Strategic Intuition

By Mark Rhodes on May 20, 2011

Biographers of Napoleon Bonaparte talk about his ability to size up a situation with a single coup d’oeil, (pronounced koo-DOY), meaning “a stroke of the eye” or “glance.”  Napoleon was so knowledgeable about his strategic situation—the landscape, the enemy, available technology, similar situations from the past—that he could understand and respond quickly to ever-changing circumstances. […]

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Organic Approach to Problem Solving

By Carter McNamara on March 20, 2011

When planning, it’s extremely important to match the nature of the planning process to the nature of the planners.  For example, not all cultures prefer a linear, sequential approach to planning, that is, to decide mission, vision and values then subordinate goals and associated objectives. One of the most challenging aspects of any strategic planning […]

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The Borders Tale: What Goes Around Comes Around

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 […]

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Setting Yourself Apart — Unique Selling Proposition

By Carter McNamara on February 12, 2011

(Guest post from Michael Zipursky.) Lack of focus. That’s one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a consultant. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, whether you’re a marketing, management, or public relations consultant (or any other type of consultant for that matter). The client of today has almost infinite possibilities to choose […]

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The Rise and Fall of Strategy and Planning

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 […]

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Choosing the Words of Strategy

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, […]

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Strategy First… Then Structure

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 […]

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Some Criteria For a Mission Statement to Meet

By Carter McNamara on December 10, 2010

There are few topics in strategic planning that generate such diverse and strong opinions as what should be in a mission statement.  The statements vary from one-line slogans to multi-page documents. There are few activities that can become such as waste of time as extensive discussions about what words should be in a mission statement […]

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Metaphors Be With You: The Strategist as Poet

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 […]

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How NOT to Do Strategic Planning!

By Carter McNamara on November 15, 2010

I got a call from an organization that was (as they said) “desperate to finally do good strategic planning.” A Far Too-Common Approach to “Strategic Planning” The previous two times they did “planning,” the organization hired a facilitator and: 1.  Got Board members together for one retreat. 2.  Word-smithed the words on their mission statement.  […]

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