Helping Values-Driven Leaders With the Hard Stuff
The audiobook version of A Sprint to the Finish, read by the author, is available now from a number of leading retailers (more coming soon).
You can currently find it at:
I hope you find it interesting, entertaining, and informative!
A Sprint to the Finish Audiobook Out Now Read More »
My most recent book is now available in print at Amazon.
At $10.99 and 96 pages, it serves as an affordable and concise guide to the critical questions every business must answer.
Here’s the book description:
Business success requires making hard decisions. Making hard decisions well requires a depth of understanding about the business and its environment that, unfortunately, many business leaders lack, or at least they haven’t formulated their understanding of the business into a framework that makes it easy to consistently and confidently apply.
In this book Russell McGuire asks six simple questions that any leader should be able to answer about their business. The answers to those six questions provide a mental framework that can help leaders navigate the challenges their organizations will undoubtedly face. But more than simply asking the questions, McGuire provides the tools and approaches leaders can use to thoughtfully develop the answers to those questions.
The chapters in the book closely follow the six questions:
I hope that this book can be a blessing to you and your business!
Note: The link above is associated with my affiliate account with Amazon. SDG Strategy will receive a small commission on the sale for any purchases made through that link.
Six Questions Now Available in Print Read More »
One of the online classes I took this year was “Robots in Society: Blessing or Curse” offered by Delft University of Technology. Last week I was informed that the final paper I submitted for the course had been selected for their “Hall of Fame”.
The Connected Intelligence Revolution is the collision of advanced data processing technologies with massive amounts of available data, resulting in new ways that we see the world, anticipate the future, make decisions, and take action.
This revolution promises great benefits for companies, individuals, and society, but it also introduces great dangers. In a global economy, with rapidly changing technologies, ensuring that no one gets left behind is a complex, multifaceted challenge that requires action and commitment at the individual, company, industry, national, and international levels. I believe that the actions I have outlined in this paper are reasonable, realistic, and can result in a positive outcome for all stakeholders.
No One Left Behind Read More »
One of the richest tools I’ve found for connecting strategy and execution is the Strategy Map introduced by Robert Kaplan and David Norton in 2001.
In their Balanced Scorecard work, Kaplan and Norton had defined four “perspectives”: Learning and Growth, Internal business process, Customer, and Financial. The Strategy Map creates a cause-and-effect relationship to emerge between these four perspectives, with the Internal and Customer perspectives being central.
If we are to achieve our strategy, what needs to be true about our business (Internal), and therefore what needs to be true about our culture and our people (Learning and Growth)? When we achieve our strategy, how will that translate into value for our customers (Customer) and therefore into value for our investors (Financial)?
As helpful as the Strategy Map is for “connecting the dots” from the company’s people and culture all the way to financial performance, with the strategy at its core, the Strategy Map often could not capture on a single page all of the things happening within the business to execute the strategy, and how those activities would be managed.
Kaplan and Norton introduced the concept of Strategic Themes as a way to focus on specific parallel aspects of the strategy. I like to consider the Pillars of the strategy as Strategic Themes and to map out the logical flow of the strategy at a greater level of detail. I also like to use this view to identify key initiatives that align with the aspects of the Strategy Map. Finally, the Strategic Themes level of mapping is also a great place to begin to call out specific metrics that can be used in monitoring the strategy to make sure that execution is staying on track.
Those metrics are then managed through the Balanced Scorecard. The Strategy Map and Strategy Themes help us translate the strategy into specific actions we need to take as a company and the Balanced Scorecard provides the tool for regularly monitoring our progress in executing the strategy.
Warner Bros. made big news this past week by announcing that new feature films in 2021 will simultaneously release in theaters and streaming on HBO Max.
For many that haven’t closely followed the company’s corporate transactions, the decision was a bit of a head scratcher. But once you understand that Time Warner was acquired by AT&T in 2018, who had also acquired DirecTV in 2015, it all starts to make sense. Kind of. In a troubling sort of way.
AT&T clearly believes in vertical integration. Vertically integrating has many advantages — you can control the value chain, drive out inefficiencies, and make decisions to maximize profitability.
But it also comes with significant challenges. I’m not sure AT&T is up for those challenges. The companies in AT&T’s portfolio come from industries with very different expectations, market disciplines, cultures, and ecosystems.
In 2020, streaming networks are the shiny thing that everyone is chasing. AT&T wants to turn the crank on the vertically integrated machine they’ve built to deliver growth in HBO Max subscribers. Who cares if Warner Bros. gets squeezed a bit in the process?
It turns out a lot of people care.
Let’s hope AT&T learns their lessons before they do too much damage.
Are AT&T’s streaming ambitions destroying the movie industry? Read More »