Plans: Control over Clarity

Organizations cling to strategic planning (despite strong evidence of its ineffectiveness), partially because many have experienced the downside of randomness. New boss, new direction. New Board Chair, new direction. One really aggressive employee in another...

The Insanity of Strategic Planning

In a keynote session last week about Humanize, I once again challenged the effectiveness of strategic planning. In the book, strategic planning is one of three traditional management “best practices” that we shine a critical light on, revealing that there...

Strategy Means Change

I did some strategy work with a client this week where they were drilling down below the level of core strategic principles and actually figuring out what they were going to do differently to move in their desired direction. I fully admit, I love the big picture stuff...

But You’re Just Not Doing it Right

That’s the response I get from the people who are very passionate about strategic planning. In case you don’t know me, I think strategic planning is horrible. In Humanize, we devote nearly 8 full pages to why strategic planning doesn’t work. And...

Strategy and Context

Sohrab Vossoughi wrote a great post on HBR about Sony and how its successful strategy in the 1980s ended up being unique to that context. In other words, a winning strategy is context specific, thus it needs to evolve and grow (we talk about this in Humanize in the...

A Different Kind of Vision

In an organizational context, the word “vision” will often score you a point in “buzzword bingo.” And that’s too bad, because like a lot of those words, it has some important meaning behind it. On the other hand, I get why it has achieved...
Jamie Notter