Organizations of all sizes play a similar game every year. Groups of talented, highly motivated men and women invest weeks, if not months, creating plans and budgets for the upcoming year. Then, as a friend of mine describes it, the tournament begins. And, like most competitions, there are winners and losers.
Category: Strategic Planning
How many budget meetings have you been in during your career? For me, the number would have to be in the hundreds, maybe thousands. I’m guessing our drill is similar to yours… infinite ideas chasing finite dollars. Today, we were trying to rank order our budget requests.
Categories
What's In Your Future?
Leaders are paid to see the future. As I’ve written before, seeing the unseen is at the core of our job description. However, we also live with the on-going awareness the future we see doesn’t exist yet; but we know it can, if we build it.
I am very fortunate to work with some really smart people. This has many benefits, not the least of which is the opportunity to learn something everyday from my colleagues. In a recent planning meeting, we were discussing factors impacting our business and someone asked the question: “Is that a trend or an issue?”
Categories
Who Is Your Competition?
Who is your competition? It may not be who you think it is. I was reminded of this again recently as I read a Knowledge@Wharton interview with MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga. You might think MasterCard’s competition would be American Express or Citibank – no, Ajay says their competition is cash.
I had two experiences Saturday that reminded me of a little discussed responsibility of leaders – maintain relevance. We must not only work to stay relevant ourselves, we must help the brands and organizations we serve maintain relevance in a changing world.
This is the final installment in this short series on big questions leaders ask. The truth is I could write a hundred posts on questions leaders ask. But, rather than write about the many, I’ve chosen to focus on the big three – Where are we going? Where are we today? And, today’s question: How will we get there?
Tension is a wonderful thing. We often don’t see it that way. We mistakenly wish we could eliminate tension. That would not be good. There are some tensions that will always exist and the outcomes of that tension are a good thing.
At this stage in the growth of our organization, it feels like we are in perpetual planning mode. We literally have planning meetings at least 9 months out of every year! Not only have we been working on our 2014 plans, we’ve continued to work on our 2020 plans, which we started formulating about 2 years ago.
Several years ago, I had the fantastic opportunity to attend the Harvard Advanced Management Program. If you don’t know about AMP, it’s an 8-week resident program in Boston. During those weeks, I joined leaders from more than 40 countries to examine and learn from over 100 business cases. It was a fantastic experience! One of my favorite topics was business turnarounds.