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How CEOs Promote Strategic Thinking In Themselves – by Graham Kenny
Maintaining fresh and clear strategic thinking is a crucial issue for CEOs and other managers in any organization. But leaders are pulled toward operational issues – matters relating to the here-and-now rather than the future. It isn’t easy to avoid this gravitational pull as one issue after another is either offered up by those below…
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Having Trouble Discussing Price and Value? Try the Value Cube – by Graham Kenny
Nuanced discussions around price and value are important to business success. It’s surprising therefore that most pricing deliberations quickly devolve into a simplistic lowest common dominator – price cutting. This occurs even when there’s no evidence that price is the primary concern for customers! The way to overcome this is to understand what supports your…
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3 Deadly Management Blunders Nonprofits Commit with Unpaid Staff – by Graham Kenny
Nonprofit organizations are facing a crisis globally. Services are in high demand, there’s a shortage of paid staff, support from donors is in decline and inflation is undercutting income. Nonprofits, however, have a superpower that is not available to profit-oriented organizations. Because they are typically working towards a cause – whether that be conservation, the…
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5 Steps to Living the Strategic Life – by Graham Kenny
Businesses that fail to develop a strategic life typically fail to be competitive. If leaders don’t set aside time to develop strategy, day-to-day matters absorb all the attention, and the present overtakes the future. The result? Opportunities pass quietly by. You may not be aware of it, but you may not be living a strategic…
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Is Your Culture Right for Happy Accident Innovation? – by Graham Kenny
When I was in my teens, Kevin, my brother-in-law, explained how stainless steel was invented. Like many of the world’s most useful products, it wasn’t so much invented as stumbled upon in a happy accident – while its inventor was looking for something else. Happy accidents are indispensable to the progress of human innovation. They’ve…
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Training Managers in Strategic Thinking May Simply Be a Waste of Time – by Graham Kenny
The sentiment comes through as a consistent complaint from CEOs. It sounds like this: “What we lack in this organization is strategic thinkers” or “It’s hard to get the executive team to think strategically” or “What’s holding us back is a lack of strategic thinking.” In consequence, CEOs worry strategic opportunities are passing them by…
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What’s Your Strategic Plan for a Low Birthrate World? – by Graham Kenny
In May, Italy hit the panic button when the Pope joined the country’s Prime Minister in calling for Italians to have more babies. The country’s low birthrate is now threatening Italy’s economic future. It’s not the only country facing a population crisis. Birthrates around the world are in a state of deep decline. In most…
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Be Aware of Strategy Drift and Gaps Post Covid – by Graham Kenny
Over the last three years, management practices have shifted from proactive to reactive. For example, fine-dining restaurants are now producing takeaway meals, and medical practices are providing “telehealth” to treat patients online. These innovations began in response to Covid, they filled a need, and they’ve stuck. But not all Covid strategies have turned out so…
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Overusing “Strategy” and “Strategic” Harms Your Business Performance – by Graham Kenny
Managers use the terms, “strategy” and “strategic” a surprisingly large number of times and in a wide variety of contexts. We hear terms like “HR strategy” or “strategic marketing.” It pops up everywhere, with “IT strategic plans,” “digital engagement strategies” and “strategic procurement.” It’s become commonplace – and overused. The consequence of this, as managers…
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Executing Strategy in a Work-from-Anywhere World – by Graham Kenny
In this work from anywhere age, CEOs and senior managers are facing a fresh and urgent challenge to prevent their organizations from splintering. If they fail to get this right executing strategy will become an even more hit-and-miss exercise. Here I look at the effect of the WFA shift on employees and what CEOs are…
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Business Model Extension: Key to Executing the Circular Economy – by Graham Kenny
The circular economy employs recycling, repair, reuse, remanufacturing, refurbishment, and sharing to offer remedies for our global waste crisis. There have been many calls for a shift from linear to circular – appeals to consumers to change their ways and to businesses to alter their practices to save the environment. State governments and municipal councils…
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Why Marketing Isn’t Strategy – and Why That Matters – by Graham Kenny
A senior executive recently suggested to me that the disciplines of “strategy” and “marketing” should be merged. There’s no need any longer for them to be separate, he proposed. I took note. This was, after all, a senior manager of a major client. From what I’ve heard and read since, he’s not the first person…
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Adopt a Multi-Business Mindset to Diversify Successfully – by Graham Kenny
We’ve seen whole industries devastated in the wake of Covid-19. Many businesses, looking for ways to stay alive, have considered diversification. But all too often they flinch because a message has been drilled into them: Don’t diversify. “Stick to your knitting!”, the saying goes. I’ve researched and written a book on diversification and I challenge…
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4 Key Qualities of Successful Division Managers – by Graham Kenny
There’s been mountains written on what it takes to be a successful manager. But what if that manager is working in the context of a diversified organization? What special skills does it take to run a division? The inability to find effective division managers holds back many organizations from truly exploiting diversification’s growth potential. And…
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Beware of Catch-22 in Your Organisation Design – by Graham Kenny
Not so long ago, organisation design was a primary concern of CEOs seen as a fundamental driver of effectiveness and efficiency. It seems to have dropped off the agenda of late being replaced by many of today’s issues such as gender mix in management ranks, incentive systems and executive pay, and, of course, the pandemic.…
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Use Rivalry to Sharpen Your Business Strategy – by Graham Kenny
Analysing “the competition” is a tried and tested method for developing strategy. But what do you do when the discussion turns bland and unfocused? Here’s a trick to sharpen your strategic team’s competitive instincts. Use rivalry. It will get them producing more successful and innovative strategies to win customers from your competitors. Let me illustrate…
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4 Steps to Reach Your Business Competitive Potential – by Graham Kenny
Louise, a senior partner at a large national law firm, I’ll call it Robinson & Rose, pulled me to one side at a break in my seminar on business strategy. “I get what you’re saying” she said “but my firm is so conservative. They just won’t change. We do what everyone else does in the…
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4 Secrets to Simple Performance Measurement – by Graham Kenny
Can you nail the distinction between “simple” and “simplistic”? If you can, you’re well on the way to successful performance measurement. If a model is simple it contains only those elements essential to explain a result. On the other hand, a simplistic model is one that is over simplified – an example might be that…
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Measuring Activity Is Not Measuring Performance – by Graham Kenny
An important part of my role as a management consultant is to workshop the secrets of measuring performance effectively. The best way to unpack it is to start with the example at hand, so I suggest ways to measure my performance in the workshop. “I could,” I explain, “measure the number of PowerPoint slides I…
RECENT ARTICLES
- How CEOs Promote Strategic Thinking In Themselves – by Graham Kenny
- Having Trouble Discussing Price and Value? Try the Value Cube – by Graham Kenny
- 3 Deadly Management Blunders Nonprofits Commit with Unpaid Staff – by Graham Kenny
- 5 Steps to Living the Strategic Life – by Graham Kenny
- Is Your Culture Right for Happy Accident Innovation? – by Graham Kenny
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