When I feel like I am living right at the centre of a paradox or a pull in multiple directions, I’m usually in the right place.
For example, I noticed myself giving this apparently contradictory advice to clients recently:
“Keep your eye on the prize and be clear what game you’re playing. It’s easy to get distracted by relatively unimportant activities and outcomes at the expense of the most important things that deserve our attention…”
Continue reading “Big and Small Wins Matter”It’s Book Club week (join us here if you’re curious—no reading required, and this week’s theme is True Riches) and in preparation I was reading The 5 Types of Wealth by Sahil Bloom.
One of his core ideas is this: “Everything comes from what you put first.” He recommends developing a “life razor”, explaining a razor as a principle that allows you to quickly remove unlikely explanations or avoid unnecessary steps to simplify decision making. (He provides a few examples, such as Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”)
Continue reading “Sharpening your Razor”Last week, I wrote about one reason not everyone in your organization will be able to see themselves clearly in your strategy. Today, we’ll explore a second reason.
Sometimes, in an effort to make a strategic plan thorough and inclusive, we see it as an inventory of everything we currently do.
A strategy is not an inventory—it’s a filter.
Continue reading “Filter not Inventory”I often hear clients talk about the importance of all staff being able to “see themselves in the new strategy.”
It’s an appeal for relevance and inclusion, and I get it. But it’s the role of strategic leaders to help each person see themselves in the strategy—it’s not the role of the strategy itself to reflect everybody’s work.
Continue reading “A Flattering Mirror”Strategic planning is not just for corporations—lots of my one-on-one coaching work feels like strategy-building for individuals too. And that’s a space I’m curious about—as group activities that also apply to individuals, and vice versa.
So over the next few weeks, I’m going to write about what strategic planning is and isn’t, and I’d invite you to view it through both an individual and collective lens, as I suspect it will apply to both.
Continue reading “Strategic Leadership”
