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Simplementation

Kirk — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:10:54 +0000

How well does your organization manage the implementation of strategy? If you said yes, statistically speaking, you are lying to yourself! Take that with a grain of salt, but also give that a minute to soak in.

It’s been proven that most companies aren’t effective at taking their strategy and making it meaningful for “the people that come to work every day. ” The good news is that it’s completely feasible to make this happen. People want to believe in their company. They want to do a good job and see the company succeed. They want to share in the rewards of that success. All in all, “people” aren’t the problem.

If you’re not seeing the results you want, start by changing the processes that support your people in making this all happen. As you start to make simple changes in what people focus on, talk about and work together, you will be creating momentum. These simple moves are all foundational to getting where you want to go, and getting the results you’re looking for.

From 100 feet or through a microscope?

Kirk — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:59:51 +0000

More often than not, we perceive organizational challenges to be more complex than they really are. We hire expensive consulting firms to create metrics that can only be reported in the form of a circumplex, a composite score or something else that justifies the price tag. I fully support complex analysis and your [...]

Exec planning: What is the point?

Kirk — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 02:34:14 +0000

Somewhere between board planning, executive planning, division alignment, team alignment and personal performance planning, a fuzziness of what to focus on in your planning can at times emerge. The surface issue that seems to distract a lot of people is the operational challenge of the day. For many companies, they never really [...]

Nothing stays the same

Kirk — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 22:15:07 +0000

There's a fallacy in how many organizations think around their overall position in the market. The same concept pertains to most areas of life. Here it is... "Things are staying about the same." Nothing stays the same. Changes can be marginal, but it's still a change. They increase and decrease, [...]

Determination of residual strategy gaps against your projected environment

Kirk — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 02:02:37 +0000

Research is as relevant to your discussion as it is to your strategy. Sounds simple, until you think about how many times you have sat in a room going through pages and pages of research that you can't correlate back to any kind of decision that will impact your business. In those cases, [...]

Balancing the art and the science of metric analysis

Kirk — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 21:49:12 +0000

There’s an art and a science to the management and analysis of measures. Some people seem most happy converting the mass of numbers into composite scores and overall indicators, while others seem to have no formula to their approach whatsoever. I believe the secret to this whole conundrum is to realize that there’s [...]

What makes for a good strategy?

Kirk — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 01:13:02 +0000

Everyone does it differently. This is my version of the truth... A good strategy: - Is built with a set of assumptions about the emerging future environment (Research) - With analysis of the expected implications of this environment (Collective analysis – wisdom of crowds) - And a realistic view of your unique set of assets, skills, positioning and [...]

Why create planning standards?

Kirk — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 23:15:13 +0000

Is the quality of management practice as it relates to the development and implementation of direction a determining factor in your overall success? I'd suggest that it is. It's for this reason that creating consistency in how your divisions and teams go about doing this is something that companies can't choose to ignore [...]

Clarifying scorecard usage

Kirk — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 21:41:03 +0000

Purpose of the scorecard • The overall purpose of the scorecard is to create balance in the management of the company, acknowledging the areas that create performance (leading indicators) and the outcomes (lagging indicators) which are primarily financial. The metrics within the scorecard are purposefully chosen to be those which are most actionable as they monitor [...]

Strategic Flypaper

Kirk — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:25:15 +0000

I'd like to introduce one more benefit related to the centralized environmental monitoring system concept. At a practical level, this becomes what I call (for lack of a better term) "strategic flypaper." It’s the system that captures all of the strategic issues that pop up during conversations in the organization. For all [...]