Strategic Thinking for Organizational Change Managers
Many people confess that change is difficult. It is hard for individuals to get away from their comfort zone, get into the discomfort of starting something new, and then create a brand new comfort zone. (Notice Lewin’s unfreezing, reforming and refreezing process). Expand this for the thousands of people in your organisation and suddenly the problem becomes intractable. Indeed getting a whole group of people aligned towards a new goal, a new strategy, a new process, or even
Should LTA censure SMRT for chartering their trains to ACS(I) – an imaginative sketch between a stra
So, SMRT chartered out five trains to carry students from Anglo-Chinese School (International) to the Sports Hub for a rugby game. A total of about 3,000 students were ferried. (Read theYahoo news article here). When the news of the service broke, and reporters queried the Land Transport Authority (LTA), they responded that SMRT should have sought approval from them before agreeing to provide the service. They are now said to be mulling over whether to censure SMRT for that.
Use this framework to monitor your business growth!
Take a look at the chart. This is from Google Analytics for our website for July this year compared to the month before. The numbers aren’t exactly something to write home about, what with only 383 users and 2,040 page views. Yet, I am happy because it tells me that what we have been doing over the past month has been paying off. With the exception of “New Sessions” (Google-speak for new visitors to the website), all the other perspectives are green, which means that it has i
Overcome “Inventors’ Blindness” by market-testing your ideas
So you think you’re on to the next best thing after sliced bread? Well, I am sure two people in this world would agree with you – you and your mom. But two people don’t make a market, even if you have just one jelly sandwich to sell! As a business owner and product developer myself, I often find that people don’t understand my ideas; and if they didn’t, well, they weren’t really my target audience in the first place! So I continue to defend my product against “criticism”. Yet
How to make organic growth work for you – tips for established companies and for startups
Having worked with small and large companies alike, I have come to appreciate the difference between the two in terms of growing businesses organically. Obviously, large established companies have greater resources at their disposal to make organic growth work, and their approach tends to be more cautious, hugging traditional means more. Startups, by their very bootstrapping nature, exclusively apply organic growth principles to their business and their approach would be less
Powering up your insight to make the future a little more certain
I introduced the concept of bracketing in an earlier post. When you apply bracketing to a situation, you want to see the limits of the upside and the downside potential. In that way, you can have a sense of the spread of uncertainty of that particular option. RELATED: If your future is uncertain, bracket it! In most situations, you will find the spread very large and to make a decision based on whether we will be at the top end or the bottom end of the bracket is difficult.
Should I quit my business? - A strategic consideration for businesses in the red
Resulting from the sleeper success of my LinkedIn post which garnered more than 85,000 views (see When is it time to call it quits?), I received many emails from business owners asking if it was time for them to quit their business. Some have been at it for 3, 5 or 8 years, all of which time not returning a profit. Imagine running an unprofitable business for 8 years! Who is funding the loss? So today we take a look at that question, specifically meant for business owners who
Are you an emotional thinker? Then you need to read this...
"First the charioteer of the human soul drives a pair, and secondly one of the horses is noble and of noble breed, but the other quite the opposite in breed and character. Therefore in our case the driving is necessarily difficult and troublesome" Plato wrote that allergory to the human soul and described the mind as being driven by two horses - one of noble breed, referring to the rational mind; and the other of wilder breed, referring to the emotional mind. And it is the ch
Why good success metrics make all the difference between success and failure!
I was facilitating a strategic decision for the management team of a shipyard in Singapore that was thinking of setting up a Super-Yard; one that can handle three times the number of ships it was currently handling. The intent of their decision was so that they could be the number one ship repair company in the world. I then asked them to identify the success metrics – the measurements that would explain what that meant. They bandied around revenue numbers, profit numbers, ma
What is your strategic thinking quotient? Take this test to find out!
Wouldn't it be great if there was an IQ test for strategic thinking? What if there was some way we could test how strategic we are in our thinking? Unfortunately, there is none. However, we have devised a simple questionnaire to look at how we think and what that transcends to with regards to strategic thinking. Now, before you go ahead and do the assessment, understand that this is NOT a psychological test and it has not been designed for reliability or validity. Instead it
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