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Writings
Stockton Graham & Co.
Balanced Scorecard – Looking Back A Year Later
It’s been about a year since Stockton Graham & Co. (www.stocktongraham.com) created its first Balanced Scorecard. At the time, the 10 year old wholesale specialty beverage company in Raleigh NC was a profitable multimillion dollar business. But Jeff Vojta, the company’s founder and CEO, was dissatisfied with the company’s rate of growth and was looking for a better way to create and communicate a strategy that would focus the entire organization on its most important activities and outcomes.
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Making the Best from the Worst
How Some Companies Will Use This Recession to Pull Ahead
We’re in a terrible global recession. Some businesses will contract and/or abandon markets. Others may go out of business. However, companies with smart management teams will use these troubled times to improve their market position. For them this recession will have a silver lining. Read More... |
Strategic Management for Everyone
Strategic management is simply a process that connects the strategy to the operating cycle so that the organization thinks and acts strategically. We become what we think about most of the time. This idea is the foundation of all personal and organizational success. But what are we thinking about most of the time? Are we thinking about ways to achieve specific goals together? Or are we distracted by unclear priorities and conflicting demands on our time and resources? Read More... |
Program, Place and Pace
How every company can succeed at strategic planning and execution
Most people would agree that the primary goal of a business is to grow profits on a sustained basis. However, a Bain study showed that only 20% of companies were able to grow profits more than 5% a year over a 10 year period. On closer analysis, what set the sustained winners apart from the rest was their ability to develop a strategic plan and execute it, a practice referred to as strategic management. Read More... |
What Is Our Strategy?
Times Are Tough
As I write this, the US government is working on a $700 billion financial rescue package to avert an economic crisis of unprecedented proportions. The outcome is uncertain. But what is certain is that the economy is slowing and things will get worse before they get better. Read More... |
Does the Balance Scorecard Need a New Name?
Let’s face it, for people who don’t know what the Balanced Scorecard is, the name itself can be a turn off. It makes it sound complex, technical, judgmental, and definitely not fun. Is it a complicated metrics exercise? Do bad scores get people in trouble? Does it involve expensive software? And who uses it? Is it a C-level tool to control the workforce? Should we stay away from it? Read More... |
Long Term Perspective: Seeing is Achieving
As business leaders I think we all believe that we could generate amazing financial outcomes if we could simply get everyone to work together on the right things. In other words, what if everyone asked themselves continuously: “What can I do today to help the company achieve its long term goals?” Read More... |
Blue Ocean Strategy
How Opposite Thinking Can Lead to Breakthrough Strategy
This post is an overview of an increasingly popular strategy formulation process, and highlights the steps to finding ‘Blue Oceans’ where competitors are few and profits are large. The concepts covered in this article are Noncustomers, Strategy Canvas, and Four Action Framework. What if you could charge $4 for a cup of coffee? Read More... |
Thoughts on Strategy
Many companies have a strategic planning process they engage in on an annual basis. In spite of that, MOST fail to produce and execute a strategy that supports sustained profitable growth. Why? We’ll share the secrets to successful planning in this and subsequent Insights. Read More... |
Southwest Airlines - How and When, Not If
This is the second article in a 2 part series. Last time we looked at how Southwest Airlines and other successful companies carefully target a well defined market in order to eventually dominate it. By focusing on a winnable market they are able to concentrate all of their limited resources thereby increasing their chances of success. Read More... |
The Universal Framework
I recently returned from a well attended 2-day strategy conference in LA hosted by ASP, the Association of Strategic Planners. I enjoyed many of the presentations from the strategy experts there, including some from notable firms like Bain and Accenture. As I think through what I heard and learned, it clarified for me that there is indeed a simple, universal framework that generates compounding positive results … if we pay attention to it. These are the five elements of the “Universal Framework”: Read More... |
To the Fly Zone and Beyond
How business infrastructure creates competitive advantage.
“Can you hear me now?” Who hasn’t asked that question in reaction to a weak cellular phone connection? We used to ask it more often when cellular operators were beginning to build out their networks. But over the years they have invested heavily in network infrastructure and, as a result, their business has grown. Read More... |
It’s True: People Trump Processes and Technology
I was excited to read a long article in the February 2010, Balanced Scorecard Report by business intelligence guru Howard Dresner, author of The Performance Management Revolution, in which he shares a recent revelation. He states that for an organization to succeed it must first attend to its culture and that “people trump processes and technology every time”. This is indeed exciting stuff because many of us who have been working with companies to improve performance through strategy, process, technology and people have learned that sustained improvement absolutely requires the development of performance-directed behaviors. That’s not what one typically reads in the literature.. Therefore it’s helpful to the cause when someone of stature in the industry “officially” asserts the role of culture in creating improvement. Read More... |
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