The Analogy Marketing is planting and raising the crops. Sales is harvesting the crops and cashing in. It’s that simple. So why do businesses have so much trouble understanding they need both working together? Because successful farming is very difficult. The basics of farming include field selection, preparing the soil, planting, cultivating, fertilizing, […]
It plays out in companies across the globe. Once successful brands and products are no longer as competitive or relevant and it’s become a struggle to maintain the business. Try as they might, they haven’t been able to introduce new products that will get the company growing and satisfy investors again. So, CEOs turn to […]
All organizations will face strategic issues that can foil the best of plans. For example, the NFIB January Small Business Economic Trends Report indicates inflation remains a top concern and nearly 40% of small business owners report job openings they can’t fill. Additionally, Accenture’s Pulse of Change Index shows technology as the number one business […]
Over the last 20 years, talk about strategy has been in serious decline. As much as a 60% decline to be more exact. Worse yet, today’s numbers are bolstered only by recent trends to understand specific applications like “social media strategy”, not strategy itself, or the numbers would be worse. And there’s one important thing […]
Intro Kraft Foods took a monstrously long time to develop its strategic plan back in the day. I’m talking months and months. Operations would start building product cost estimates beginning in early June. Marketing began building their plans early in the third quarter. And finance, well finance was always planning. Granted, Kraft was a $40B […]
The Theory Teleology is the explanation for something as a function of its end, purpose or goal. The teleology of a saw is to cut, a hammer to pound, a conveyor to convey. In other words, the teleology or purpose of these things, the reason they were designed in the first place, is to accomplish […]
There’s a saying out there attributed to Peter Drucker, the famous management guru: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. It’s understandable that business leaders might think this. After all, they put a lot of resources into crafting a strategy for success only to see it fail due to lack of alignment in the organization. But we’ve […]
It All Starts With Strategic Intent Imagine you have a large pile of Legos on a table and you and your team are going to build something together. What’s the first thing you should do? You probably should agree on what you’re building. The same goes for strategy. Before you start developing a […]
Is strategy about choosing to be different? Is it being the low-cost provider in the market? What about competitive advantage? How about a framework for making decisions? Marketing? Acquisitions? Adapting? Agility? Put “definition of strategy” in your search bar and you’ll get over 2.7 billion results. Read 1 billion of them and you’ll still […]
In the classic HBR article, Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey, the authors say this: “Subordinate-imposed time begins the moment a monkey successfully leaps from the back of a subordinate to the back of his or her superior…” That happens all the time and most bosses LET it happen. They let their subordinates walk up […]
