-authored a series of short articles on Strategy Debt with my colleague at INSTEP, Brian Nejmeh. The concept of Strategy Debt arose out of the software industry and the well-established concept of Technical Debt. Our premise is that Strategy Debt can arise from a wider set of organizational circumstances — not justContinue reading “Strategy Debt”
Rethinking Strategy in 2021
Given the global developments of the past several years, and the economic, political, environmental, and social challenges we face today, it seems appropriate to step back and consider the role that Strategy can play. What should strategists think and do? How is this different from the way Strategy has been practiced in the past? TheContinue reading “Rethinking Strategy in 2021”
Strategy, Creativity, and Leadership 