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Archive for the ‘Strategy’ Category

Benchmarking and best practices are stupid

Posted in Innovation, Strategy, tagged , , on September 16, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

A friend and colleague, Steven Shapiro has a new book Best Practices Are Stupid coming out at the end of the month. He is right best practices really are stupid, but I repeatedly hear managers asking for benchmarking reports. But why are they stupid. An article in the McKinsey Quarterly on Strategy (sorry lost the [...]

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How they did it: Lessons on how to improve strategic agility.

Posted in Strategy, tagged , , , , on December 14, 2010 | 2 Comments »

Being a nimble business which can change, flex, and grow with customers is a critical organisational capability to develop. I’ve been covering strategic agility on this blog a lot lately, with posts here, and here . In this post, I look at the tools, processes and thinking that Avery Dennison Materials used to improve the agility [...]

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Case Study: How Caterpillar maintained strategic agility during the global financial crisis.

Posted in Strategy, tagged , , , on November 16, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Last week McKinsey Quarterly posted an interview with Jim Owens, the recently retired Chairman of Caterpillar. The interview highlights how Caterpillar embraced strategic agility to navigate the financial crisis, and emerge a still stronger business. Owens reflects on the processes used in devising the Caterpillar strategy: “In terms of the economic side of it all, here [...]

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4 Key traits to develop to maintain strategic agility.

Posted in Strategy, tagged , on November 10, 2010 | 2 Comments »

Strategic agility is all in the thinking. A key component of maintaining strategic agility is to think better. It’s not known as strategic thinking for nothing. 1. Objectivity The ability to remain objective and to change your conclusions when facing disconfirming evidence is a key behaviour to develop, as confirmation bias is very powerful in [...]

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Improving on your personal best

Posted in Strategy, tagged , , , on October 20, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

To achieve goals in the future you need to create some space. Little’s law states that lead time increases as the Work In Progress increases, this means you need to let go and stop doing some things in order to reach out and achieve new goals. Once a quarter sit down and making a ‘what [...]

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Plan less, experiment more

Posted in Innovation, Strategy, tagged , , on October 6, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Managers, and many business people hate uncertainty, and in order to overcome it they plan… and plan, and plan. But planning rarely helps, because beyond a certain level of actions you run into a high level of uncertainty where any extra time is futile. This is never truer than in strategy. An article in Sloan [...]

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The iterative approach to creativity and problem solving

Posted in Innovation, Process Improvement, Strategy, tagged on September 22, 2010 | 2 Comments »

Today I read an interesting post by the very good Cal Newport, about the concept of not starting and instead focusing on the idea. Actually he advocates focusing on the quality of the idea and not starting to work on it until it has built up such a head of steam that it takes on [...]

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The myth of the triple bottom line

Posted in Strategy on August 16, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

I have been doing a great deal of consulting in a hard charging investment bank lately, and it has really brought home the concept of focusing on the goal to be achieved. The goal of investment banks (all banks really), is to make money. As much as possible; now and in the future. If I [...]

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Napoleon’s strategy secrets

Posted in Leadership, Management, Strategy, tagged , , , on June 8, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

Lately I’ve become increasingly interested in Napoleon Bonaparte, particularly his character and philosophies that he developed and how they apply to life today, specifically in the business arena. In the book, Napoleon At Work by Colonel Vachee, his ideas on success are elucidated: “Napoleon few and simple directing principles as quoted in a letter to Lauriston, [...]

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How To Develop a Winning Strategy 8/10

Posted in Strategy, Video, tagged , , , , , on June 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

This 10 part video series “How to Develop a Winning Strategy” was filmed at National Speakers Association Australia event in Adelaide. I will post the 10 video’ here each Friday. You’ve got a burning passion and you want to share it with the world. The current economic conditions pose opportunities and threat. You need a [...]

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