Planning for 2009 – A Different Approach
A Strategic Conversations exercise with employees is an inexpensive way to extract information and benefit from the knowledge that your employees possess. You can ask about how the company can perform tasks faster or better or cheaper, and where there are areas to improve.
Reading List: Midas Managers by Rob Slee
Midas Managers shows the power of story to teach. The eighteen stories in the book describe some of the all-star managers that were clients over the course of Slee’s investment banking career.
Industry Snapshot: Something More Than Bullets
Tell a good story and use pictures on your slides to connect with the reader.
Reading List: Made to Stick Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath & Dan Heath
This image tells you a lot about the communication strategies that these brothers and co-authors espouse—that ideas that succeed are easy to understand and memorable.
Reading List: Freakanomics By Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
Freakonomics asks tough questions and tries to answer them through analytic methods used by economics. Freakonomics is a light and entertaining read.
Industry snapshot: Visual Presentation Techniques
How can you make your presentation better than a regular, old PowerPoint?
Industry snapshot: Hewlett Packard’s New Strategy Story
New CEO Mark Hurd recently stepped in, following the departure of Carly Fiorina, and he is taking a very different approach than his predecessor.
What’s Your Story?
Can you tell a compelling short story about where you want to take your own team?
Give Them the Full Story
Telling a strategy story is actually helpful in most any situation where you want to unite a group around a goal, a project, or a product launch.
Reading List: The Story Factor By Annette Simmons
Ms. Simmons tells us that stories are an ideal way of influencing other people because they give the listener room to think for themselves.
