By M. Dana Baldwin, Senior Consultant Note: This article was previously published in Compass Points March 2006. Why is focus so important to success in our businesses? We’ve all heard of the person who wanted to clean off his desk, and couldn’t imagine why it wasn’t done by the end of the day. When he began […]
Continue readingBy Robert W. Bradford, President and CEO of Center for Simplified Strategic Planning We get questions about how to adapt our Simplified Strategic Planning model to smaller companies. The model was initially developed for companies with 50-500 employees, but has been used with great success in much smaller companies as well as Fortune 500 companies. This being […]
Continue readingThomas E. Ambler, Senior Consultant, CSSP, Inc. Recruiting disciplined people requires a well-tuned filtering process that determines if there is a fit of the candidate’s skill sets and passions with the job requirements of the organization and determines whether the candidate is self-disciplined. We can take a cue as to how to do this from the […]
Continue readingAsk strategic questions Once a client was chatting with me and mentioned something about my strategic planning: I ask weird questions. Not so weird, in my mind – but my favorite questions are always strategic. Furthermore, they always lead to excellent discussions about the sources of value in business and how you can create more. […]
Continue readingThomas E. Ambler, Senior Consultant, CSSP, Inc. In his outstanding book about great organizations, Good To Great, Jim Collins concludes, “Sustained great results depend upon building a culture full of self-disciplined people who take disciplined action, fanatically consistent with the three circles.” (The three circles for an organization are (1) what it can be best in the world at, […]
Continue readingBy Denise Harrison, Senior Consultant How can we better deal with uncertainty when we develop our strategic plan? Many strategic planning teams struggle with this issue. While it is important to understand what you know as facts and what your assumptions for the future are, I have found that some good scenario planning helps a […]
Continue readingContinuing the discussion we started in the prior posts, the third main reason why you may be disappointed in your Balanced Scorecard program is fundamental to the limitations of the scorecard itself. III. Your Balanced Scorecard isn’t driving action This is most likely true if you are doing Balanced Scorecard instead of true Strategic […]
Continue readingBy M. Dana Baldwin, Senior Consultant When your team gets so busy they can’t put in the time to continue their responsibilities to execute their parts of your strategic plan, what do you do? No surprise, it is up to you to change the atmosphere in which they are working to get them back on […]
Continue readingBy Robert W. Bradford, President & CEO Last week, I was talking with someone about their insurance agent. She was absolutely thrilled at how the agent handled a recent car accident, saying “She made everything so much simpler!” It got me thinking about simplicity, and how it works in companies we like – and those […]
Continue readingBy Robert W. Bradford, President & CEO Following up our prior discussion, another set of limitations of the Balanced Scorecard includes: IIa. You are measuring things because they are easy to measure This issue reminds me of the old joke about the man looking for his wallet on the sidewalk. Passerby: “Did you lose your […]
Continue readingNote: This was previously published in Compass Points Some time ago, I had an interesting conversation about the Balanced Scorecard with a friend who works in a large organization. His comments reminded me of so many comments I’ve heard about Balanced Scorecard and Strategic Planning that I went back through my notes to see […]
Continue readingBy M Dana Baldwin, Senior Consultant Most people know that in order to help an organization focus on its future and to build plans/strategies to improve market share, profitability and competitive stature, that a company should go through a formal, well-organized planning process which will result in specific objectives and actionable strategies. But how many […]
Continue reading