The essential strategic planning process for a disrupted future
It is January, and looming in many organisations is the annual, calendar driven budgeting exercise. In more normal times, the strategic planning update would have been done in September or October last year, but that went out the window, along with the...
The 2020 StrategyAudit blog scorecard.
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...
New Year’s Day 2021
Well, we made it through the most disruptive year in the last 50. As I reflect, it was the last gasps of the war in Vietnam and Australia's involvement that even comes close to the disruption of 2020. However, sitting in the epicentre of the Corona 'Croydon...
10 strategies business can learn from Bellamy & Bennett.
Rugby league is a ferocious sport, now gone well beyond a sport to be a profession, at least at the top levels. You can still play in the park, and enjoy the competition and physicality of it, but that is not what the top level is about. It is a business, and the...
The key question every SME owner should ask themselves. Often.
Every business starts small. The biggest on the planet all started somewhere, in a garage, dorm room, lab, somewhere between the ears of the entrepreneur. Most fail, or at best deliver a return that would have been dwarfed by the interest on the same investment in a...
‘Innovation’ is often just an attractively coloured herring
Everyone wants ‘innovation’. Fair enough, unless we innovate, we stand still, and get killed in the rush. However, in my experience, it is not the number or quality of ideas that is the limiting factor, it is the execution of those ideas that limits us. We do not need...
Try being a ‘Strategic Quitter’.
When do you quit, let go of the sunk cost? How do you decide when to quit? It is a hugely important component of deciding how and where to allocate your scarce resources. Quitting, and taking the 'hit' is also much harder than just planning. There are always...
4 steps to build a value proposition that delivers sales
We all use mental models, it is how we get through life without overloading our cognitive capacity all the time. Mental models are evolutions way of enabling us to respond automatically, without a lot of thought, over, and over again, as we come up against...
‘Snowmobiling,’ Covid, and confirmation bias.
'Snowmobiling' is a term created by Col. John Boyd, USAF to describe the process of pulling down a set of existing items, drivers, or perceptions, and putting them back together in an entirely different way, simply not seen by anyone else, just because it is...
Is strategic planning still relevant?
It is November, typically the beginning of the planning cycle for budget year 21/22. First point of call in a formal review is generally 'How did we perform so far this year against the plan we set ourselves back in November 2018? Few could reasonably mark...