I’ve found recently many of the enquiries I’ve received revolve around strategic thinking and the way strategy should be driven within the organisation. Whether it’s the economic situation we’re all facing, or the changes we are experiencing in business, it is obvious that management thought patterns are changing along with it, and many managers recognise the need to think strategically is a natural addition to their leadership portfolio. Here’s some thoughts from management expert, Henry Mintzberg.

Mintzberg argued that it’s really hard to get strategy right. To help us think about it in more depth, he developed his 5 Ps of Strategy – five different definitions of (or approaches to) developing strategy.

Each of the 5 Ps is a different approach to strategy. They are:

1. Plan.
2. Ploy.
3. Pattern.
4. Position.
5. Perspective.

1. Strategy as a Plan

Planning is something that many managers are happy with, and it’s something that comes naturally to us. As such, this is the default, automatic approach that we adopt – brainstorming options and planning how to deliver them.

This is fine, and planning is an essential part of the strategy formulation process. The problem with planning, however, is that it’s not enough on its own. This is where the other four Ps come into play.

2. Strategy as a Ploy

Mintzberg says that getting the better of competitors, by plotting to disrupt, dissuade, discourage, or otherwise influence them, can be part of a strategy. This is where strategy can be a ploy, as well as a plan.

For example, a grocery chain might threaten to expand a store, so that a competitor doesn’t move into the same area; or a telecommunications company might buy up patents that a competitor could potentially use to launch a rival product.

3. Strategy as a Pattern

Strategic plans and ploys are both deliberate exercises, and a consistent and successful way of doing business can develop into a strategy.

For instance, imagine a manager who makes decisions that further enhance an already highly responsive customer support process. Despite not deliberately choosing to build a strategic advantage, his pattern of actions nevertheless creates one.

4. Strategy as Position

“Position” is another way to define strategy – that is, how you decide to position yourself in the marketplace. In this way, strategy helps you explore the fit between your organisation and your environment, and it helps you develop an advantage over the competition

For example, your strategy might include developing a niche product to avoid competition, or choosing to position yourself amongst a variety of competitors, while looking for ways to differentiate your services.

5. Strategy as Perspective

The choices an organization makes about its strategy rely heavily on its culture – just as patterns of behavior can emerge as strategy, patterns of thinking will shape an organisation’s perspective, and the things that it is able to do well.

For instance, an organisation that encourages risk-taking and innovation from employees might focus on coming up with innovative products as the main thrust behind its strategy. By contrast, an organization that emphasizes the reliable processing of data may follow a strategy of offering these services to other organisations under outsourcing arrangements.

Using the 5 Ps

Instead of trying to use the 5 Ps as a process to follow while developing strategy, think of them as a variety of viewpoints that you should consider while developing a robust and successful strategy.

As such, there are three points in the strategic planning process where it’s particularly helpful to use the 5 Ps:

1. When you’re gathering information and conducting the analysis needed for strategy development, as a way of ensuring that you’ve considered everything relevant.
2. When you’ve come up with initial ideas, as a way of testing that that they’re realistic, practical and robust.
3. As a final check on the strategy that you’ve developed, to flush out inconsistencies and things that may not have been fully considered.

Using Mintzberg’s 5 Ps at these points will highlight problems that would otherwise undermine the implementation of your strategy.

After all, it’s much better to identify these problems at the planning stage than it is to find out about them after you’ve spent time and money implementing a plan that was flawed from the start.

Thanks again

Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Course

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In Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em: Getting Good People to Stay, Beverly Kay and Sharon Jordan-Evans write about creating commitment cultures.

After 20 years of research and 60,000 exit interviews, the Saratoga Institute reports that 80% of turnover is related to unsatisfactory relationships with the boss. Talent retention and engagement will remain one of management’s highest priorities over the coming years. In fact, in the current global economic situation with its ever-increasing reliance on talent and technology, retention and engagement are critical to an organization’s survival.

Organisations therefore need to focus on three areas to retain and engage their talented people:

Employee development – Support learning and growth.

Find ways to continuously develop and grow workers’ talents. Enrich and enliven employees’ work, making every effort to increase the time they spend on desirable and innovative work. Help workers identify opportunities for moving laterally as well as vertically. Link workers to mentors, coaches, leaders, or colleagues who can offer guidance and support.

Management style – Inspire loyalty.

Ask employees what they want from their work and what it takes to keep them motivated. Provide constant feedback – clearly, truthfully, and respectfully – and, in return, listen closely and carefully. Look for creative, meaningful ways to recognise and reward workers. Create a culture of inclusion – valuing not only differences of race and gender, but thoughts, experiences, and attitudes as well. Hold managers accountable for retention and then give them the training and the tools to do it.

Work environment – Create one that people love.

Let fun happen. Share information freely and regularly. Give people space – providing the freedom to get the job done in ways that work best for them, from their schedule and attire to their approach and process.

There are many complex reasons why some organisations are more successful than others in attracting and retaining the best people. However, studies reveal some common patterns. The most significant of these clearly boil down to questions of leadership.

Thanks again

Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Course

Click below for a:
FREE email course “Improve Your Management Skills”

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Learning new things is often seen as the vital ingredient to improving your management style. Here, we discuss how you can pick new things up quicker and easier, through a process called Accelerated Learning.

Accelerated Learning is a unique way of presenting information to gain powerful learning experiences. It is not a theory, methodology or a philosophy, neither is it the result of one person’s research. It’s a combination of many studies from leading psychological researchers who estimate it can achieve at least a 300% improvement in both the speed and effectiveness of learning.

The following is a summary of the key concepts behind Accelerated Learning adapted from Colin Rose’s book, Accelerated Learning, How memory’s secrets unlocked the way to relaxed, easy learning:

• Your brain has enormous potential – the more you use it the more associations and connections you make and the easier it is to remember and learn yet more new material.
• The left and right halves of the brain process information in different ways – the right brain responds to art, music and patterns  – it processes information holistically, grasps the whole picture quickly and is more sensitive to subconscious influences. The left brain tends to work on a step by step basis. Fully involve the right brain and you don’t just double your brain power, you increase it many times over.
• Relaxation is important to create a stress free learning environment. Relaxation is associated with a predominately Alpha brain wave pattern.
• All new information enters the short term memory store, but only gets transferred to the long term memory store if it is rehearsed immediately.
• Registering new facts depends on strong encoding, strong encoding depends to a large extent on creating strong associations. Strong encoding is achieved by creating concrete images of sight, feelings, sound, taste and smell. The stronger the original encoding the better the ultimate recall.
• Words linked to a picture are easier to learn/remember because you have achieved dual encoding.
• The key to memory is to improve visualisation – interactive visual images are the most powerful.
• Individual lessons should have breaks – people tend to remember more from the beginning and end of a training session (the Primary and Recency effects) so by increasing the number of breaks you will increase the amount of information remembered. This links to the Zeigarnik effect  – Zeigarnik, a German researcher, found that interrupting a task lead to higher subsequent recall.
  
• Learning the principle is easier than learning each individual example.
•  Meaning is vital to memory.
• Learning by example is better than learning by rote.
•  Memory works by creating a network of associated ideas.
• Suggestion can improve actual performance greatly by unblocking the negative suggestion that something cannot be done – creating a belief in success and a positiveself-image will, when allied to a sound and realistic learning programme, create great success.
• We probably all have the potential for photographic memory. The key to it is imagination.
•  Learning is maximised when all the elements are focused on the learning process. Since possibly 90% of communication is at the subconscious level, the greater the number of subconscious stimuli that are orchestrated to aid learning, the faster and more effective is that learning.
•  Imaging and articulation of new material is a powerful memory creating device.
•  Presenting each lesson in the three sensory channels – Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic – ensures that the presentation is in a style which the student learns best, and that all three senses are co-ordinated to make learning highly effective.
•  Early success provides the motivation for extra attention and involvement. This fuels a virtuous circle.

Get yourself more knowledge of Accelerated Learning, and identify how you can learn new things quicker and easier.

Thanks again

Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Course

Click below for a:
FREE email course “Improve Your Management Skills”

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Differentiation is vitally important to your business success because it helps you keep your customers coming back time after time.

Do you realise that most companies replace the majority of their customers every five years? Businesses in general lose at least 10% of their customers every year. Thus, every five years the average business must replace at least half its customer base. Why? What happens to these customers? Let’s take a look:

3% move away or die.

5% are led by their friends to buy elsewhere.

9% of customers stop buying because a competitor provides a better offer.

14% of customers defect because they’re dissatisfied with the product or service.

68% of customers stop buying because of indifference. In other words, they don’t think anyone cares about them. This apathetic attitude to customers when they have become a ‘customer’ is the key reason they leave you.

Now here’s the interesting fact: Most businesses fight over one of the smallest percentages of defecting customers. They chase the 9% who are looking for a better price. It makes no sense because even if you’re successful at capturing a “price sensitive” customer, you can be sure they’ll defect as soon as a competitor offers a lower price. Let your competitors fight over the price shoppers. Spend your time where the value-conscious customers meet!

Consider the 14% of customers who are dissatisfied. Do you think you could reduce that percentage just by staying in touch with your customers and asking them about their level of satisfaction? The answer is yes.

But wait! Two-thirds of customers are defecting because of indifference. You can make a huge impact by differentiating your business and making sure that every customer knows that you are sincerely interested in serving them. Not just today, but forever.

Here are some ideas that will help you differentiate your business and keep more of your customers.

Promote your new products and services to your existing customers.

List your products and services on your direct mails, your linked-in accounts, your business cards, your packaging, your Facebook and Twitter business accounts and other marketing links. Don’t leave it up to your customers to know your product line!

Get to know your top customers, the 5, 10 or more who spend the most money with you.

Whether they are retail customers or on-line shoppers, get to know them! By the way, these are the people who will give you referrals that will help build your business faster than any other method.

Get physical with your marketing strategy.

Use more than literature to promote your business.  A computer software trainer we know sends a bottle of aspirins to prospects to get them to sign up for his seminars, which are designed to “ease the pain” of learning a new software program. A travel agent we have used in the past uses sand to sell holidays. What can you use to be different? Think about the benefits of your products and services.
Now think of an object to associate with the benefits. Send that object to your customers and prospects!

Call your customers AFTER the sale.

Thank them, encourage them, and answer their questions. By doing so, you are there when they need you and you prove yourself different from other companies who just take their money and run!

No doubt there are other ways of making yourself different in the market place. Whatever they are, use them to effectively show why you should be top of their list when they are thinking of your products and services.

Thanks again

Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Course

Click below for a:
FREE email course “Improve Your Management Skills”

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One of the many things we hear on our management courses is the whining that ‘I’m not a good time manager’. This mindset always creates problems for managers and does not allow us to tap into the potential to create a high performance culture within ourselves, department and organisation.

The truth is that anyone can be a great time manager, if we choose to go from potential to performance.

So, how do we do this? Here is a simple process we can follow that will allow us to see performance building quickly and effectively:

• Determine exactly where our time is going at the moment. Too many managers confuse busy with effective. If we continually work on the urgent, we won’t have time for the important. Make time to identify where your time goes every day, as this awareness will help you see what is really happening

• Determine what your values are – what do you view as important and what do you want to accomplish? You simply cannot do everything that’s expected of you, so you have to apply the four levels of productivity: With a task, either decide to Do it now, Delegate it, Delay it or Dump it. There really isn’t much else you can do with it.

• Set time priorities that will move you toward living out your values. Now’s the time to plan and prioritise. If you are continually taken away from your plan, become aware of how this is happening. Are you saying ‘yes’ too often? Is the important at the mercy of the urgent? Are you shunning importnat stuff because urgency is getting a grip on you? You simply can’t afford to let your values slip by because of poor prioritisation.

• Develop a system of scheduling that works best for you; don’t be led by a time management guru. There are many ideas out there on how to manage your time. Find a system that works for you, personally. Don’t try to fit in with things that cause more work for you. A system should help you, not add pressure and take more time than it’s worth.

• Stick to your schedule. If you find yourself changing things continuously, the environment might be too blame. See if you are working efficiently and effectively.

These simple steps, if you apply them, will take you from having the potential to be a good time manager to true time management performance. Will you be able to make it work and get the results? Only time will tell!

Thanks again

Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Course

Click below for a:
FREE email course “Improve Your Management Skills”

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