Perspectives
Focus on Strengths
While Sam Walton was a great believer in identifying weaknesses, he didn't focus on them. Yesterday's blog was not meant to advocate a focus on weaknesses, just to say that ignoring them is not productive. In fact, what you want to focus on are strengths. The book,...
Sam Walton – SWOT
Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart was a great believer in looking at strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, SWOT, on a regular basis. So much so that he made it part of their regular Saturday management meetings. In Sam's own words: "That Saturday morning...
SWOT
Last week I looked at the topic of thinking strategically. One critical dimension of this talent is the ability to see Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. SWOT. Most of us are good at recognizing strengths and perhaps next at seeing opportunities but...
Richard Branson – Big Picture Thinker
Thinking Strategically (yesterday's blog), in more prosaic terms is about seeing the big picture. What's your big picture? For Richard Branson, it was customer service. He built the Virgin Group, a collection of seemingly unrelated businesses by targeting businesses...
Thinking Strategically
Getting ahead in business means thinking strategically. Easy to say but not so easy to do given that many people really don't know the difference between strategy and tactics. So here goes, an attempt to explain the difference. When you look in a dictionary (I checked...
5 Reasons Why Men Can’t Focus
What? A second blog today? I actually wrote the last one on Wednesday but got distracted and forgot to promote it until today. So much for focus. You might have noticed that women are taking over the world. From university enrolment to the professions and now to...
Focus Focus Focus
One of Steve Job’s greatest strengths was knowing how to focus. When he came back to Apple in 1997 as a consultant, he found a company that was severely unfocussed. Apple had a dozen different versions of the Macintosh and each of the versions had a different...
Shoe Shopping and Materiality
As a typical guy, I've always wondered why women obsess so much about their shoes. After all, they're just shoes. In particular I used to wonder why women spend so much time shopping for shoes and so little time shopping for cars for instance. I've seen women agonize...
Leadership and The Occupy Movement
Today is the first anniversary of the day that Occupy Wall Street took over Zuccotti Park and the Occupy Movement was born. As a movement it began over a growing disillusionment about income inequality and corporate greed. While it dominated the world's attention for...