by Robert Bradford | Feb 26, 2021 | Competitive Strategy
If you have attended the Simplified Strategic Planning seminar or read the book, you are probably already familiar with the concepts of specialty and commodity customers. Simply put, specialty customers are those who perceive premium value in a product or service and...
by Robert Bradford | Nov 28, 2020 | Strategic Thinking
If you’re familiar with Google, you may have heard of the 20% rule they’ve followed since their early days as a startup. The simple rule says that every key employee needs to spend 20% of their time on projects that have no immediately visible payback for the...
by Robert Bradford | Oct 18, 2020 | Uncategorized
Last week, I reviewed the pros and cons of our new monthly schedule for strategic planning. If you’ve been using Simplified Strategic Planning, you might find the new strategic planning schedule useful. Month 1 – Situation Analysis In the first meeting, as with our...
by Robert Bradford | Oct 11, 2020 | Scenario planning
Scenario planning can be a very important part of your strategic plan. One question that sometimes comes up is should I use a single scenario or multiple scenarios? Another question is with more than one, how do you choose what the scenarios are? Should you use more...
by Robert Bradford | Sep 13, 2020 | Strategic Thinking, Uncategorized
You’ve seen it happen, perhaps dozens of times: A company makes some choice that looks good on paper, but leads to major strategic problems. No one is immune to this problem, because good strategic thinking is hard. Why is this? And how can we make strategic...
by Robert Bradford | Sep 6, 2020 | Strategic Planning during the COVID-19 pandemic
With current concerns about safety and travel, it’s natural that many people will be considering doing virtual strategic planning. Making more of your work virtual is one of the big changes many of us are making to be more competitive. Obviously, virtual meetings have...
by Robert Bradford | Aug 23, 2020 | Strategic Thinking, Strategy Implementation, Uncategorized
One of the great challenges in executing a strategic plan is getting the team to perform and be motivated by the strategy. Indeed, strategic performance in implementation is the achilles heel of strategic planning. It’s common to hear people say “We did...
by Robert Bradford | Aug 9, 2020 | Making predictions, Strategic Thinking
In the first two articles about predicting the future, we looked at types of curves and leading indicators. These tools are useful ways to predict trends, but tends have limits, too. Today, we will look at the types of things that disrupt predictions made with the...
by Robert Bradford | Aug 2, 2020 | Strategic Thinking, Uncategorized
We can improve our predictions in strategic planning by predicting with leading indicators. You may have hear of the Composite Leading Indicators, a statistic used by the Federal Reserve to predict recessions. This tool is a good way to anticipate changes in a...
by Robert Bradford | Jul 26, 2020 | Strategic Thinking, Uncategorized
One of the things we cannot avoid in strategic thinking is making predictions. While predictions, being assumptions, inevitably carry the risk of error, there are things we can do to make better predictions. When you can match an understanding of future trends with...
by Robert Bradford | Jul 5, 2020 | Competitive Strategy
When most people are traveling on a highway, stopping for fuel or food involves an interesting decision making process. We often exit the highway and look for a restaurant or gas station that will meet our needs. Naturally, a strong brand preference may cause us to...
by Robert Bradford | Jun 19, 2020 | Strategic Planning during the COVID-19 pandemic
What we need when there is great future uncertainty Over the years, I’ve taught many concepts that are vital to good strategy. One of the key struggles many have with strategy is that our assumptions can turn out to be incorrect, rendering some of our strategies less...
