Starting Your Strategic Plan on the Right Foot

What if most of what’s up on the web, most of what you have
learned about creating a strategic plan, is… well misguided?  

I could say most strategic planning for businesses STARTS OUT
ALL WRONG… but I was trying to find a word that communicates
without stepping on toes.  Did “misguided” work for you?
If you and I were to [...]

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Strategic Planning – an Oxymoron

Strategic planning is an oxymoron as practiced by many
organizations, maybe even the one you work at.  Why? 
It’s an oxymoron because planning without follow-up,
without results and metrics to check assumptions… is not strategic.
Strategic Planning isn’t typically strategic.  That’s a good one, isn’t it?
But think about it.  You see it wouldn’t be very strategic if in
our strategic [...]

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Being Strategic about the coming Upswing (2of2)

Ok, following up on yesterday’s post, I’m pointing out that getting the “right” people on the bus, and engaged and working with “right” contract is the (hidden) key to taking advantage of the upcoming upswing in the economy.
I know this may sound unusual, especially from someone who runs a software company.  But the point about getting the “right” work contract in place [...]

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Being Strategic about the Coming Upswing (1of2)

McKinsey just released an intriguing  article on the upcoming economic recovery, with a thought provoking graph that shouts at you –
“it’s coming sooner than later…
it will happen quickly and by the time it is in the news,
you’ll have missed the early big push.”
What do you need to have in place to take advantage of coming upswing…
to [...]

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Comfort, Adaptability and Winning at Business

Another thought about the role of comfort in business.  I keep being struck
with how often it functions in an orthogonal, if not opposing, manner to
working strategically and winning at the game of business.
Hm… first sentence and I already wrote that to nicely.
How about saying it this way:
“Be very careful about doing or supporting others doing what’s comfortable…
check that it really is [...]

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Working Strategic and the Role of Comfort

Hi, I couldn’t help but post another blog on the relationship between
comfort and working strategic, given some of the interactions I was
involved in as I worked with multiple organizations this week.
Here’s a couple of thoughts on the role of comfort and how it
interfaces with our success at working strategically… which in turn often
effects our relative level of success… [...]

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Chunking the Work Process and the Role of Comfort

I’ve been swamped with a large international project for the past few months,
and blogging as well as a few other things, have all had to take a back seat.
One thing I have been itching to write about it seeing how individuals manage
and translate information into a preferred work style.
If you’ve read anything I’ve written, you [...]

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Strategic Planning, Scenarios and People

Strengthen your strategic planning by developing scenarios to aid your anticipation and response to the future. Roxburg suggests you “Look for events that are certain or nearly certain to happen…

I suggest you add people of influence to your scenario planning. They actually have a much broader influence on scenario out-comes, and executing a plan to deal with them, then most people recognize.

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Perspective from Ian Paterson, SMC-SA:

I think that the top four value adds for me were;
1. Ease of use (a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing, but so far I’ve found MP digestible
and relatively easy to use once you understand the basic layout etc
2. Functional positioning – strategy execution and scorecards – taps into [...]

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From: David C. Payne, Bemex Corporation Pty Ltd

“I have been using ManagePro for about 7 years and have seen the product mature into a premium solution for managing strategic issues, large and small projects, incorporating all the usual tools that experienced project & program managers expect – and more. All in one closely integrated product… the strength of [...]

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