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Leadership

This category contains 17 posts

Why insight is essential and software can’t provide it

Essential: vitally important, fundamental
Insight: penetrating and often sudden understanding, as of a complex situation or problem
I once asked the inventor of a clever search engine to build a business analysis engine - a software machine into which we might pour gigabytes of business data and then ask a series of broad questions. It would [...]

Aligning your strategies

One of the biggest challenges facing any leadership team is getting alignment between the functional strategies. Strategy maps provide a way in which this alignment can be made. They also can provide a useful link to creating a balanced scorecard. The strategy maps work on four levels.
1 Finance:what are the overall financial objectives?
2 Customer: [...]

30% growth possible using lessons from the sand crab

Last night Phil Richardson presented a talk on biomimetics in Bath to the Marketing Network. A wide range of people attended including an MD of a successful high growth senior interim businesses, innovation people from FMCG businesses and marketing professionals. Phil presented the sand crab and demonstrated how this biological system could be used to [...]

CRM project not quite going to plan?

You will no doubt be aware of the ‘buzz’ surrounding something called CRM or customer relationship management. In some cases it might be referred to as ERM ( enterprise relationship management), customer loyalty, or even the customer experience.
It all means the same thing.
“How do I/we make money?”
Essentially all the terms above are concerned with the [...]

Finally something for business project management that isn’t Microsoft Project

Defining the future business and understanding the complexity of the existing business takes some serious planning, thinking and analysis. Our approach it a bit different to some you may have experienced. We start with the end in mind. Creating a view of the future then look back at the current situation to see what we [...]

Come and challenge us to think bigger!

As consultants we get a buzz from improving the clients position. We really enjoy the feeling of tackling a problem alongside the client and then being able to demonstrate that we have a working solution. This means that we don’t like being told what to do (come and run a workshop, facilitate a meeting, interview [...]

Your first 100 days

Your first 100 days
If you have just started in a new business, department or project you might find the following five steps a useful place to start.
1 Decide what your product or service is
2 Decide who your customers will be
3 Plan how you will sell your product to the target customers
4 Define how you will [...]