Engage the people
It has been said that the most important job of any manager or leader is to both engage and grow their staff, and even their successors! Additionally, if you are an entrepreneur or business owner you actually make your business significantly more valuable if you engage and grow your team, in effect, to make yourself […]
Master your measures
I first came across this approach of looking at data when I was undertaking a Master’s degree with the world’s first Professor of Quality Management, a great guy called John Oakland. Now, this thinking and these tools and techniques are so powerful (and so criminally (IMHO) under-utilised) that if I didn’t have a mortgage to […]
Know the flow
In the last blog, we looked at articulating intent and defining your organisational purpose, which defines the value that is delivered to your clients. We are now going to look into the processes and practises that are instrumental to the delivery of your purpose. So, if we want to build a robust management system that […]
Articulate intent
As an owner manager there is a key question you might want to consider contemplating: What is your (company) purpose? I don’t mean to make a profit – that’s a result. When we think of an organisation’s purpose, we are thinking about the job you do for your clients and customers that they can’t do […]
5 steps to business planning
Well, it’s that time of year again, the Christmas songs are out and I’m already out of Whamageddon, having heard that damn song “Last Christmas” on the very first day of December! All far too early for me! In the words of another famous singer, Mr Lennon, “Another year over and what have we done?” […]
Mission, vision, values… what’s the purpose?
Many organisations publish their mission, vision and values statements but what is the purpose? The question above is actually two questions: The obvious one of “what is the purpose of a mission, vision and values statements?” The second is perhaps more interesting: What is the “purpose” of an organisation and how does this differ from […]
SWOT analysis
The SWOT analysis is probably the archetypal marketing or business planning tool, the origins for which seem have been lost in the mists of time. Some credit an American business thinker, a guy called Albert Humphrey, who worked at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) for its invention. However, whilst he developed other tools, […]
Porter analysis
When to use it Porter’s Five Forces Model is another well-known, top-level, battle-hardened, often deployed tool for analysing the external competitive environment a business faces, but whereas PESTEL works at the macro-environmental level (looking at the issues beyond the control of the company), Porter works at a level below that, where, very significantly, given the […]
PESTEL analysis
PESTEL analysis is probably one of the most well-known, top-level, battle-hardened and frequently deployed business planning tools – a great tool! PESTEL being an acronym for Political, Economic, Socio-cultural, Technological, Environmental and Legislation. When we first came across the tool (some 30 years ago) it was simply PEST analysis: the EL has been added along […]
Taming complexity, problem solving and introducing Ishikawa
If you have a serious problem, it’s critical to explore everything that might cause it, before you start thinking about solutions. Ishikawa, or cause-effect analysis, is a brilliant tool for doing just this. Cause and effect Most of us assume that the relationship between cause and effect is both simple and direct as in the […]
