Executive Leadership

Executive Leadership, Leadership, Strategic Thinking, Strategy

If You Hire Big Consulting to Design Your Strategy, You Might As Well Be Fired


For decades, the saying went: “No one ever got fired for hiring McKinsey or BCG.” These firms, and others like them, represented the gold standard for corporate strategy. But recently, a seismic shift is shaking this narrative. A top executive I know of was recently unceremoniously removed by their board—not for incompetence or malfeasance, but […]

If You Hire Big Consulting to Design Your Strategy, You Might As Well Be Fired
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Culture, Executive Leadership, Leadership, Personal growth

10 uncomfortable truths every leader should read

When you’ve been around long enough, you see patterns in behavior, individual and organizational. And you hear people say things, and repeat them again and again, sometimes really stupid things. When I say ‘stupid’, I mean misinformed, shortsighted, and simple plain wrong things that people hear and then repeat. Often they perpetuate fads and myths

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Culture, Executive Leadership, Leadership

What effective team development looks like – and what you should avoid

If you ask 10 CEOs whether they’d like their business to have a winning strategy, you’d probably get 11 “yes” responses. Everyone wants their business to lead with a great strategy, of course. Chances are that out of those same 10 CEOs, the majority would start strategy at the wrong end: the strategy itself. Yes,

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Executive Leadership, Leadership, Strategy

Why ELTs struggle to focus on strategy and how to overcome It

Executive Leadership Teams (ELTs) often find it challenging to shift gears, from day-to-day operations to long-term strategy. This brings a number of challenges, the most obvious ones is that the No.1 ELT responsibility is shaping strategy and culture. No-one else can take this job off their plates. Here are the main reasons behind this struggle

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Executive Leadership, Storytelling, Strategy

Aligning Employees on Strategy – The Art of Strategic Dialogues

Why do strategies fail? Apart from making wrong choices, one topic stands out: failure to engage teams and help them understand a new strategy. Strategy communication is so crucial, yet few companies truly nail it.  Before you can link individual roles, responsibilities, and targets to the strategy, people need to understand what the strategy means

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Executive Leadership, Performance, Strategy

Great Teams Create Great Strategy. But Most Teams aren’t Teams.

Think about strategy conversations as a seed. And think about your team environment as soil. If the seed falls on toxic or infertile soil, and nothing will grow from it, but weeds. Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith conceptualized the team performance curve, a J-shaped graph, illustrating five levels of teamwork. Unless you become at least

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Executive Leadership, Learning & Development, Strategy

Two Must-Have Resources To Design More Impactful Strategy

Two approaches have proven particularly effective to start aligning leadership teams at the beginning of a strategy and identity process: Combining a 360-degree feedback and a team assessment. These tools address individual leadership challenges and create transparency about a team’s level of functionality. Functional team consisting of conscious leaders will dare to create strategy beyond

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Board of Directors, Corporate Governance, Executive Leadership

The Fish Stinks from its Head: When Boards of Directors Cause More Harm Than Good

The fish stinks from its head. A sentence describing that issues in a business can usually be traced back to the executive table. And that’s what typically happens. We’re quick to blame executives for a lack of leadership, a lack of business strategy, a lack of setting the tone for the desired culture. The reality

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Culture, Executive Leadership, Leadership, Strategy

The Essence of Executive Leadership: Nailing Business Strategy and Culture

What’s the job of an executive leader? So many thoughts come to mind. But in a nutshell it comes down two two things: they’ve got to define the choices to win in a company’s chosen marketplace (that’s business strategy) and make sure everyone’s vibing on the same frequency (that’s company culture). Crafting a Business Strategy

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