Do you have trouble leading your employees or co-workers to execute your vision? Does your strategy seem to fall on deaf ears? Join Brandon and Rick as they discuss Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy/Bad Strategy book in light of a story about Notre Dame’s legendary football coach Knute Rockne and his four horsemen of the apocalypse. Take away some tips on the first of this two part series in guiding your employees and co-workers toward your strategic horizon.
- Does the direction you give to your employees amount to just “fluff?”
- Encourage participants to ask the strategy leader (and others) what he/she means by buzz words they use.
- Do you avoid facing challenges?
- Be candid and expose a “white elephant” that may be in the room.
- Check with your employees or most loyal customers about your company’s short-comings.
- Are you just making goals, as opposed to strategy?
- If you cannot do a full blow strategic plan, at least use the SWOT analysis to get you in the strategic mindset of thinking. It will at least help you in focusing on the STRATEGY to realizing your goals, as to opposed to just listing the goals themselves.
- Do you have bad strategic objections? (Suggestions based on Rumsfelts book)
- Don’t mistake a long list of things to do and label them strategies. For example: Don’t list a diverse set of objectives that has no cohesiveness towards a specific horizon.
- Don’t establish a strategy that is so obscure or outlandish that your company cannot design actions to get to your strategic objectives. For example: You want your company to be the best in the world at producing movies. OK, how?
- Don’t shift strategic objectives in midstream without giving them a chance to develop. This could mean that you did not establish a good objective from the outset.
Moral: Your employees need direction. It is up to you to be clear and complete in where you want your company to go.
