Technology enabling your strategy
Posted by Grant Brewer
Hopefully by now your organisation has a good strategy that is focused around real business purpose instead of focusing on a flakey “vision statement”. If you’re doing a good job of strategy, then strategy in your organisation will be more than a few days away at the off-site and will have become a consistent and constant conversation through out the year. So this might be good time to extend your thinking to how technology can enable your strategy. Recent columns have considered the role of people in strategy execution in terms of customer service or in terms of leadership and ethics. Technology won’t replace the people or decrease the need to have an people-centric strategy, but it is a useful enabler of strategy.
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implementation (10) | strategy (8) | technology traps (1) | technology (1) | enablement (1)
All business planning is not strategy
Posted by Grant Brewer
The idea of what is strategic or what comprises strategy is often confused. The terms themselves are so overused that they risk losing any meaning at all. What is often necessary in organisations is a sense of getting back to basics. It is often forgotten that strategy is about the "big picture"; it relates to the overall landscape or context within which an organisation exists. Strategy is not about the day to day tactics.
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Taking stock of your strategy
Posted by Grant Brewer
The start of a new year is always a good time to step back a little from your day to day leadership or management tasks and think. As a leader, it is valuable to make time to think, to learn and refresh your ideas. When it comes to strategy, time away from the business can add clarity to your ideas and ensure that you don't mistake the strategy process for the real outcome of organisational strategy. This is a common mistake and it leads to strategy ceremonies that serve the strategic planning process, but that are not focused on getting the organisation to focus around a specific purpose and direction.
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The first hundred days
Posted by Grant Brewer
So you've been promoted, or taken on a new role or a fresh direction in your career. Maybe you've taken on the turnaround job of a lifetime. So the question is: where are you going to start, how are you going to leave your mark on your first one hundred days? A fresh start brings the opportunity to reshape and sweep the slate clean (or at least a little cleaner!). As a manager, you often need to be able to take a new situation and impart an immediate sense of leadership and focus on the team and their situation. Your thinking might incorporate these ideas.
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Operations: implementing strategy
Posted by Grant Brewer
Operations is what a company does. It is the core. Strategy tells us what we're going to do and how we might be doing it - operations gets down to the doing and actually implements a strategy. It is easy in conversations about strategy to lose sight of the fact that all strategies need to be implemented otherwise they remain concepts or ideas. No business can be successful by focusing only on building strategy. At some point every organisation (even a non-commercial organisation) has to implement. Operations is perhaps not seen as the glamorous side of business strategy, but it is equally important because it is where the doing gets done.
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Is your strategy implementation failing?
Posted by Grant Brewer
The strategy is defined. You're a leader - your job is to develop the strategy for your team. Wrong! Your job is to deliver results. Coming up with strategies is often the easy part since it is frequently an intellectual activity. Choosing between alternative ideas and then managing their implementation is the hard part. Quite often, managers are not as well prepared for managing projects that cut across functions and business processes, where most of the project team are not under their direct management.
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Cracking your next product implementation
Posted by Grant Brewer
The strategy development and the design of products or services has been completed. Now onto your next leadership challenge: surviving a successful product launch. Surviving is a good choice of words, because product or service development and the subsequent implementation can be a real challenge. Often, the organisations focus on the product design and development because this is seen to be the innovative and glamorous process. This is at the expense of the good product implementation, without which a good idea never sees the light of day.
Any project to implement a new product is going to be a challenge, will suffer changing requirements and hostile deadlines. Good managers know that this is a reality, yet understand how to manage the expectations and demands so that the collective effort results in a better product or services for the business and its customers.
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implementation (10) | product strategy (2) | operations (2) | product design (1) | high performance (1)
Startups are hard work!
Posted by Grant Brewer
Staring up a new venture is hard work. It is hard work, regardless of whether you're establishing a real independent start up business, starting a some kind of non-profit organisation or starting a new line of business in an existing organisation. Everything just seems to take much more effort and take much longer than you originally think. I don't think I've ever met or read about a entrepreneur that commented with hindsight that turning their idea into reality turned out to be far easier than they had imagined! The fact that setting up a venture to commercialise your new idea is a lot more difficult than it seems at the outset means that entrepreneurship needs to go far beyond ideas. We've commented before that developing a strategy is difficult, but often more easily achieved than implementing it. This is entirely true of strategies focused on implementing new ideas - truly talented entrepreneurs have skills that extend past the ideas to encompass operational skills and a great deal of patience! The successful embrace these apparent conflicts and above all they develop the patience to trust that their vision will materialise piece by piece over time. Rome was indeed not built in a day.
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Innovative strategy is more than passion
Posted by Grant Brewer
It is not unusual to see organisations that are struggling because they allow the passion and the belief in a new idea to masquerade as strategy. It is true that new ideas will almost always fail unless someone has the passion and the belief in the idea to stay with it through all the challenges. However, fresh ideas and people that are passionate about them are not uncommon, yet successful businesses built on these same ideas are a lot less common.
Innovation is more than ideas. Re-inventing an industry or a product category takes more than research and a fresh take on the business model. Managing innovation and implementing new business models is notoriously difficult -- regardless of whether you're an established business, a new business unit or a start up company. It is a common mistake to assume that sheer passion and belief will bring a strategy to life. New ideas need the passion and the belief -- they also need good strategy, leadership and implementation.
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Strategy is not a competitive advantage
Posted by Grant Brewer
Strategy is about choice. It’s about implementation. It’s about reality. It is about so much more than a document or a planning session. Strategy is worthless when it exists only as an idea, trapped in the intellect of its originator. Only the capacity to act creates value or competitive advantage. Strategy is about direction and a business concept that has focus, a purpose and has a clearly understood way of creating value. Most importantly, good strategy is about bringing the the ideas and the implementation together in an ecosystem that becomes far more valuable than the sum of its parts — an infinitely more difficult and costly for competitors to copy.
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implementation (10) | strategy (8) | execution (3) | value (1) | creating value (1) | complex systems (1) | competitive advantage (1) | choice (1)