The Meaning of Innovation & Why It’s Important
Business executives are often told by their managing director to be more innovative, as if the very word will transform their marketing, product development and ultimately create success. It can be hard to act on this when you are not sure what innovation means and what is just old ideas in new packaging. Innovation is a […]
How Useful Are SWOTs and PESTs?
Concluding my series on strategic thinking with a look at the planning tools used by many businesses and learned by every A Level Business student in the country and why they are sometimes useless! Planning tools are not really strategy Part of objective setting is taking a look at where you are right now as […]
Putting Strategic Thinking To Work
Most business goes through a planning phase in its yearly cycle and usually that plan is revisited at least monthly. However, that planning can get a bit formulaic and becomes almost a ritual rather than an innovative exercise. If you can effectively harness the strategic thinkers in your leadership and within the organisation then monthly […]
How To Improve Strategic Thinking Skills In Leadership?
Strategic thinking skills, in an ideal world would be something developed at all levels of an organisation. However, realistically speaking, strategically smart workers would not be much use if their managers and bosses are not strategic! So an organisation needs to lead by example and develop strategic thinking skills in their management, or recruit strategic […]
Headless Chicken Vs Strategic Thinking
What does strategic thinking mean? Strategic is a term that has become extremely popular in this century- just look at the graph below which shows its use in literature over the decades Strategic means relating to the identification of long-term or overall aims and interests and the means of […]
Bureaucracy – The Lighter Side
As I have been writing these posts on the somewhat dry topic of bureaucracy one thing struck me as rather funny… that how despite being on the fourth post on the subject I still manage to spell it incorrectly – thank goodness for auto correct. When I was at school, good teachers used to get […]
Be An Innovative Business
How to be an innovative business without drowning in bureaucracy The 21st century business needs to be lean and responsive if it is to stay competitive and this can be difficult if it is shackled or tied up in bureaucratic red tape. Innovative business ideas are those eureka moments where someone throws out an observation […]
Bureaucracy And The 21st Century Business
Our love affair with bureaucracy doesn’t suit 21st century business. What’s that you cry? Love affair with bureaucracy, don’t we all hate that red tape? Well, we all say we hate it and if that were truly so, surely there would be less of it? History would seem to deny this. Our systems built upon […]
Are You Strangling Your Own Business?
Workflow and red tape – the outside bureaucracy The meaning of red tape is; Rigid or mechanical adherence to bureaucratic rules and regulations especially those involving unnecessary paperwork. http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/red-tape.html Its origins come from the 17th century where legal and official documents first started being, and continue to be, bound by red tape. Many small business […]
Do You Know How to Think? Or Just Think You Do…..
Do you understand the value of critical thinking? You are probably thinking right now; what a ridiculous question, of course I know how to think, it’s like breathing. You may believe that you cannot shut off thinking, well, actually you can and sometimes you need to. Did you know that according to the National Science […]