Which StrategyAudit posts gathered attention during 2020?
The StrategyAudit blog, and supporting research is both a personal archive of ideas, that vary from complete to really half-baked, a recitation of the things I see and learn from those I work and interact with, and the lessons that come from those interactions.
Over the course of the year, there were 120 posts published on the StrategyAudit site. It seems like a small return for the effort. Luckily, I did not keep a count of the hours spent thinking, researching, writing, and editing these 120, or I would probably have to counsel myself to do something more useful to my retirement fund with the time.
The 3 most popular posts published this year.
A bit of an unfair advantage accrues to those published earlier in the year. However, the pattern across the decade of this blog has consistently demonstrated that most views of most posts happen over the week or so after publishing. It is the minority that then pick up later and continue to deliver multiple views weekly over a long period.
Reflecting on the new management challenges created by Covid, the April attempt at predicting the impact of Covid came in first. Perhaps understandable, and with the benefit of now 8 months hindsight, I am very pleased with the accuracy of the predictions. That will be the subject, as promised at the time, of a separate post. Second place goes to a June post that looked at what I saw as the 6 critical challenges of remote work, a topic we were all thinking about, and at that time just coming to grips with. Third was a bit of a personal rant, which obviously struck a chord at the time, after that idiot MP Craig Kelly jumped on British morning television in January, telling all and sundry that the fires, then ravaging the east coast of NSW, bore no relationship to the hoax that is climate change.
I am going to stretch the friendship a bit and give a dead cat bounce award to a post that I think had some considerable value as I review it, but that got no traction at all. I set out to describe the benefits that may flow from the Covid crisis, reflecting on the adage that there is a silver lining in every cloud. As with the winner in the category, I feel vindicated that the predictions made have been pretty accurate. Perhaps it was just a lousy headline?
The 3 most popular posts of the year.
This is a hands down to a post published over 6 years ago that describes the business model of supermarkets. It has continued to be the most viewed post every year since it was first published. Coming in second is the perennial runner up published in 2016, describing the 4 dimensions of project planning. Third was a welcome surprise, from early 2018, a marketers explanation of the accounting term Net Present Value. Many of those who run small businesses have a disturbing lack of understanding of even the most basic financial management tools, of which NPV is a common and very useful one. There are several other similar posts on accounting related ‘accounting type’ topics that also contributed significantly to the numbers.
Ideas that got no traction, but that seem valuable.
Some of the ideas I post may be a bit whacky, at least to some. However, it is not my job to reflect the consensus, it is my job to stimulate thought, and create some disturbance to the status quo by throwing in stuff from left field.
This one from 2019 combines two ideas. The first that the demarcation between marketing and sales is artificial nonsense created for the convenience of corporate management, and the second, that the accepted sales funnel is as redundant as a knife in a gunfight. Checklists on just about everything abound on the net. This post from late 2017 summarises a checklist I use when assessing the health of a business, was prompted by a similar idea published in the AICD magazine written by Phil Ruthven, for whom I have a very high regard. In 2013 I stumbled across an article in Fast Company magazine that started to explain the OODA loop, an idea that evolved from the fertile and obsessive mind of US air Force colonel John Boyd. I have since read a biography of Boyd, and spent considerable time reflecting on the competitive implications of the OODA loop, which I think is a seminal idea, highlighted this year by the speed and destructive spread of the Corona virus. Those who have successfully re-oriented themselves to get inside the ‘turning circle’ of their competitors, and the spread of the ‘Bug’, and been able to pivot their businesses in the face of the unexpected, have followed, mostly without knowing, the wisdom of the loop to their collective benefit. This follow up published in October 2020 was, sadly, a very strong contender for the dead cat award for 2020.
Finally, one of my personal favourite posts, viewed only once this year, published in 2016 after the death of Leonard Cohen. It has nothing to do with running a business, but is a deeply personal post, reflecting on a couple of the pivotal events in my life.
I look forward to interacting with you throughout 2021, which is getting harder, and harder. The combined impact of the continuing increasingly intense battle for your attention, and the squeezing of organic access to those who may be interested by the ‘social’ platforms makes life a challenge. (with the number of links in this post, LinkedIn is likely to stick me in solitary and throw away the key) If you find value in my thoughts, subscribe to them directly from the website, and spread the word amongst your networks. I promise not to follow you around when you do.
Have a better 2021 than 2020, perhaps an easy goal for most, and the basis of continuous improvement, finding a way to do a better job every day.
Header cartoon: once again, my thanks to Hugh McLeod at gapingvoid.com for the header
