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Engagement & Ownership

Safe Execution: Business-IT risk discussion

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If you are anything like me, historically your initial discussions with IT drifts toward their requirements and policies- some version of a C-I-”No”.  This is usually followed by some type of business-sponsor intervention allowing us to technologically enable our business outcome, with at least a little lingering animosity.  During a recent webinar1, Professor George Westerman [...]


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The Calculus of Capabilities- An integrated maturity model

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  For years executives (and more than a few consultants) have applied judgment in assessing a business’s capability readiness based at least in part on one-on-one interviews.  However, the need for a holistic understanding of core competences has been out of academia and in the real world for nearly 20 years.  To what effect?  Are [...]


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2012 Favorites- An Overview

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Once again, we thought you might like to see some of what has influenced our thinking this year, and how we think these concepts will impact business improvement efforts as we move forward. The following are our favorite thought provoking articles, books and web-based tidbits from this past year.  Six topics span a wide range [...]


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Improved Vetting: Social-Business-Inside-The-Enterprise Case Study

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“Companies are beginning to find that social technologies have enormous potential to raise the productivity of knowledge workers.” McKinsey Global Institute* The concept of vetting an idea has universal application in ideas large and small.  The following case study is based on an executive’s need to move quickly to create and embed an operational strategy [...]


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What to do with the strategy-pak: A starter list

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Like most tools, our strategy-paksm framework has little value unless you put it to use.  As we briefly explored in our Communicate Strategy for Effect post, we believe in building from the basics.  So, here are a few traditional, time-proven ways we have used the framework to improve our clients’ businesses… the basics. Best practice [...]


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Enterprise Analysis Framework- Planning for outcomes

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“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything” Dwight D. Eisenhower1 As we work through strategy, there is a natural cascade, or progression, from “why” to “what” to “how”.  We need to drive the directional thinking (“why” and “what”) down into execution (“how”) because, and we should keep reminding ourselves of this, at the end of [...]


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Social Business- Don’t start in the tool shed

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“…the most important question for any organization is this: are we changing as fast as the world around us? “     Gary Hamel, “What is adaptability?“,  Management Innovation eXchange blog, 11.8.2012 Why Social Business? There are at least two solid reasons to be interested in social business, just based on part of Professor Hamel’s blog excerpt [...]


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Change Leadership II- Understanding Kotter

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“Time is the friend of the wonderful business, the enemy of the mediocre.” Warren Buffett Buffett reminds us, and we should never forget, the reason we change over time is to deliver better business outcomes, to build business capability more in line with competitive needs, and to be the wonderful business.  Also, with the increasing [...]


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The Strategy Stack

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“Three Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity; From discord find harmony; In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”  Albert Einstein Seldom do we have the opportunity to help a client with strategic architecture from a clean slate as we recently completed with ABC.  More typically we have used a comprehensive view, our strategy-paksm, [...]


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A Working Definition of Strategy

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Everyone knows what strategy is.  Just ask them.  The difficultly we typically encounter is no one group, dare we say no two individuals, share the same definition. This is the issue we have faced over and over again.  With our clients, we could expend literally days of team time discussing the “s” word.  While this [...]


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