“The best laid schemes of mice and men go often askew” (Robert Burns, “To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough”, 1785) If poet Robert Burns were a CEO in today’s operating environment, we expect he’d use that line…often. In fact, is there a better way to manage expectations for a strategic plan with leaders …
We all know the routine. A leadership team comes together to formulate strategy, then armed with the best of intentions, assign business unit and functional teams to execute the initiatives they’ve chosen. Mission accomplished! Not so fast, often a gap between understanding and performance is experienced by those charged with implementing the initiatives flowing from the strategy. This gap invariably …
Dubai was such a great experience for LBL last May that we had to go back! This time we sent our President, Randall Rollinson, to train a new batch of strategy professionals. Equipped with our new and improved Mastering Strategy Boot Camp program, Randall and 16 professionals from Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Uganda spent five days learning together …
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a popular topic in the realm of business. From predicting IT failures to which new song will become a hit, AI presents many exciting opportunities. This begs the question: how is AI affecting the most critical element of any business — its strategy? MIT Sloan Management Review recently partnered with The Boston Consulting Group to …
At Agile Strategies, we apply the lessons of both Agile software development and organizational learning to the whole enterprise, particularly the process of formulating and deploying strategy. Here are the guiding principles we work with: #1: Sense and respond An agile organization senses and responds to disruption and opportunity in real time. This is the only way to address the high levels of …
We use the term “strategic management” often, but what exactly does it mean? To some, it might seem obvious, but the reality is that the term has a lot underneath the surface that is worth unpacking. To understand what strategic management is from a base level, let’s turn to our friends at the Association of Strategic Planning (ASP) who define …
Gene Kranz helped build NASA from the ground up in the late 1950s, developed the space program through Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, and he was the flight director for missions including Apollo 11 and Apollo 13. He’s the guy that ran mission control, one of the key players in achieving the goal of “landing a man on the moon and …
Strategic planning is all about the unknown. What will my business look like in six months? What will happen if I make this decision? How can I improve as a strategic planner? The list of questions is endless, but fortunately, there have been many individuals to go before you who can provide answers. It’s rare to find yourself in a …
When it comes to setting organizational goals, finding the right measures to track your success is a crucial part of the process. If you want to keep up with a changing market, you should know how well you’re doing, how you can improve and what effect your actions are having on your overall strategy. Needless to say, the pursuit for …
When you compare strategies between businesses, you’ll find that no two are exactly alike. Each business is trying to accomplish something another isn’t – however large or small the differences end up being. This fact could lead you to believe that a strategy professional’s talents are unique to each business too, with no transferable skills. But, when you look into …
As the rate of innovation, disruption and change accelerates across all sectors private, public and nonprofit, the requirements of strategic planning are called into question. New methodologies, techniques and tools such as OKRs come to the fore challenging organizations to adopt shorter timetables and be more nimble in the formulation of strategy, evaluating performance and making course corrections. In the …
As the business world’s dependence on data collection and analytics continues to grow, many strategic planners are left wondering what their role is going to be in this new era of computer-driven decision making. Is the old-school CEO going to be usurped by technology, or is there still room for someone with professional experience to make the call? The answer …
Recently a client asked a very simple, and yet extremely complex, question: “What’s the difference between ‘strategic thinking’ and ‘strategic planning’?” Great question! A quick Google search reveals that academics have pondered and debated this question since the early 1990’s. One extremely helpful scholarly overview can be found in the June 1998 volume 31 of Long Range Planning, in a …
There are countless ways to derail a strategic planning process. Sometimes a process is undone by the tyranny of the urgent. Other times the process can be intentionally sabotaged by c-level staff who fear the process encroaches on their territory. But most often, when a strategic planning process unravels, it is due to one of the following sure-fire methods, virtually …
“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” (Carl Jung) Carl Jung’s work in understanding the human psyche (conscious and unconscious) fundamentally informed the development of modern psychoanalysis. His quote elegantly frames the challenge within the human condition to find balance between what we want (desire) …
There is no one answer to this question. The level and scope of the initial program should reflect the best use of management capabilities, and equally important, leadership preferences on how to initiate strategic management activities—regardless of the ultimate level and scope of the strategic management process aspired to and eventually realized. Organizations, even those performing the same functions and …
To create an effective strategic plan and management system is a major challenge for any organization. To do so without the necessary preparatory steps will, in all probability, result in wasted time, energy, misdirected efforts and can even lead to the resulting plan failing. Having a clear understanding of where your organization’s journey begins is vitally important and too often …
In this the second segment of our “Radar” post. We offer insights into facilitating the learning and strategic thinking processes in leadership teams of mid-sized organizations. Whether it is in a private sector, public sector or nonprofit organization we believe these principals apply. Let’s begin with a clear statement of our baseline assumptions. Accurate assessment of any strategic environment is …
To build strategic information radar requires executive management interact with key managers and staff on a continuous, scheduled basis to gather and evaluate strategically significant information of potential relevance to the strategic management of the organization. We begin construction by acknowledging what we consider key characteristics of “strategically significant information” to be: Information from any source, direct or indirect, primary …
