Critical to the success of every organization, strategy is not a long planning exercise or document. Strategy can be simple, fun and effective and is founded on a set of five interrelated and powerful choices that positions an organization to win.

ON Strategy

Playing To win
At best, Management Models help managers make better choices faster, without having to go back to first principles to build their decisions from the ground up. However, at their worst, they perpetuate the making of bad decisions. That is why when it comes to Management Models, quality is key.

ON Management Models

A New Way to Think

Integrative thinking is a form of reasoning which allows you to constructively face the tensions of opposing models. Instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, you generate a creative solution. Your solution contains elements of the individual models, but is superior to each.

ON Integrative Thinking

Creating Great Choices

Organizations need to incorporate the best of design thinking into their ways of working to unleash innovation and creativity. An organization will be able to counter-balance analytical thinking with intuitive thinking – to enable it to both exploit existing knowledge and create new knowledge. 

ON Design of Business

The Design Of Business

While prevailing theory holds that stock-based compensation perfectly aligns corporate executives’ incentives with those of shareholders, it does the opposite. As a consequence, executives have done brilliantly while shareholders have become increasingly frustrated. Incentives and governance practice needs to be transformed to enable corporations to prosper in a way that better serves society.

ON Incentives & Governance

Fixing the Game

The combination of the stagnation of medium incomes and the rapid rise of high incomes is threatening the future of democratic capitalism. Its predictive future requires building a more robust knowledge, transactional and physical infrastructure for broadly shared prosperity.

ON Democratic Capitalism

When More is Not Better

For both social entrepreneurs and corporations, the key tenet of social innovation is finding ways to make the world a better place. My work focuses on building tools for social entrepreneurs to create more powerful models for creating value for society and developing models to guide corporations on a path of productive corporate citizenship.

ON Social Innovation

Getting Beyond Better

STRATEGY

Great strategy is critical to the success of every organization.  That notwithstanding, most managers find strategy to be more complicated, arduous and ineffectual than either they would wish or is productive for their organizations. It doesn’t have to be so.  Strategy can and should be simple, fun and effective.  But that requires a clear definition of what strategy is and a simple process for making strategy choices.

In 2013, I wrote a book called Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works with P&G CEO A.G. Lafley, with whom I work closely, to clarify and simplify strategy to make it a powerful tool for managers. That requires having a clear definition of strategy: strategy is choice.  Strategy is not a long planning document; it is a set of interrelated and powerful choices that positions the organization to win.  There are five key choices in the Strategy Choice Cascade:

  1. What is our winning aspiration?
  2. Where will we play?
  3. How will we win where we have chosen to play?
  4. What capabilities must be in place to win?
  5. What management systems are required to ensure the capabilities are in place?   

Making strategy choices is never easy because it means doing some things at the expense of others.  I have worked for 20 years on developing and honing a process that I call the Strategic Choice Structuring process that helps managers work together to make powerful choices.

Armed with a definition of strategy as choice, the Strategy Choice Cascade and the Strategic Choice Structuring process, any manager in any organization can build powerful strategies.    

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Watch "A Plan is Not a Strategy" from Harvard Business Review