Archive | alignment

Next Practices or Best Practices?

If you want to pursue innovation, consider next practices instead of best practices. Best practices look into the past to document processes that can be repeated for specific business problems. Next practices are future-oriented blueprints which allow organizations to better anticipate and respond to strategic issues which have inherent unknowns and risks. Best practices allow…

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Red queen effect

The Red Queen Effect Explains Why You Aren’t Getting Ahead

For much of my career, I’ve argued that people design key performance indicators (KPIs) incorrectly. One of my own favorite blogs made the case that, unless you compare yourself against some external benchmark, you might be making progress towards achieving your KPIs but actually losing ground. Simplistically, if you’re growing by 20% and the market…

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Vision vs. Mission

“Your mission, should you choose to accept it.” It’s been nearly 25 years but I still vividly remember those words from the television show Mission Impossible. At the time, I didn’t realize it was a remake of the original show which aired 25 years before that. I also didn’t realize the two series might have…

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Four Oxen and the Lion

During my career I’ve often used animal stories to help illustrate specific points, reinforce behaviors, or to provide colorful rallying cries. Whether it’s elephants, monkeys, or camels, stories about animals are easy to remember and therefore more likely to be repeated. The heart of good communication is repetition. When I originally introduced the story of the…

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