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Legends
When corporate legends live long - we don't always prosper.

Why Climate Change is the A-Bomb of the 21st Century
Why Climate Change is the A-Bomb of the 21st Century

5 Marketplace Implementation Lessons from a Corporate Strategy Execution Consultant with 25+ Years of Experience
The best-laid strategic plans often go awry once exposed to the light of day and the rudeness and ruthlessness of reality. These difficult times call for a disciplined, thoughtful approach to execution of strategy in the marketplace.

Achieve tremendous business growth in bad times

GROWTH is one of the most critical words in business. Some companies achieve a great deal of growth, others want to grow and another group of entrepreneurs and executives do not really know if it is even a good idea to attempt the risky mission to continue to grow. This typically occurs when the company is evaluating a leap frog expansion which will impact, for example, infrastructure, resources, product offering, geographic coverage, sales channels, going (eventually) public, etc. Regardless of the particular situation, the best time for growth is always NOW ...

Live Consultant Thinking: Looking at A Business Coach in the Corporate Strategy

In most sports, certainly in most sports businesses, the line-up is similar. You have the owners, the general manager, other managers, the head coach, coaching staff, trainers, scouts and recruiters, ticket sellers, and hopefully a roster of all-star players. This alignment of tasks and talents works well most of the time. With so many great sports business models to learn from, you wonder why we are slow to acknowledge the important role of coach in general business.

Lesson #3: Think Long-Term
“We weren’t trying to just go public and get rich,” recalls Gates of his early Microsoft days. “There was no near-term thing. It always was this many-decades thing where there were no shortcuts and we’d sort of put one foot in front of the other.”

The Golden Thread: Linking Strategy to Execution
Detailed operational planning has to relate corporate strategy with the operations of the enterprise at the initiative level and below that at the project level. This Method Frameworks article describes ways to inject operational planning into the strategic planning process and string the “golden thread” through all of the execution loop-holes.

5 Secrets to Successful Corporate Strategy Implementation
A well crafted strategy provides essential vision, direction, and goals for the organization. Yet what happens when many organizations attempt to realize the outcomes of those meaningful strategies? This article explores 5 secrets to successful corporate strategy implementation.

3 Common Causes of Corporate Strategy Misalignment

A recent artcile on corporate strategy covered the symptoms of corporate strategy misalignment. As discussed, a properly aligned corporate strategy will align strategic goals with the operations and execution tactics necessary to fulfill the organization’s desired outcomes. With a well-aligned corporate strategy, the entire organization – both internally and externally – will move in the same clearly-defined direction. Left to its own devices, a strategy that is misaligned will result in operational initiatives that are out of sync with strategic goals, missions that drift operationally off course, and chaos that compounds into serious consequences. Now it’s time to consider the causes of corporate strategy misalignment.

Symptoms of Corporate Strategy Misalignment

Strategy misalignment is subtle and sometimes difficult to spot. Yet without a properly aligned corporate strategy, you are likely to introduce a serious dose of chaos into the organizational environment. Corporate strategy is the blend of strategic goals that support the mission and vision of an organization. When a corporate strategy is aligned, the key outcomes (strategic goals) of the organization are united with operations and execution tactics. In other words, all parts of the organization’s eco-system (the sum of internal and external functions of an organization’s environment) are moving in the same well-defined direction. When strategy is misaligned operational initiatives are out of sync with the strategic goals of the organization, mission drift occurs within the operations of the business,

In Corporate Strategic Planning, Leave Your Perfectionism at the Door

The pace of change and uncertainty in today’s economic and business environments require that business leaders define and evolve their plans while the organization is in full motion. Leaders must be able to react to risks and opportunities as they appear, while making choices that support a consistent corporate strategy. And while it’s tempting for organizations to strive for perfection in every strategic plan, this approach can result in serious missed opportunities and lost market share. Embrace the imperfection that is inherent in any corporate strategic plan. After all, without clairvoyant powers nobody has perfect information upon which to plan and act -- and that’s okay.

The Critical Step of Current-state Analysis & Review in Strategic Planning

What is the definition of success and how can you get there if you don’t know where you are starting from? Obviously it makes sense that you need to know your point of origin to determine the optimal route to your desired destination. If that is the case in our day-to-day lives, then why do so many forget to apply that simple concept in business – and in this case – in our business planning? This article focuses on a major step of critical importance in your planning process – a review and analysis of your organization’s current-state. Learn how to do it and what information you will need in the analysis.

What is good selling?
Like many people, I have always been curious about what makes "great sales performance". This is a perplexing question that has been asked and attempted to be answered by many people over the years. Also, are great sales people born? (most people believe this to be true - but it's not). What does it take to be an elite sales performer, and can anyone learn how to sell well?

Success is a moving platform

Do you have the wrong sales team delivering your sales strategy? Ask yourself the follow the questions: How has your strategy and /or market place changed recently? How have you seen the role of 'sales' change over the last few years in your industry? How do your sales people compare to your competitors? How do your sales people need to sell now? How is your product offering behaving in the market place now? Was it once exclusive and now a commodity? The definition of a ‘good' salesperson is driven by many possible needs. Those needs are a function of industry standards, changing market conditions, competition, corporate strategy and culture, personalities, past experiences, just to name a few.

Corporate Strategy and the Elephant in the Room

Recession weary executives have a new challenge to face. Times have changed and businesses must re-evaluate their pre-recession strategies. The elephant in the room is in full view, but organizational leaders do not like to talk about it or even think about it. Yes, the elephant in the room, that no one likes to address, is outdated strategy and the need for new and improved strategic thinking. Making change to the way we have operated in the past in difficult. A starting point for change is to correct the self-inflicted organizational dysfunction that occurs during strategy development.

Do you have Employee Policies to protect your online reputation?
More likely than not, your employees frequent social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube. etc. So does your company need to have a clear policy about the use of your company name and information within social networking websites?

Besting Your Plan’s Performance: The Time To Start 2012 Strategic Planning is Now

Corporate plan management is a day-to-day and week-by-week activity. The long-held belief that strategic plans are addressed once a year serves to obfuscate the ever-green nature of what plans really represent. They require a switch in our mindset away from treating strategic planning as if it were a project. Instead, it is an ongoing journey that requires us to recheck our position against the map frequently to avoid getting lost.

Strategic Planning - Business Executive Essentials - Part 8 of 12

The spectrum of corporate strategic planning models and processes is broad, and the term has taken on many different connotations over recent decades. For organizations that are new to formal strategic planning, it can seem like a daunting task. It certainly does not have to be, and this article series is intended to help chief executives get on the right path to better corporate planning. Just compiling goals and timelines into a spreadsheet that gets sent along with a meaningless report in a binder doesn’t cut it. That becomes worthless data to all involved in the organization and will not accomplish the results strategic planning should accomplish. There is no “magic binder” of spreadsheets and PowerPoints that can perform miracles when it comes to strategy and the execution thereof.

Strategic Planning - Business Executive Essentials - Part 9 of 12
How do you assess your process for strategic planning and know if it is on track or as optimized as it might be? The analysis this week, and over the next three segments article series, should help you to objectively evaluate your planning process and identify potential issues and risks that may exist in your organization's current planning world. How would you answer these questions?

Basic Alignment Drives Sales Results
As important as product, technology, market message, and strategy all are, there is nothing more essential to the overall organization’s sales success than the internal alignment between the sales leadership team and the corporate strategy. The point transcends Sales and applies to every function within the firm, but SalesFulcrum's founder discusses it specifically to Sales.

Can We Trust Our People To Execute?
Our entire executive team is usually very involved in the creation of the strategic plan, so they most likely “get it”. Presumably, they are vested. But what about the levels below the execs?

Are We There Yet?
Successful business executive’s possess a vision for their organization’s developmental journey. They are tuned into the business strategy and know what milestones they expect to see; holding predictions related to how long each should likely take to be reached. But what if the top executive’s vision for the journey was more widely disseminated and fully understood?

Are You a Breakthrough Leader?
Leaders that outperform their industry peers have learnable skills. They encourage loyalty to the company first, which means listening to the dissenting point of view. They are also good at developing and empowering people. They have great skill in resolving disputes and finding win-win solutions.

Can We Remove Risk From Our Strategy?
If you could, wouldn’t you choose to test your organization’s strategy before gambling your business and your career on the assumption that the strategy is right? This article contains a short list of tactics to help remove some of the risk from your strategy.

What Is Your Organizational Value?

The latest data shows that the U.S. economy grew at just under a 2% annualized rate in the first half of 2011. Interestingly, statistics also bear out that the productivity of current workers is rising at about 2 percent a year. That means that a company can produce 2 percent more goods and/or services a year than the year before, even if it doesn't increase the number of people it employs. Perhaps it is because we have yet to see an economic recovery stick, but the pressure to increase productivity continues to grow. This phenomenon is really about losing entitled employees and keeping those that add value. You can see it happening at all levels of organizations, but what does this dynamic tell us about our changing work environments?

Would Your Strategic Planning Process Survive Reality TV?

If your strategic planning process was put in front of a panel of experts, would it be ridiculed and sent home, or would it be given a ticket straight to Hollywood? If it’s like the more than 85% of strategic plans that fail to deliver the intended results, its chances are not great. It takes a very good process to result in a strategic plan that is realistic and can be executed. Too many plans end up full of content that is cerebral and fluff, adding little or no value to the organization. So before you send it into the limelight, ask yourself these questions to objectively evaluate your planning process and identify potential issues and risks that may exist in your organization's current planning world. Considering these questions now can avoid potentially devastating results later.

Five Ways Strategic Planning Builds Capacity And Capability

By September 2011, Borders Books will close their doors forever. The company will liquidate all of its assets and deliver pink slips to approximately 11,000 employees. Meanwhile, as a result of smarter strategies that recognized and accounted for changing dynamics in their marketplace, competitors like Barnes & Noble have fared much better. How can two such similar book store giants end up on such divergent paths? Examination of the downfall of Borders Books reveals strategic errors that arguably led to its demise. Such is often the result of ill-conceived strategies that failed to zig when the market zagged.

Customer Value Creation In A Down Economy: Avoiding Near-sighted Strategy Mistakes

A slow economy provides many challenges for business leaders, but that does not mean we throw out the baby with the bathwater. Despite the challenges, long-term viability of our businesses relies on keeping our strategy focused beyond the horizon-line. Chief executives must own the responsibility to stay the course on value-creation, championing the cause to maintain enthusiasm for innovation within the business organization.

Lining Up The Pillars Of Your Strategy: Syncing Strategy With Operations

Is your organization’s strategy embodied in your business operations? How confident are you, as the champion of your strategy, that it is on track within the layers of your business operations? Strategy alignment is the synchronization of strategic goals with operations and execution tactics. Strategy “misalignment” occurs when operational initiatives are not in sync with the defined strategic goals of the organization. Most organizations inherently suffer from some amount of immaturity and unsophistication in their planning process, and this directly leads the the misalignment issue you want to avoid.

The Changing Role of Board Involvement in Corporate Strategy

Up until the early-2000‘s, corporate boards might have rubber-stamped their approval of the CEOs strategic plan without the need for much involvement in its formulation. They were largely content with rewarding profitability or handing out consequences for losses - all based on the rear-view mirror perspective of financial performance. In the United States, that changed with the arrival of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which required board members to pay far more attention than before to the goings on within their organizations. At that point, the stakes were raised in regard to board responsibly for managing the CEOs job performance, overseeing financial reporting and supervising risk management. Their legal liability to shareholders increased significantly.

The Truth About Why So Many Strategic Plans Don’t Get Executed

Last week I was asked the question by a client prospect, “so how many retreats will we be doing as part of the strategic planning process?”. That got me to thinking about just how many of these retreats are probably happening in hotels across the U.S. this fall. Strategic planning retreats are a joke in terms of producing meaningful strategic plans, yet every year companies go through this ritualistic planning process. The problem is, virtually all of these so called strategy retreats provide very little value in terms of desired strategic planning outcomes.

How Well Do You Understand Your Organization’s Core Competencies?

What if you were to ask your key management team a simple question: “What do we do?” You might be surprised at the answers you would get: answers that lack consistency, focus, and clarity, with your key leaders offering slightly different responses to this seemingly simple and straight forward question. While it may sound somewhat juvenile to suggest that organizations expend effort to solicit feedback on what they do, there are some very compelling reasons to do so. And, in the end, you may find that this simplistic exercise is the root of many organizational troubles.

Anger Solutions at Work Can Your Team Survive
With reality TV dictating that the only way to win is to use your team until the team is no longer useful, the dog eat dog mentality is threatening to overtake the corporate world. But do the behind-the-scenes antics that stink of tribalism and "game strategy" translate to the real world? In today's competetive corporate market, would your team sink, swim, float, or survive?

Sustainability; a key issue in marketing
Corporate social investment has long been used by marketers for PR but real sustainability needs to be incorporated into strategy.

Qualities of an Effective Corporate Strategic Planning Process
Corporate strategic planning is intended to provide both the direction (strategy) and the actions (execution) needed to achieve strategic goals. The combination of smart strategy and successful execution is the hallmark of a great planning process. Does your planning process have the qualities to translate strategy into successful business execution?

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