Tag Archives: Strategy

Complaining is not a strategy

in entrepreneurship, Innovation, Leadership, Strategy

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos starts his High Orde... Many companies may start their lives playing to win, but inevitably end up playing not to lose. It is this cycle of being proactive and then reactive that may become a fact for your organization.

Many books and blog posts have been written about the many reasons companies fail, a key reason is because they stop paying  attention to customers, and instead focus on competitors. It is a very interesting dynamic to observe how companies may start innovating but then decide to align themselves with their competitors…

The question is: why?

The answer comes down to human nature. Success hides problems, and our tendency to become complacent after having some success puts us in a state of reaction. As a result, competitor activity becomes a huge source of anxiety and frustration for company leaders. For me, a clear signal that a company may be loosing its footing is when it talks a lot about what competitors are doing and how they have to match them; not what they are doing differently.

Sure, other competitors may take advantage of trends in technology and ride a wave that ends up disrupting existing businesses; but very rarely are companies created with a deliberate need to crush existing companies. That happens after the fact!

It is very simple, the future happens to you, not other competitors.…

For Good Strategy Not To Do Is To Be

in Leadership, Strategy

strategy is about making decisions Why do companies insist on a one-size-fits-all template for strategy? Is it because the MBA types come in with their unimaginative frameworks that speak to unimaginative executives? I certainly think so.

The ones who are at a fault the most, McKinsey, recently published a series of articles about the Art of Strategy. What’s new about strategy in the article?

Absolutely nothing.…

How do you change the game?

in Question-To-Innovate, Strategy

how do you change the rules of the game?

This is a question I get asked very often (goes with my blog name). The topic of strategy is vast, it is filled with stratagems and other thinking that can be confused as cookie-cutter solutions. Strategy is heavily dependent on context, so, there isn’t one single way to change the game. But, for me, there is a psychological tactic you can use to change the perception of how the game is played.…

Culture tells us what to do when the leader isn’t in the room

in Leadership, Strategy

How does a leader build a sustainable company cultureCulture tells us what to do when the leader isn’t in the room. We’ve all heard this before, and being able to achieve this is one of the daunting challenges of leadership.

It is not unusual to be in a strategy session and come up with all kinds of great quotes and soundbites, that are quickly forgotten when everyone leaves the room. The key is to be able reduce those great quotes into “concrete behaviors” that happen on a daily basis.

For me, the challenge is ongoing. And to face this challenge, I use a code: FLUSH.…

To innovate better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission

in Innovation, Leadership, Strategy

Cultures of innovation are naturally dynamic. Employees think of new ideas and try them on the fly. Processes and procedures are fluid. There often is no one right answer to a problem, but rather experimentation drives many projects, efforts, assignments, and ultimately opportunities for improvement.

With that said, in my neck of the woods, businesses are the complete inverse.

Take a recent experience I had with the marketing manager of a telecommunications company based in Tijuana. With Startup Weekend Tijuana 4 coming this week, this marketing manager enthusiastically let me know that she signed up to participate. “Great!”, I said. But there was one minor problem: she didn’t want me to tell her boss about it.

Sucks!

According to her, the boss doesn’t want people to have their head occupied in anything other than what they’re supposed to be doing at work.

Sound familiar?…