Tag Archives: Featured

BUSINESS STRATEGY QUESTIONS SET #006

Where and how does one begin the innovation process? Autodesk’s Innovation Strategist, Bill O’Connor, offers 7 questions:

  1. What could we look at in a new way?
  2. What could we use in a new way, or for the first time?
  3. What could we move, changing its position in space or time?
  4. What could we interconnect, for the first time or in a new way?
  5. What could we alter, in terms of design and performance?
  6. What can we make that is truly new?
  7. What can we imagine that would create a great experience for someone?

Source: https://labs.blogs.com/its_alive_in_the_lab/2016/08/the-autodesk-innovation-genome-is-part-of-a-process.html

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BUSINESS STRATEGY QUESTIONS SET #005

How to create an integrated view of strategy? According to Kevin J. Boudreau, the most essential questions to address are:

  1. What Value Are You Intending to Create, and for Whom?
  2. How Do You Plan to Deliver That Value?
  3. What Is Your Competitive Advantage — Your Sources of Uniqueness?

Read more at

(1) https://hbr.org/2017/10/a-short-guide-to-strategy-for-entrepreneurs

(2) Designing Your Company: Creating, Delivering, and Capturing Value, Harvard Business School Strategy Unit Working Paper No. 16-131

BUSINESS STRATEGY QUESTIONS SET #003

What do you do better than others?

Is your entire organization aligned to do everything with this thinking?

If yes, then you are a “coherent” company. Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi suggest taking a “Coherence Test” as illustrated in the image below.

 

Based on this, Paul Leinwand and Matthias Bäumler have listed the following 8 tough strategy questions.

References: (1) https://hbr.org/2017/11/8-tough-questions-to-ask-about-your-companys-strategy (2) https://hbr.org/2010/06/the-coherence-premium

BUSINESS STRATEGY QUESTIONS SET #002

How effectively are you implementing your business strategy?

The seven questions designed by Harvard professor Robert Simons could help answer that question:

1 – Who is your primary customer?
2 – How do you prioritize the needs of shareholders, employees, and customers with your core values?
3 – What critical performance variables are you tracking?
4 – What strategic boundaries have you set?
5 – How are you generating creative tension?
6 – How committed are your employees to helping each other?
7 – What strategic uncertainties keep you awake at night?

See more details at http://www.free-management-ebooks.com/news/simons-seven-strategy-questions/

Get Clear

How does an entrepreneur GET CLEAR?  Really clear about business, customers, profits and the entire spectrum that makes up an entrepreneur’s life.

How CLEAR are you about your business goals, most profitable market segments, long-term strategy, day-to-day business operations and the integration of all these with your life goals?

You may have an immediate sense of what you think you want. It could be one or more of the following:

  • Better Margins, More Profits, More Revenues
  • More Customers, High Ticket Customers, Customer Retention
  • New Market Segments, Products, Services
  • Get out of day-to-day Firefighting (Crisis Management)
  • Create more time for creating new avenues for your business instead of being stuck in day-to-day crisis handling
  • Find better employees (who own their work and are proactive)
  • Build Better Systems
  • Streamline your operations in such a way that your employees take ‘complete responsibility’ for their roles & solve problems proactively instead of making excuses

Whatever is on your list, it is often difficult to decide where to start.

Seth Godin has a riff titled “The Priority List”. He says, the ability to decide “what to do next” is an underrated skill. For example, he says:

Is it better to email an existing customer, send a brochure to a prospect or improve your product a bit? Should you tweet or post a new blog post? Should you have a meeting to coordinate your team or spend ten minutes returning phone calls instead?

His tip:

Do you have a list? Have you figured out which metric you’re trying to improve? Can you measure the impact of the choices you make all day?

I see this mistake in business development all the time. Assume for a moment that the goal of someone in this department is to maximize profit. Why then would this group spend most of its time tweaking existing deals (looking for a 3% improvement in yield) instead of spending the same time and effort doing new, game-changing deals?

If you already have your LIST along with corresponding MEASURES, and you are still struggling to “Get Clear”, then what could be missing is clarity regarding your goals.

When did you last review your Goals? What are you REALLY up to?

Stephen R. Covey said “Priority is a function of context.”

So, WHY are you doing whatever you are doing?

Is that CLEAR?

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