My life is a reflection of the power of strategy. I grew up as a working class kid in the 80s and early 90s in a small rural village in Germany. As long as I remember I wanted to escape what I perceived as an environment of narrow mindedness stifling creativity and personal expression. But […]
How Strategy Empowers You and Your Business Read Post »
Volkswagen, Porsche’s parent company, is planning to take Porsche public. Investors expect it to be one of Europe’s largest-ever listings; the IPOs could raise more than $10B. What a stock market debut this could become for Porsche! At the same time, news about Boeing tends to be less exciting, to say the least. The company
Why Porsche Is Flying High, And Boeing Isn’t Read Post »
The Four Winning Mindsets for your Breakthrough Life In our current times of transformation, global crises, and search for meaning, mindset is more important than skill to secure success. Sure, skill matters, but only so much. Studies show that over the long run, people with the right mindset can outperform those that started out with
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How Fear and Complacency Stand in the Way of Your Strategy
By Alex Brueckmann
A friend recently told me how much he enjoyed riding the ancient tractor they use in his family’s forest: “There are so many moving parts, all running flat out all the time, and you have to be really careful shifting it up a gear so things line up perfectly, but you’re off to the races once it’s in gear!”. That’s what your business might feel like as well: while still producing the result you want, it might feel a bit rusty, slightly dated in how it functions, not quite what you need anymore.
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The Business of Habits
By Alex Brueckmann
Habits are something mighty. So mighty they can destroy you: drinking, smoking, doing drugs, eating junk food. Other habits are less dangerous but harmful nonetheless: excessive social media consumption, binge watching your favorite streaming site, not getting enough sleep. Then there are healthy habits – they make us happy and can even help us become champions: physical exercise, playing an instrument, spending quality time with your spouse, kids, family, friends.
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Let’s unbuzz the buzzword “Strategy”
What Strategy is, and what it is not:
If you asked five of your colleagues what ‘strategy’ is, the odds are that you will receive six different answers. They might range from “a plan of how we create value” or “our priorities for the next few years” to “our approach to winning against our competitors” and “a framework against which we make decisions”. There is nothing wrong with these answers; and as a matter of fact, if you research business literature for a definition of the term strategy, I am pretty sure that you will find suggestions that match those ideas to a large degree. So, which definition is the most accurate? Who’s right?
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The culture imperative for executives – The supercharged organization
Culture is everywhere. Every organization, department or team has one. They either consciously created it, honed it over time into what some organizations call their ‘secret sauce’, as in ‘not copyable by the competition’. Or they have a culture that just appeared, accidentally, whatever it might be. Trust me, you don’t want an accidental culture. I’ve been there, I have seen what these cultures can look like and what they do to people. In accidental cultures, there are hardly any boundaries, the doors are open to all kinds of behaviours, even toxic ones like lying, cynicism, gossip and avoidance of accountability. As a result, people will burn out and leave. This is true for all kinds of organizations whether non-profit or for-profit.
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I first got in touch with strategy as a discipline in business school and found the subject incredibly boring. It was taught with little corporate context and had no visible connection to my own life. To me, at that point in time, strategy was all about theoretical frameworks without connection to the outside world. However, early in my post-university career this perception changed rapidly – and I realized how conscious leadership and strategy are intertwined, and how both are essential ingredients to business success.
