Rising Above: The Call for Senior Leaders to Embrace Strategy Over Tactics

In today's fast-paced business landscape, leaders frequently face various tactical and operational challenges. When it comes to managing day-to-day operations and responding to unforeseen problems, the frenetic pace of the immediate can become a zone of comfort. A significant number of future leaders have gained professional experience and earned their stripes in these trenches, becoming masters…

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Gaining Strategic Advantage by Connecting Your Corporate Team with Sales

For over 18 years, I have been leading sales teams through the trenches of sales war. I have experienced corporations deeply connected to what was “actually” happening in sales, and other situations where it was quite the opposite. Throughout my professional career, I have navigated multiple industry segments from professional services to consumer goods and served a decade+ stint in the…

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What Sid Meier’s Civilization Game Taught Me About Business

Since childhood, I have played video games, and one of my all-time favorites is Sid Meier’s Civilization. The turn-based strategy game appeared in the early ’90s, and the game has evolved significantly since its debut, each version has new challenges for players to solve. As the title of this article suggests, I'd like to share what Sid Meier's Civilization game has taught me about business and…

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Strategic Planning Must Change With The Times

If you’re frustrated by your organization’s current strategic planning and execution processes or the outcomes from that work, you’re not alone. Whether they’re developed in-house or brought in by outside strategy firms, many strategy methodologies are of little value if they don’t keep up with the times. So if you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you have always got.…

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How Many of Your Organization’s Strategic Initiatives Succeed?

My guess is that your answer is less than half or at least “not enough of them.” Delivering on strategic company initiatives on time, every time, is the hallmark of organizations that are best in the world at executing strategy, and they’re rewarded with a premium put on the value of their company. Organizations that can’t deliver on their strategic initiatives fail at executing their strategy,…

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The Outcomes of Strategic Best Practices: Mediocrity and Disappointment

Strategy management processes and the so-called “best practices” most organizations follow have not kept pace with the demands of the marketplace and the performance expectations of shareholders. By definition, best practices are “tried and true,” meaning they have been around for a long time—too long. It is unlikely that you will ever create a competitive advantage following the same practices…

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Principles Over Process

ADVANTAGE STRATEGY Five Paradigm-Shifting Principles Repeatable processes and procedures add great value in stable and predictable times. Those are not the times we live in today or likely in the future. Strategy that works has got to be based on something that proves successful in the unpredictable, fast-moving, and changing times. Principles, not processes and procedures, provide the…

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Get Off The Strategy Merry-Go-Round

Most organizations, and even most strategy consultants, are using strategic planning frameworks built for business models that were designed during the industrial age. These methods are antiquated in both efficiency and effectiveness. They are complex - they are costly - they are slow - they are broken. Whether you are working at a company-wide, business unit, functional, or product level,…

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Leading Transformational Strategy – Next Practices

Not all business strategies require the same degree of change to be considered successful. Many are simply a continuation of an already established path and destination. Others identify the change in some areas of the business but those changes do not represent a significant departure from the status quo. Some strategies however require transformational change. These strategies are usually…

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Strategy – Why It’s Broken and How To Fix It

Only 20%-30% of corporate and business unit strategies successfully deliver expected results. That is a bold statement. However, this statistic has been reported in many studies from reputable firms and publications and mirrors much of what I have observed and experienced during my career. Despite awareness of the problem, the statistic itself has not really changed much in the last 20 years.…

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Strategy, Capability & Really Bad Advice

Today’s post is a rather short rant, but one I felt compelled to put forth. I just finished reading an article where the author (a self-professed innovation guru) recommended strategy be aligned with capability, and that to allow ambition to exceed capability is nothing short of a recipe for disaster. If this sounds like rational thinking to you, I’d encourage you to read the text that follows…

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Culture Trumps Strategy – Not

Does culture trump strategy? I think not, and I'll explain why. Even though I have seen this phrase quoted by some very bright people whom I respect, it just doesn't resonate with me. I thought perhaps I was misunderstanding what was being said, so I decided to Google the phrase "Culture Trumps Strategy" and found that Stanford offered an Entrepreneurship Lecture by this title, I found several…

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In Support of Strategy

What's with all the "strategy bashing" of late? How could sound strategic planning possibly be a bad thing? Things have spun so far out of control that I recently had a CEO ask: “Is strategy still relevant in today's business world, and if so, what role does strategy play in the overall make-up of a CEO's duties and responsibilities? Let me begin by stating that strategy has never been more…

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Quick vs. Right

"Quick vs. Right" is a phrase that makes me cringe every time I hear it used. One of the most common copouts inept leaders use in masking their decisioning inadequacies is to delay pronouncement on the grounds that they currently possess insufficient information to make an astute decision. Almost without fail, this tactic is a trite and cliched attempt to somehow insinuate that speed in…

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