Leadership
Natural nationalism
The family is the basic unit of society acording to my good friend Guy. A collection of families are a village, town or city and a collection of these are a nation. Of course in nature there are examples of such systems in place and equally those that spread their subsequent generations far and wide. [...]
The next big thing in consulting
Biomimetics is the next big thing in consulting acording to a group of senior business leaders that attended the latest briefing by Phil Richardson of Thoughtcrew. Exploring the application of the new models and theories developed by Phil on his PhD at the University of Bath the invited audience were enthusiastic about the application of [...]
Avoiding the crunch in mergers and acquisitions
Phil Richardson of Thoughtcrew talks to Danny Davies from DD Consulting about the mergers and acquisition marketplace. Danny runs DDConsulting and is a trustee for the Chartered Institute of Management. Here are the questions and answers from that session. If you want to ask a question then please use the comments section or you can [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
