By Mark Rhodes on June 3, 2016
LinkedIn founder and triple billionaire Reid Hoffman has two endearing mannerisms that reveal the way he sees–and reasons with–the strategic environment. First, he peppers his statements with the word so. Almost a verbal tic that would grate on a speaking coach like the overuse of the dreaded uh … but he uses it more like therefore. That […]
By Mark Rhodes on December 22, 2015
To engage in strategic thought, you must think and reflect on the big picture—on the diverse players and forces in your competitive environment. Anticipate the future. Use your right brain for intuition and wisdom, your left for planning. As Isaac Newton said “truth is the offspring of silence and meditation.” Here are 50 tips and tools for […]
By Mark Rhodes on November 5, 2015
When you are faced with the most important and strategic decision of your life, where can you go for wisdom? Can you find insight in a book of history? Facing a world in crisis, John F. Kennedy did just that. Generally, we learn skills by trying something, failing, and trying again until we get it […]
By Mark Rhodes on October 21, 2011
Good Strategy Bad Strategy This fresh approach to strategic thinking begins with tales of battles at sea in the days of Napoleon and continues to explain what kinds of strategies have made the difference for modern companies like Apple, Wal-Mart, Cisco, Starbucks and Wells Fargo. Author Richard Rumelt shows that many recent high profile failures […]
By Mark Rhodes on February 20, 2011
If you are interested in the theories of business strategy covered in the blog post below, you may want to read Henry Mintzberg’s excellent book, Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour through the Wilds of Strategic Management. For example, Mintzberg and his co-authors provide a more lucent (and compact!) description of Michael Porter’s Five Forces Model […]
By Mark Rhodes on February 3, 2011
Imagine that you could dump all the words of a million books from the past 500 years into a giant database, and look to see how various words have waxed and waned in usage over the centuries. You could look and see when archaic words like thou and yon disappeared from popular usage. You could […]
By Mark Rhodes on January 31, 2011
The strategist is one who is concerned about the future of his or her personal, family or organizational life, and spends time and thought considering the best possible direction upon which to set forth. Yes, this makes us all strategists. Strategy is, simply, chosen direction. Smaller, perhaps, than the mission or purpose of an individual, […]
By Mark Rhodes on January 23, 2011
The historian Alfred Chandler of Harvard Business School wrote a seminal book published in 1977 on the history of strategic decision making at the highest levels of Corporate America , including DuPont, General Motors, Standard Oil and Sears Roebuck. The book was called The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. In this work […]
By Mark Rhodes on November 19, 2010
Strategy-making begins with an idea. Without a guiding idea there can be no sense of direction. Yet many articles and books about strategy do not address a most important matter: how to generate ideas. To conceive the essential set of ideas that we call strategy, the strategist must understand and master the art of the […]
By Mark Rhodes on October 12, 2010
What is a strategic decision, and how is it different from an operational or tactical decision? Strategic decisions determine the grand direction upon which an entity will embark. Always, strategy precedes action. The object of strategy is to bring about advantageous conditions within which action will occur. In the military context, this means positioning forces for best advantage […]
Carter McNamara of Authenticity Consulting, LLC, provides organizational development, consultant training and Action Learning services, and is developer of the Free Management Library. [Read more ...]