Blog
Capability Development: People are a company’s greatest asset
I have worked in organisations that have had great attraction, recruitment and selection processes. Most of them had poor training and development processes. Those companies did not provide suitable training or suggest suitable training providers. Even when I found training that aligned with my role and career, I was told it was not ‘relevant enough’. …
Read MoreImplementing Strategy: Balancing Innovation and Efficiency
Leading successful change can be paradoxical. There is a drive to disrupt the status quo while embedding new ways of working. Familiar processes get upturned and new processes need to be learned. We replace systems with new ones and map and transform data to fit. People have to give up their habits and behaviours and…
Read MoreStrategy: A Simple View
Strategy is the choices you make to differentiate the value you create. It is the choices you make to deliver that value to customers. It is the choices you make to embed that capability into your organisation. Businesses need to differentiate to compete. Why would anyone buy from you rather than someone else if your…
Read MoreCutting Costs while Adding Value: Is it possible?
Can we reduce costs and add value at the same time? Yes. You can. But it takes some objectivity, some research and reflection and a willingness to change. Cutting costs while providing more value sounds counter-intuitive but it need not be. My experience in consulting, and in management prior to that, is that necessity is…
Read MoreDelivering Results: Consultants need to add value
Management consultants can be great value for money, but they do need to deliver results. A consultant is usually engaged for a specific time to deliver something of a certain quality – often for a fixed fee. The consultant makes a promise to deliver value and they need to keep that promise. Our management consulting…
Read MoreSeizing Opportunities for Project Success
Organisations gain competitive advantage by seizing opportunities. We can do that when we run projects too. We need to be open to wins and adopt a benefits and opportunities mindset. Focusing on mitigating risks is not enough. Consider what positive risks could occur. How could you present and leverage them? Risk Response PMBOK 7th edition…
Read MoreIf we learn lessons, mistakes can help us
Learning from mistakes is good. Learning from someone else’s mistakes is better. Learning from what went right is better still. We have all done things that didn’t go so well – sometimes we fail spectacularly. We tend to remember those moments. The embarrassment and sense of failure fades with time but we retain a lesson…
Read MoreThinking before implementing strategy
I work with a team which helps implement strategy – turning strategic objectives into results. Funnily enough, when we meet a new client the strategic drivers and objectives are often far from clear. Executives come to us because they want to do something and they want to make it happen quickly. That’s fine. We can…
Read MoreStrategic Doing: Faster Strategy, More Doing
Strategic Doing is a powerful way to achieve meaningful change and address complex problems. Complex, or sticky problems have no clear solution. They can absorb a huge quantity of resources – and often little obvious progress is made unravelling the issues or developing a viable way forward. They need a fresh approach to address these…
Read MoreStrategic Roadmaps: Unravelling the mystery
In many organisations, there’s an aura of mystique surrounding strategy. It can seem disconnected from the everyday, from business as usual, from what people do. I’ve found this especially true of the “strategic roadmap”, a mysterious document concocted by gregarious people after a session in front of a whiteboard at an off-site somewhere. Strategic…
Read More