Over a period of weeks, I’ve been deconstructing and exploring how we meet and make strategic decisions. Given our current pandemic reality, strategic retreats are neither possible nor desirable. My question was how they can be replicated online, and—for extra bonus points—whether it was possible for those meetings to be more effective than what we are more traditionally used to. I was cautiously optimistic at the outset. I’m now quite confident that it is actually possible.
Got a KPI For That?
While this is likely to come across as controversial, I’m going to say it anyway: If you care most about key performance indicators, then you likely don’t care about what matters most. And that’s a challenge. In my view, it’s a challenge of terminology, of ideology and of narrow-minded thinking masquerading as holistic solution. But semantics are important. And the words you use say a lot about what you value.
On Writing
I write. A lot. I work as a management consultant, but it could be argued instead that I’m a professional writer. My work products are reports, documents, presentations and emails. Over the course of my career, though, how I write—and what I focus on and value—has evolved. A great deal.
Focus & Follow-Through
Know what you want. And go do it. These are the essential elements of success. There’s a very careful balance to walk here between doing for the sake of doing, and taking action because it will move us forward. And there is a simple test to know which is which.
On Not Ticking The Boxes
It’s easy to get into a routine—and a rut—where the work that we do is just ticking the boxes. It’s a great deal harder to think about how the work that we do gets used, and what we need to do to make it as easy as possible for the work gets used. But doing so makes all the difference.
Exercising Agency: What To Do When Politics Gets In The Way
Politics is a challenging concept. We tend to view the term ‘organizational politics’ negatively, often seeing it as competitive, antagonistic, manipulative and dysfunctional. Certainly organizational politics can be all of these things, but it doesn’t have to be.