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What Is the Best Mindful Business Strategy?

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Mindfulness garners a lot of recent attention. Wisdom 2.0, a conference that blends mindfulness with technology, leadership, and culture, hosted over 2,400 participants earlier this year. Attendees come from all over the world to learn and engage in developing meaningful mindfulness practices.

A new area for mindfulness is how business strategies are developed. Strategy development and mindfulness are a great combination, and the best mindful business strategy starts with a simple concept – Be present.

Being present is a simple idea. However, many businesses are not present, especially when it comes to making a decision and moving forward with a strategy. The next generation of leaders are using mindful practices to gain meaningful results.

Strategically Stuck

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About the Author

Jon MertzJon Mertz is one of the Top 100 Thought Leaders in Trustworthy Business and highlighted as one of the Leaders to Watch in 2015 by the American Management Association. He also is the author of Activate Leadership: Aspen Truths to Empower Millennial Leaders. Jon serves as vice president of marketing at Corepoint Health. Outside of his professional life, Jon brings together a community to inspire Millennial leaders and close the gap between two generations of leaders. Follow him on Twitter @ThinDifference or Facebook /ThinDifference

The End Of Long-Term Planning

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At the end of a particularly long and grueling strategy meeting with the executive team of a major consumer services business, Alan, the chief executive officer, turned to me and said, “Living quarter by quarter is madness, but in a few years’ time people will laugh at us for developing three-year plans.” He was right. With the pace of business change today, driven by technology and globalization, long-term plans last about as long as an ice storm in the desert. As military experts put it, plans rarely survive contact with the enemy.

Despite these new realities, many executive teams remain stuck with 20th-century approaches to strategy development. It is still common for companies to take six months or more to develop their new growth strategies. This prolonged, inefficient and largely ineffective approach — involving colossal data analysis projects, the creation of a series of 100-slide decks, and periodic executive meetings where directors are presented with findings and recommendations to comment on – may suit consultants looking to maximize fees, and even some executives who want to look as if they’re in control, but it does little to help businesses succeed in fast-changing markets.

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About the Author

Stuart CrossStuart Cross helps market-leading businesses such as Walgreens Boots Alliance, Masco Inc. and Aimia Inc. to accelerate growth. His new book, First & Fast: Outpace Your Competitors, Lead Your Markets and Accelerate Growth, is out now. Find out more at www.morgancross.co.uk.

Risk Management Best Practice 4 – Risk Quantification

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StrategyDriven Risk Management Best Practice ArticleEach organization faces a unique set of risks challenging the continuity of its operations. All risks, however, are not equal. In order for an organization’s leaders to economically manage their business’s risks, they must first understand each risk’s inherent and residual value. Failure to quantify the organization’s risks produces a less meaningful set of potentially adverse events; lacking relevance, priority, and return on investment information and often resulting in the application of either too many or too few resources applied to address these challenges.

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About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

Recommended Resources – I Have A Strategy, No You Don’t

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StrategyDriven Recommended ResourcesI Have a Strategy, No You Don’t: The Illustrated Guide to Strategy
by Howell J Malham Jr

About the Book

I Have a Strategy, No You Don’t: The Illustrated Guide to Strategy by Howell J Malham Jr provides an illustrated definition of business strategy. Howell breaks down the concept of strategy into its component parts and illustrates these with real-world examples from renowned companies.

Unlike other business books, I Have a Strategy, No You Don’t is structured as a playfully interactive dialog between two characters, Larry and Gary. Through these characters’ conversations, Howell shares:

  • Common misconceptions about strategy
  • Four basic elements of strategy
  • Detailed models of effective strategies and why they work

Benefits of Reading this Book

Business leaders at all organizational levels commonly misuse the term ‘strategy.’ This misuse frequently results in miscommunications that ultimately lead to errant decisions and actions detrimental to the organization.

StrategyDriven Contributors like I Have a Strategy, No You Don’t because it brings to light the seldom recognized but often damaging problem of leadership’s misunderstanding of what business strategy is and provides a clear definition to help resolve the issue. While StrategyDriven Contributors don’t fully agree with Howell’s definition of strategy – we believe strategy represents a how not a what – we fully agree with the premise that an organization should define for itself what strategy is and then consistently apply that definition in its planning and execution efforts.

I Have a Strategy, No You Don’t is a quick and easy read. Howell’s examples of effective strategies come from well-known and respected companies making them relatable to the reader. For bringing to light and offering a solution to an age-old business planning and execution problem, I Have a Strategy, No You Don’t is a StrategyDriven recommended read.

Strategic Planning – How Much Should Organizations Spend on Business Planning?

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StrategyDriven Strategic Planning Principle ArticleWell-crafted strategic and annual business plans provide a sense of purpose and direction. They establish the operations and initiative activities the organization will implement in order to achieve defined outcomes. Furthermore, these business plans serve as a communications mechanism to drive alignment of management decisions and employee actions to the effective and efficient achievement of the organization’s mission goals. (See StrategyDriven article, Why Do Organizations Need Strategic Planning.) Without business plans, time and effort may be applied to activities less directly focused on achievement of the organization’s goals thereby wasting the business’s precious limited resources.

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About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.