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Where are you on the Technology Curve?
New technologies follow a fairly well-understood “curve”. We can think of these curves in terms of profitability, but this is oversimplifying things. Much of the thinking about technology curves in the business world comes from the work of Nikolai Kondratiev in the 1920s. The Kondratiev Curve In his work, Kondratiev suggested that there are long-term […]
Continue readingPush Strategic Growth with the 20% Rule
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 company. While 20% may seem like a lot, […]
Continue readingHow to use multiple scenarios in 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 than one? A single scenario is the basic […]
Continue readingMake strategic thinking easier
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 thinking easier? There are three basic reasons why good […]
Continue readingStrategic Performance
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 strategic planning, but it didn’t change anything.” Obviously, the way you approach strategic […]
Continue readingHow to Predict Trends by Finding Limits
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 first two tools – or any other tool. In […]
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