This past week I gave a short talk at the Wipe out Waste Annual Banquet to honor companies who have done excellent work in the Charlotte region to wipe out waste.  The event was sponsored by Mecklenburg County and several business organizations. My topic – the circular economy which refers to a regenerative system in…

I’ve often mentioned GE as a company to watch as it goes through its transition. I could not resist writing about them in this week’s blog since just about a year ago, in August 2017, General Electric brought in John Flannery to help revive the company. In November, the new CEO said the company was streamlining…

My work on upward mobility has led me to unexpected places.  One of the unexpected places has been an exploration of unconscious bias.  I am a research consumer on related topics and I’ve learned that we humans have lots of unconscious biases.  I also learned what is meant by systems thinking and institutionalized biases such…

Upward mobility is an issue throughout the world, and the U.S. is no exception. In earlier blogs and newsletters, I reported on Raj Chetty’s work. A defining feature of the “American Dream” is upward income: the idea that children have a higher standard of living than their parents. Chetty’s work shows that children’s prospects of earning…

Several people have contacted me recently in regards to implementing a strategy. So, here is my view of the important principles for effective strategy implementation. Principles guide behavior and they serve to alert others what is important in the organization. What are the principles you advocate? I summarize my ideas in four phrases: Dreams +…

Over the last few months, I’ve been outlining my approach to strategic thinking. One way to summarize this approach is to list a set of questions you can ask of your organization about internal analyses, external analyses, gaining focus, and quality implementation- the four criteria for an effective strategy. I’ve added a fifth area, questions…

Competition occurs at the business-unit level and it is essential that a firm uses the tools of competitive strategy in order to create a competitive advantage for its business units. Many firms have more than one business unit and compete in multiple industries. That being said, a multi-business firm must have a corporate strategy that…

Dozens of schools of thought claim to have the most widely applicable and useful framework for strategy development and implementation. The purpose of the table below is to show how an organization can choose the most appropriate fine-tuning school of thought in order to make for a compelling argument to proceed in one direction versus…

A main benefit of strategic thinking is that it creates a strategic mindset that is cognizant of several principles: All organizational members contribute to strategic thinking and have a means to contribute to what to do and what not to do. Organizational leaders do their best strategy work by finding ways to involve as many…

I’ve organized this material to take account of inevitable uncertainties, proven principles, and the connection between strategy content (what is or should be the strategy of the organization) and strategy process (how to determine the strategy and how to best implement it). Strategy content and strategy process are treated with equal importance as two sides…