
clarion calls
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2012: Ready, or Not?
Consumers' experience with internet access and social media is changing their notions of how they relate to businesses: they expect to play a more active role in shaping the products and services they buy.…
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2011: To Merge or Not to Merge
More companies are looking at M+As as a potential avenue of growth. We have some ideas about what often goes wrong and some suggestions for leaders about both things they are in a position to direct pre-close and surprises they can expect to deal with in the post-close weeks and months.…
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2010: With Strategy in Mind: It’s Time We Look Inside
This piece describes some recent developments in neuroscience and what they reveal about strategic decision making, and suggests some things that leaders can do to counteract individual bias, to increase awareness of individual bias, and to create the mental space to realize strategic insights.…
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2010: Getting a Jump on the Competition: Spotlight Strategic Opportunities
Coming out of the recession, companies making good strategic choices can leap ahead of the competition. Read how our framework for finding opportunities, pinpointing gaps and seeing roadblocks helped one company analyze its situation, find new opportunities, and realign to move in a new direction.…
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2009: Navigating a New Landscape: Challenging Old Assumptions
Many leaders created growth by extending and optimizing existing business models to yield greater returns. When the current economic contraction does eventually turn, leaders will need to adapt to new markets. We offer a framework for reassessing their business models and growth strategies.…
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2008: Talent, A Key Ingredient for Your Business – Now and in the Future
Hard times offer a chance for leaders to move from management into true leadership: to restore faith and renew a sense of purpose so that talent can truly contribute. Read why many talent systems fail to deliver; get ideas to make enabling talent a part of the natural rhythm of the business.…
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2007: Encouraging Innovation: Pampering the Goose
Business leaders, individually and as a team, have the responsibility for enabling innovation in their organization: for nurturing the Golden Egg-laying Goose. They must manage the balance, for instance, between pure creativity and pure analytics; and they must be innovators themselves.…
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2006: Team at the Top: Their Unique Mandate
The team at the top is in the position of having the entire organizational picture in their view, with the ability to impact the organization in a lasting way. This team has unique responsibilities and must deliver on a mandate that cannot be satisfied from any other seat in the business.…
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2006: Balancing Tensions at the Top: the Amazing Ambidextrous Executive
It’s hard to sustain the top management balancing act. The ability to achieve and maintain the balance between opposing tensions is a critical skill for top managers. We discuss the balancing role, the challenge of identifying and developing this skill, and some ideas about finding balance.…
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2005: Spider Think: A Shift in Perspective
A shift in perspective can be an amazingly freeing experience. It allows us to break away from rigid frameworks, gain fresh insights and see new possibilities. See how breaking mental barriers and allowing creativity can help leaders understand and solve challenging problems.…
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2005: Organicity: Transforming Our View of Business
Organicity – a concept of organizations as natural systems – is a way for leaders to understand, reframe and consider changes within their organizations. This has implications for business leaders, with its potential value in creating adaptive, fluid and responsive organizations.…
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2004: Cultivating Renewal through Smart Growth
All businesses experience a progression from infancy through high growth and prime performance, into stability and eventual decline. Some companies find ways to cycle from stability back to high growth. Smart Growth takes its cue from nature, pruning and grafting to nurture the fruits of renewal.…
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2003: What If: Awakening to a New Day
One of the most important leadership qualities is the ability to project a clear vision of the future. But how to do that when the future is increasingly unpredictable? We discuss Scenario Planning as a way to increase leadership capacity and make organizations more agile and resilient.…
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2003: Unlock the Potential Within: A Context for Positive Growth
Helping individuals and senior teams become more effective means going beyond mere symptoms in order to uncover root causes. If individual performance is on target yet there is untapped potential as a team, behavioral alignment can help to move the organization closer to achieving its goals.…
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2002: Reality or Illusion: A 3-D Organizational Assessment
Many leaders rely on what their people tell them about the realities of their businesses. Failure to recognize less tangible facts about the business can have potentially severe consequences. Forensic Organizational Analysis can be a predictive tool for revealing true organizational health.…
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2001: The Container Effect
Corporations search for profit; individuals need greater purpose. The Container Effect results from people embracing corporate value structures that overlook or conflict with their personal belief systems. We need to reestablish a connection between our work and our larger sense of purpose.…
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2001: Space Has Its Place
Retail businesses often succeed based on their ability to use space to influence buying habits. But any business that requires in-person interaction should consider their space usage. We offer some practical ideas on how to use space to improve internal environments and customer interaction.…
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2000: Organization Design: The Blueprint for Success
Many companies attempt to address M+As, new subsidiaries and upheavals from re-engineering through new organization structures. We believe the real issues lie in strategy, management infrastructures and behavior. Only after those have been examined should new organization structure be introduced.…
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2000: Building the Capacity to Fly
Leaders often struggle to recruit, develop, retain and leverage talent. To help them clarify what is needed, we offer tips on building success profiles based on the 3Cs of behavior: capabilities, characteristics and capacities.…
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1999: Operating Models: Gearing Up for Optimal Performance
There is a unique blend of strategy, management infrastructure and organizational behaviors needed to bring each business to life. Only when these three components are aligned and linked into a cohesive model does the business really kick into gear.…
