Honesty is the Secret to Success The success of an organization is closely related to an honest company culture. And here’s the proof: A 2010 Corporate Executive Board study found that companies encouraging open and honest feedback among its employees experienced superior shareholder returns over a ten year period, outperforming … Continue reading →

Strategy is how an organization chooses to reposition itself for greater competitive advantage within a desired market. It’s a collection of choices about how to compete for the future. Perhaps with enough information about the competitive environment, market share, trends, loyalty drivers and customer experience touch-points, we could guarantee success … Continue reading →

In building or changing your corporate strategy, making the initial decision is the easy part. So what happens AFTER you make the decision to focus your organization on a narrowed target market by deepening your focus or through customer adjacencies (same customers, new offering / same offering, new customers). How … Continue reading →

Is the real test of whether your branding and competitive strategy are implemented well: 1) Whether your leadership all agree 2) Your department plans all align 3) Your line managers all understand it 4) Even operational employees know what it is 5) Every employee knows how to live it out, … Continue reading →

In refining the corporate focus to maximize organizational resources to support successful strategy execution, you will undoubtedly encounter many sacred cows along the way. (Sacred cows: An idea, custom, or institution held, esp. unreasonably, to be above criticism) So how do you differentiate (sort out your herd) between the things … Continue reading →

Senior leaders have a choice in how they portray their business environment; whether they lead with opportunity or fear based management. Some choose to paint the most optimistic view possible, while others maintain a “sky is falling” backdrop whenever possible. The implications of both choices are significant, and there are … Continue reading →

Accountability is a critical concept in corporate management. I’d like to suggest that there are actually two considerations within this field that need attention: 1) Do you hold people accountable to truly drive the transformation of the organization? 2) Is there a widely held understanding of the temperature on the … Continue reading →

Why is it that no one agrees on what a vision statement should look like or how it should be written? With a million attempts under our collective belts, should we have not figured out how to standardize this? On the surface, yes. When you look below, probably not. There … Continue reading →

When you think about the environmental analysis or research processes your organization uses, to what extent do you notice continuous “up-sampling” of the information? Is it constantly becoming more insightful, or do you notice a lot of starts/stops and blank pages. Are the sections to the reports that don’t hold … Continue reading →

It’s important to maintain multiple types of measures. The reason for this is simple: you use measurement for a variety of purposes. Hence, while you don’t want to maintain copious or superfluous measures, you do want to cover the angles. Here’s a view I built to break it down: You … Continue reading →