Incredible strategies

Turn Your Career into a Work of Art

2012-05-03T16:30:00.001+02:00

We are all artists is the thrust of this Harvard Business Review article. By thinking like an artist we can get develop like artists do.

Turn Your Career into a Work of Art - Gianpiero Petriglieri - Harvard Business Review

Google Course Asks Employees to Take a Deep Breath - NYTimes.com

2012-04-30T20:16:00.001+02:00

Stop, Breathe, Notice, Reflect and Respond. Google's Search Inside Yourself (SIY) internal course has already educated 1,000 of their employee's on mindfulness. The New York Time's takes us through some of the in's and out's of the approach. Eckhart Tolle would be proud.

Google Course Asks Employees to Take a Deep Breath - NYTimes.com

Dilemma's of decision making

2012-04-22T14:39:00.004+02:00

We assume that if someone can make a decision they can also tell us why they have made that decision. In the video below from Malcolm Gladwell he points out our naivety in this assumption and from it we could make the case, that the exploration of why we make decisions is best done by somebody objective and outside of the decision making process. We aren't the best judges of our own decisions.

6 Habits of True Strategic Thinkers

2012-03-22T14:50:00.002+02:00

Have you got what it takes to be a strategic thinker? Here are 6 habits that make all the difference:

Anticipate
Think critically
Interpret
Decide
Align
Learn

You can read the full descriptions in the INC article.

5 Ways Corporate Execs Can Thrive at a Start-up | Inc.com

2012-03-17T22:12:00.001+02:00

5 Ways Corporate Execs Can Thrive at a Start-up | Inc.com

Can you really unlock your "Inner Genius"?

2012-03-17T19:54:00.002+02:00

Bill Donius, author of 'Thought Revolution: How to Unlock Your Inner Genius' explores the link between our right brain and our inner genius.

How to not get a job

2011-10-28T08:50:00.000+02:00

The class of business science students that I teach strategy are heading out into the world in January. They have a unique outlook on life which they will need as they head into a world as uncertain today as anytime that I remember in my 44 years.

We need to stop looking businesses to work for. I meet a lot of people every month and a lot of people are asking how they will get a job or get a better job. This is the wrong question.

The right question is, 'where can I contribute'. With contribution come rewards. Always. If I am making a real contribution I will get rewarded either financially or in some other meaningful way. I think we are conditioned to expect instant gratification - I work - you pay - at the end of the month. This is a limiting assumption and allows us to take 'jobs' that aren't fulfilling for us nor valuable for our employers.

A better strategy would be to figure out how to be able to contribute until my contribution is recognized. It may take two or ten months. If I can really contribute then it is probably because the work is meaningful. If it's meaningful I want to do it anyway and I can be patient.

In a market where 'good jobs' are getting scarcer looking for places to contribute opens up many more options. I can do my own business, partner with others, volunteer my time to get experience or create a joint venture with an existing business.

And if you are going to go the contribute route then make sure you do it on your own terms.

Steve Jobs: A living eulogy

2011-08-31T03:20:00.003+02:00

All the usual suspects have written living eulogies of Steve Jobs (Economist, Bloomberg, HBR, Forbes, WSJ, Washington Post) since he decided to step down as CEO of Apple on August 24th for health reasons.

In this day and age it's great that a CEO get's to quit on his own terms, many wait until they are pushed and then it is all about their golden handshakes rather than what they have achieved.

Steve Jobs has accomplished a significant amount. When Fortune names you the CEO of the decade and likens your fundamental shake up of four industries (movies, music, mobile and personal computers) to Henry Ford's one (automobiles), you know you have made an impact.

Of the back of all that accomplishment, there must be a hundred articles extracting the 7, 10 or 12 secrets to Steve Jobs' success.

Most are trite for the simple reason that they lead to his success not yours.

The one nugget worth taking away is that he lives on his own terms mostly unaffected by what other people think he should do. This would seem to be a universally applicable strategy and while not guaranteeing success (which strategy can?), it certainly does guarantee fulfillment.

Using Steward Brand's final signoff line from The Whole Earth Catalog, "Stay hungry, stay foolish", his commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005 (previously posted on this blog), is one of the strongest calls to action for a life lived uniquely on your own terms.

Now that's an incredible strategy.

3m

2011-07-18T15:23:00.000+02:00

Using 3m in the same sentence as innovation is pretty cliched these days.

They are one of the companies that are held up over and over again for their success at innovating.

What is less known is how they get it right.

Bottom line, a lot of common sense.

The big question, why do so many companies have so little common sense?

The new retirement

2011-07-01T00:23:00.000+02:00

The old retirement worked on the basis that you work your whole life and save like mad so you can get to 60 and 65 and then hope like crazy that you don’t live longer than you have money to live because if you do you are so far out of the market that you can never recover. Keywords - mad and crazy.

The new retirement says retire today. Retire from work that is not meaningful and a life which is not balanced with the things you might think are only possible when you’re 65. It’s not true.

The new retirement works on the basis of a portfolio life starting today. Craft the elements of your life that add richness, uniqueness, meaning and fulfillment for you and the people around you. Do it starting today from within your current company and if not their, find a place where it is.

If you’re in doubt, ask your kids, they’ll help you decide whether the old retirement or the new retirement is for you.

John Baldoni’s Harvard Business Review blog warns about leaving it too late.

Bad strategy

2011-06-27T22:26:00.005+02:00

We've all seen it. Perhaps even been in a session.

Endless discussion leading to a watered down list of things that need to be done that are then dressed up under the name strategy. If it's a long list we call it long term strategy.

Sadly but rather predictably, the session is repeated a year later with not much different happening in between.

Just because it's called a strategy day doesn't mean that strategy is what comes out out if.

Most often the failure of strategy is the failure to decide what not to do. Both individuals and companies have too many choices and unless we ruthlessly cut out many things so that we can focus on what is truly important and differentiated, we end up with a lowest common denominator approach to life and business.

Richard Rumelt sums it well in this McKinsey article.

Most strategic partnerships are purchase orders

2011-05-19T09:23:00.001+02:00

Buzzwords are the bain of the business world. My personal worst is "bring you up to speed". I'm not sure why that is, possibly because it has been overused by people around me.

"Strategic partner" is another one that is best left alone. It is used to describe every possible relationship that business people can have. While the intention is good it very often is used describe relationships which are seldom strategic and never really partnerships in the true sense of the word.

It seems that if we call someone a "strategic partner" we are saying we like you and we want you to be close.

Scott McNealy (of Sun Microsystems fame) got taken apart this week in a Harvard Business Review article for tweeting:

"Most over used phrase in business is 'strategic partner.' Favorite partnership for me is a purchase order. Defined charter, beginning, end."

The author of the article, Ben Gomes-Casseres, who is is currently writing a book on alliances, describes what a strategic partner should look like. Unfortunately many companies approach the issue as McNealy does, using the term to describe what is essentially a transaction.

The psychology of being wrong

2011-04-20T11:11:00.003+02:00

Perhaps it is the financial crises or the fact that despite our incredible advances we are realising more and more each day that there are lots of things we do not fully understand (Google 'scientific consensus' or read the Wired Article on the 'What we don't know') but somehow there seems to be a lot more introspection even, in unlikely places like the business world.

Harvard Professor Rita McGrath has written a couple of articles on the topic, covering Tata's scheme to incentivise failure and Google's willingness to get it wrong (a lot). Kathryn Schulz's TED talk 'On being wrong' sums up the issues very well. It is worth a watch.

The world of strategy if famously littered with 'wrongness', some we see immediately and at other times we have to wait a while before we cannot believe how wrong things have gone.

Scenario planning when used as part of the strategy process ensures that as Steward Brand said, rather than being exactly right, we are more importantly, not wrong.

In fact right and wrong is perhaps too simple. Carveth Read in 1898 probably said it best when he said "It is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong."

To get to the point of not being wrong we do need to embrace the fact that wrong is an option.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to avoid information which doesn't suit our worldview. Unless we are able to embrace being wrong (even a little bit) when designing strategies we are not looking at the full picture and are likely to be surprised.

Without introspection and challenging our blindspots we are unlikely to find complete solutions to our strategic thinking challenges.

We often believe more analysis and better information leads to better strategies. This is not the case. Strategic thinking is more dependent on the psychology of the people creating the strategies, and their ability to be both right and wrong in their thinking.

What Google can learn from Microsoft about strategy

2011-04-06T19:12:00.000+02:00

Microsoft's filing last week of a complaint against Google with the European Competition Commission is somewhat cynical considering their own competition woes and their failed strategy to thwart the accusations of the competition authorities on both sides of the Atlantic. In the end they paid billions of dollars in fines and their reputation was damaged.

By attacking Google through the European competition authorities Redmond is acknowledging that despite their strong business position they are worried enough about Google to take their fight into the regulatory space, a bit like a child running to the teacher to report the unfairness of another when things aren't going her way.

Google would do well to think strategically about their approach to both the Microsoft attack and the European competition authorities. Perception is reality and at the moment Google still holds the perceptual high ground. They can hold onto this high ground by thinking through how their approach will impact both perceptually and legally.

As Microsoft found out, a purely brute force legal denial of the accusations did little to alter perceptions and in the end they nearly faced break-up at the hands of the authorities. Google are in the fortunate position to be able to learn from Microsoft's mistakes and to take a strategic approach which helps them not only survive the attack but also maintain the perceptual high ground.

Customer driven CSR

2011-04-02T19:42:00.001+02:00

Customers have become somewhat cynical about corporations attempts to give back to their communities through CSR programmes. Leading CSR thinkers like Wayne Visser of CSR International have even said CSR is dead.

This makes US based Home Depot's decision to embrace their customers in their giving campaign particularly gutsy. The companies 260,000 Facebook members can vote on their fan page for the projects that they want the firm to fund in their "Giving Back" campaign.

Band launches single on USB drive

2011-03-31T23:27:00.001+02:00

Norwegian band Dancerock released their new single on a USB stick (called a DataRock) which comes in the shape of a red figurine. The figurine contains their single, 'Catcher in the Rye' together with an EP 'California', a 60 minute concert film and a number of other bonuses including additional tracks, music videos and photos.

Source: http://super7store.com/new-arrivals/datarock.html