Strategy
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 [...]
Innovation is a way of doing business
Many involved in innovation are buried in the R&D departments of large corporations. This isn’t right. There are a few who sit at a senior level and may be called Innovation Director or Head of strategy and innovation. I’m not sure that this is right either. I see innovation as a process. It is not [...]
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 [...]
The value of business operations
One significant weakness in many business strategies, is that they do not appreciate the value that business operations can bring to achieveing both competitive advantage and success. Once the domain of manufacturing, business operations is now the mainstream way in which any business works. perhaps the better way to think about business operations is to [...]
Innovation as a strategic target
Many businesses have ‘innovation’ as a strategic target or goal. However many are uncertain as to what this means or more importantly how they go about achieving innovation. what it means for the business and how to know when innovation has happened.
Thoughtcrew uses Biomimetics as the source of inspiration for innovation. We help identify the [...]
Business projects - did we solve the problem?
Projects
There seems to be a difference between what people think project management is and how they go about managing projects. Our view is pretty simple. We see the project as a finite piece of work that delivers a result - often solving a business problem. It rarely is IT alone and often IT takes a [...]
