“A company without a story is usually a company without a strategy.” Ben Horowitz, entrepreneur and investor1 Steve Jobs bounces onto the stage and grabs the slide changer from his colleague with a friendly “Thanks Scott”. He’s looking thin and grey, illness having taken its toll, but his energy remains boundless. It’s the 2011 Apple […]

John Hagel has written an interesting post on the importance of narratives in providing persistent context for our lives, organisations and society. The post is important because John is an esteemed thinker that business and institutions notice and heed. And it is also this reason that I’m prompted to write this reply because I feel […]

One of the basic requirements for any form of successful communication is the listener understands what’s being said. However we often face the challenge when trying to get our message understood of the “curse of knowledge“. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our […]

Have you ever had this happen to you? I was chatting with a senior leader asking him about their organisational values. “Yeh, sure, we have a set of values. Let me see, where did I put the annual report?” He then ferreted around his office to find the list of values. There are some things […]

Last week I was driving to basketball with my daughter listening to Hamish and Andy on the radio. Richard Branson was up next to talk about the launch of Virgin Money and this is what he said (perhaps not word perfect but how I remember it): Andy: so tell us about this new venture Sir […]

In our work to help organisations make their strategies stick we often start by helping the executives get clear on their purpose. Why does their enterprise exist? If you have facilitated these types of sessions you probably seen this happen a million times: the group circles in on the essence of what’s important and then […]

This evening I was reading Business Model Generation (thanks Tom Graves for sending me a copy). It’s an approach for designing your business model and comparing it with others, such as your competitors. It is one of many approaches that illustrates the phenomenal effort that goes into developing business models and strategies. Yet despite all […]

I’m off to Malaysia in May to help run a leadership development program for a telecommunication company. While I’m there I’m meeting senior leaders from a range of companies and government departments and showing them our strategic story work. As an ex-IBMer I remember our CEO at the time, Lou Gerstner, say that strategies are […]

Every company wants to tell a compelling strategic story that conveys the essence of what they’re about. If it’s a success their customers and employees will know where they have come from and where they are going and what makes them unique and worthwhile. And with this knowledge they become attracted to what they are […]