Our blog articles about strategy, people, performance, decision making, balanced scorecards and culture change
Here is a way into my blog articles, over 300 of them: It is structured into major topics areas linking to the most articles in each topic area. These cover:
- The Strategy Zone
- Communicating & socialising Strategy: An Executive’s guide
- The Decision Improvement Zone:
- The Culture & Behavioural Change Zone
- The Performance Management Zone: A guide to understanding the management of performance
- Modern Balanced Scorecard Zone
- The 4G Strategic Management Zone
- How we look at our organisations and how we manage: The Paradigm Shift Zone
- Thought provoking articles about how we manage our organisations
Simply scroll down through the various topic areas and articles…
1) Strategy choice, approach and implementation articles: Most recent first
First choose your approach to strategy, then choose your strategy
In the world of strategic thinking and models there are many ways to think about strategy: but there are also several levels. In this post I want to explore three levels or dimensions. Let me take a simple example. Some people are quite keen on the Michael Porter...
Lessons for the annual strategy off-site: thinking fast and slow
Have you ever been at an annual strategy off-site, where you and the team developed some great plans, walked away.... and a year later very few of those ideas or plans were implemented? So often I hear of organisations, or rather their management teams, who have...
Insight 4: It’s about behaviours, (Stupid!) The Deeply Embedded Learnt Behaviours.
Insight 4: It’s about behaviours, (Stupid!) The Deeply Embedded Learnt Behaviours. This insight is part is a series of six insights into strategy, people and performance, derived from working with my clients in 2013. I recently interviewed twenty Chief Executives...
Insight 2: Strategy has become a continuous learning process
Insight 2: Strategy has become that continuous learning process This is part is a series of six insights into strategy, people and performance, derived from working with my clients in 2013. Strategy as a learning process is entering the main stream I have been talking...
How to read a strategy document: questions to ask yourself
Why I now read every strategy document differently. This insight is part is a series of six insights into strategy, people and performance, derived from working with my clients in 2013. Nowadays, as I read any strategy document there are two questions key I now carry...
Thinking fast and slow about strategy and decision making
I have been applying Daniel Kahnemans' work to thinking fast and slow about strategy and decision making in organisations. If you are involved with strategy in any way, I strongly recommend that you read book by the Nobel prize winning Psychologist, Daniel Kahneman....
2) Communicating & Socialising Strategy articles: Most recent first
Telling the story of your strategy: Making it stick from the start
As you stand in front of your team about to tell the story of your strategy, you want to be sure that the message gets across. That is the essence of "Communicating Strategy". You want to have thought through how you will construct and tell the story of your...
Admirable honesty from a Politician
It is refreshing to hear frankness and honesty from a politician. So I was amused to read this on the FT.com website about the budgetary message once delivered by Enver Hoxha, the late dictator of Albania, who told his people: “Next year will be worse than this...
Politicians claiming responsibility for things they don’t control is a bad model to follow
Back near the start of the Gulf of Mexico crisis, Barack Obama claimed to have hid foot on the neck of the oil executives in BP ensuring that they solve the problem. An unfortunate metaphor perhaps as it is quite difficult to operate an oil rig with someone's boot on...
Clarity of communication: Fukushima nuclear reactor as an example.
Watching the developments after the terrible earthquake and tsunami in Japan, I have been frustrated by the reporting of the problems at the nuclear reactor plant at Fukushima. The thing that frustrated me the most was the loose language used in describing the...
Leaking news or keeping it under wraps
As it it budget day in the UK, (The day the Chancellor announces changes to various tax rates) we have been inundated with speculation about what will be in the Chancellor's budget. All prior to the announcement. Now it is a tradition that the contents of the...
Vince Cable – Not even malicious compliance
Only a few weeks ago Lord Young was booted out of office for telling the truth about the cuts, but at an inappropriate time. He was merely an advisor to the Cabinet. Now we have Vince Cable, a member of the cabinet, telling people "in his constituency" (actually...
3) Decision making and decision taking articles: Most recent first
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4) Performance management, various types and perspectives. Most recent articles first
A behavioural approach to public sector influence and change
Sneaking under the radar in central government are a small team of ten people. Called the Behavioural Influence Team (BIT), they have a remit of using behavioural techniques to improve how government bring about change and improvement. They have just brought out...
Are you “just an employee” or “a person in the business”?
Recently I have been interviewing executives who have either created exceptionally high performing cultures, or who have achieved significant cultural change, especially around deeply embedded learnt behaviours. In one discussion the Managing Director was contrasting...
Paul Moody CEO Britvic talks about the benefits of their Balanced Scorecard
This is an interview on the BBC Radio 4 programme, Bottom Line, where Paul Moody explains how they communicate their message to around 3000 employees. It is as good an explanation as I have ever heard of what the balanced scorecard approach is all about. Using the...
Performance Management Systems & Culture: Advice to a Chief Executive
On a LinkedIn discussion the Chief Executive of a Housing Association asked For some practical experience of implementing performance management systems and cultures.How best to go about he process of identifying and measuring leading performance indicators. Two quite...
Choosing KPIs – First determine your “Point of performance”?
If you manage an airline, you will know that your aircraft have to leave and arrive on time, you need efficient check-ins, you want to ensure your planes are full and you want to optimise the income (yield) from each flight. These are each "points of performance". If...
Avoiding dysfunctional behaviours due to measures
One of the underlying causes of the dysfunctional behaviour sometimes experienced in performance management is where individual measures and targets look at only specific parts of a problem.As a result are asked to achieve targets that are locally optimal, but...
5) How to achieve Cultural and Behavioural change. Most recent articles first
Communicating finance in the public sector
Just at the moment, one of the most difficult places to be must be in finance in the public sector. They are constantly re-doing budgets and subject to negotiations over custs to funding from central government. That is if the organisation still exists: if you are a...
5) Modern Balanced Scorecards. Most recent articles first
What is the difference between a measure and an indicator?
What is the difference between measures and indicators? This question has become a perennial topic on many discussion forums: To us there is a clear and useful distinction. Unfortunately, a very loose language merges these separate words, measures and...
Balanced Scorecards in Charities, NFP and Social Enterprise – Three mistakes to avoid.
Mistaken approaches to Balanced Scorecard Perspectives for NfP organisations To really create change and implement strategy in a charity, you need more than a simplistic scorecards. You have to be thinking modern Balaced Scorecard approach: One that systematically...
Using basic balanced scorecards to get control of an organisation.
Challenge 1: Getting control - operational balanced Scorecards Many Executives start in a search for control and the basic discipline of management reporting. What we call, “Getting a grip on the organisation”. The approach they use is often to collect a wider view...
Aligning projects and programmes with a cascade of strategy maps in a strategic balanced scorecard
A linkedin question recently was about the integration of the Balanced scorecard framework and the Project hierarchy. The questioner desctibed their situation like this: "We have a top level strategy map for company-wide usually contains 15-25 main strategic...
Does the Balanced Scorecard need to consider financial capital in the Learning & Growth perspective?
The question A recent question on a Linkedin forum was, "Does the BSC need to explicitly consider the financial capital in learning and growth perspective? " The questioner followed up with "Commercial organizations need funds such as equity and debt on an ongoing...
Leading indicators and lagging indicators – making sense of them
I see many conversations about leading indicators. People searching for a leading indicator, or arguing whether an indicator is leading or lagging. This article provides a simple way of breaking through this problem. The whole debate about whether an indicator is...
6) Fourth Generation Strategic Balanced Scorecards and modern methods of management. Most recent articles first
Managing strategy as a learning process
The Benefits managing Strategy as a Learning Process If, like many organisations, you want a more responsive and agile organisation that is sensitive to the changing demands of your environment, then the answer lies in the way your strategy and plans are managed: Your...
Deliberate or Emergent strategy: when to choose either or both
Deliberate or Emergent strategy: when considering strategy, planning and implementation, one choice is whether to have a strategy and a strategy management process, that is deliberate or emergent. There are, broadly, two ways to look at your strategy process:...
Measurement and target cultures: the problem and solutions
If you are in an organisation that has too many measures and targets, or relies on measures and targets to communicate your strategy and intention, then read on. This will help you diagnose the problem and point to some solutions. Watch the video and you can look at...
Moving to Emergent strategy: Make sure your balanced scorecard does not stop you
Talking with a Chief Executive the other week about a new strategy map and balanced scorecard for their organisation, he had realised the importance of emergent strategy and wondered how the modern strategy map and scorecard supported it. Deliberate strategy Like...
We manage by absorbing friction – and building up heat!
What role do, and should, our management systems play in protecting from, and connecting our organisations to, the volatility and uncertainty of the outside world? At a recent management presentation I suggested that the way we manage is designed to absorb friction. ...
Managing organisations in the same ways birds manage to fly together
Treat this as an off the wall, whimsical post - with a serious intent.... One thing that we all see far too much of - Management. One problem with many organisations is that we spend too much time managing, we create too many rules and practices and processes for...
7) Paradigm shifts that affect our organisations and how we manage.
Most recent articles first
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7) Thought provokers, designed to make you consider thinking differently about how we manage and our organisations:
Most recent articles first
Communicating Strategy – Ten heresies
During the initial research for my book, "Communicating Strategy" I found a web site that suggested: “You should not communicate your strategy, as it will leak your strategy to the competition”. I was incensed by this idea. I hope you are also, because, as you will...
Methodology is not the same as method: It should be the study of methods
I like to pay attention to our language, because how we speak gives us clues about how we think. In this case how we are failing to think about a subject. The use of one particular word really annoys me. That word is: methodology. Methodology is the study of...
Passion is NOT a strategy!
Let me be clear up front. Passion is not a strategy. I am fed up reading various web pages, listening to talks and hearing people say, they are "Passionate" about being whatever they are, or doing whatever they are doing.Let me be clear here:Passion is not a strategy!...
Forget your business model… What about your people model?
What is your people model? I hear lots of talk about an organisation's business model, or their operating model, or their service delivery model. It is a core part of what I do, understanding how the business, operation, or service is going to deliver and make...
Organisational structures do not exist – they are a myth!
OK, I can hear the squeals of anguish and dissent. "Of course organisational structures exist" I hear people say. We have organisations and we create structures and we do organisational design to place people within those structures. We spend time and effort and...
The Psychology of Management: Taking the long view
I am quite interested in the psychology of management because I think we tend to adopt psychological models of how management works, and how change happens, without necessarily questioning their assumptions and continued validity, or applicability. I also find that...
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