STRATEGY CENTRAL

Gary Hamel spoke recently at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit.  Knowing his flair for language and keen insights into organizational design, I was anticipating quiet a stir…on the heels of his talk.  And I was not disappointed.  It was a talk that generated a lot of interaction.

Want a sample of the kinds of things he [...]

When is it time to take a look at the strategy that drives what you do?  Do you wait until it crashes?  Or do you take a look at it even when it seems to be firing on all cylinders?  Scott Anthony, author of The Innovator’s Guide to Growth: Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work, suggests [...]

Ever realized suddenly that you were talking with an insider, clueless to the world outside the organization?  I had a brief verbal sparring match with someone this morning.  He wanted to know why we had a display of classic cars in the parking lot.  "It seems a little bit of a compromise," he said to [...]

Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, is well known for his "stop doing" list.  If you're not familiar with the idea, it is simply that all of us are doing things that we need to stop doing.  Rather than simply focusing on a "to do" list, we ought to put some time into determining [...]

Thought provoking post today over at Seth's blog.  Writing about the moment when operating systems surged from DOS to Windows, Seth Godin points out that prior to the switch the word processing tool of choice was WordPerfect.  Today?  Obviously Microsoft's Word.  In the moment when offices everywhere were choosing to move from DOS to Windows…there [...]

What comes first?  Strategy or structure?  According to Peter Drucker it's a no brainer.

"Only a clear definition of the mission (purpose) makes possible clear and realistic business objectives.  It is the foundation for priorities, strategies, plans and work assignments…Structure follows strategy.  Strategy determines what the key activities are in a given business.  And strategy requires [...]

The first step in a growth strategy?  It's probably not what you think.  According to Peter Drucker, "The first step in a growth policy is not to decide where and how to grow.  It is to decide what to abandon (Inside Drucker's Brain, p. 101)."

Uh oh.  Is that what happens in your management team meeting?  [...]

How closely are you watching the relevance of your organization?  How often do you take a look at your assumptions to see if they still line up with the outside world?  In an earlier post I referred to a strategic principle from a very helpful HBR article, When Growth Stalls, noting that, "Leaders must bring the [...]

How connected are your senior leaders with what is happening in the culture around them?  How often do their statements and actions ring "out-of-touch?"

In response to the big three automakers' visit to Washington D.C. this week, Bob Sutton had a great post about how they were  clueless to what matters most and suffer from a [...]