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Checklist for Setting up a Strategic Plan -- To Win

What factors make for a strategic plan that you and your company actually will do? Here are key questions to ask yourself to avoid the most common planning mistakes:

Networking Saying Hello with Impact

In an age of global competition, today’s information professionals engage in a sport that isn’t found on an Olympic roster. Chambers of Commerce, conferences, and other business meetings form the backdrop for networking, a form of interaction professionals use to build profitable relationships.

Delegation Letting Go to Move Ahead

If you are a manager that spends too much time dealing with administrative matters, you're in the majority. Perhaps you do this out of a feeling employees can't or won't make good decisions in your absence. These common problems are key symptoms of the need for delegation. Here's how.

Consulting Code Blue

Management consulting skills (or the lack of them) make the difference between the success and failure of a consultant. Poor skills usually result in the consultant not being asked back, or worse, being dismissed. Such dismissal is the consulting equivalent of heart failure. In many hospitals, they would call such a failure a "code blue". I use the term "code blue" to describe the situation of consultants who are quite talented but find themselves out the door and on the outs.

Why Corporate Change Programs Fail

Theories X, Y, and Z. MBO. Grid Management. Situational Leadership. T-groups. Excellence. TQM. Team building. Re-engineering. Empowerment. Diversity. The Seven Habits. You have probably heard of at least one of these programs for business and corporate change. Like insatiable lovers, corporations can journey from one program to another, sometimes not even pausing to take an organizational breath. It is more important to help people grow sanely than quickly. The belief that there's no such thing as too much growth has killed hundreds of companies, careers, marriages, and dreams.

Is Your Mission Statement Written by Dilbert

There’s no more painful corporate ritual than the every-few-years mission statement revision. Here’s where a group of well-meaning people gather for several meetings, markers in hand, to torturously wordsmith themselves into agreement. Does this mission statement typically fire up everyone? Does it fire up anyone? The employees take the t-shirts home to their kids. The gold frames will be filed, roundly. There is no pulse-quickening. Instead, employees, customers, suppliers – everyone except execs and the authors themselves -- see the mission statement as vague, irrelevant, and disconnected from real work. The corporate Ginsu won’t even cut a tomato.

Visionarys Disease and the CEO

We all know the value of vision. The Greek philosophers spoke about it. Former President George Bush recommended attention to "the vision thing." What happens when an organization's problem isn't a lack of vision but too much? What happens when the CEO's vision changes monthly, weekly, or even daily-driving his organization crazy? Welcome to Visionary's Disease. If you are consulting to someone who suffers from it, you are probably very frustrated.

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