At least that’s the impression you might get if you believe everything you read. I spend quite a bit of time reading academic and business forums and inevitably I see the same misconceptions everywhere I go. As an MBA graduate (and a DBA student) I take offense to many of the comments I read, some [...]
The Orlando area – at least where I travel – hasn’t seemed to be hit too bad by the financial mess we’re in. Unfortunately, I think we’ve just been delayed a little. Over the past couple of months I’ve seen a number of large franchise businesses completely shut down, but one surprised me: Boston Market. [...]
A SWOT analysis is a great tool to understand your operating environment. However, misusing this tool can – at best – prove to be useless. This post is a quick introduction to the SWOT, how to use it, and how to get the most out of it!
The cornerstone of any decision making process is to know the environment in which you work. However, “knowing” your environment simply is not enough – in terms of strategic management, anyways. What we need is a way to list these factors, rate them relative to one-another, and determine how we stack-up when it comes to [...]
Over the past several months I have been looking into what ROI means for the Public Sector. The term gets thrown around quite a bit and government programs are all-too-often “judged” based on their ROI, but what does ROI really mean in this context? Is it even appropriate to use the term? I say “NO”!
I did a little searching this weekend on the idea of “refusing to fail” looking for real discussion of what this mentality does to individuals and organizations. As I expected, what I found was a slew of motivational articles, audio books, and speakers discussing how to be more motivated. The contention is that if you [...]
The first step to any strategic management (or planning) process is defining the Mission and Vision of your organization. So…what does that mean? Very simple: A mission is what you do, your purpose, the reason you exist. A Vision describes what you want to become, how you want to get there, who you want to [...]
I think I’ve jumped-the-gun a bit with my posts. I realized that I began discussing advanced applications and tools in the Strategic Management process but never actually defined what strategic management is!
How do we make decisions? Depending on the size of the company or program, that answer tends to be very involved. Turning the question on me, I would reply with a number of different metrics: Cost, Political issues, technical worthiness, and so on… The problem is that none of these options are equally weighted. What [...]
I’m sure many people have seen – or at least heard of – the 70/20/10 concept developed by Eric Schmidt (Google CEO). It essentially states: 70% of your time/resources are spent on core business activities 20% is spent on related activities 10% is spent on spent on unrelated activities.