About a year ago, Stanford Business School professor Bob Sutton, blogged one of my favorite rants. He wrote: Big hairy goals don’t mean much without thousands of small wins. My colleague Jeff Pfeffer and I have argued for years that implementation, not strategy, is what usually separates winners from losers in most industries, and generally explains the difference between success and failure in most organizational change efforts, sales campaigns and so on. Atul Gawande drives this point home even further in his remarkable book on […]
goals
Five Good Lessons on Strategy
As we mentioned a few months back, this past Fall, Groupaya engaged in our first strategic planning process. Given our obsession with learning, it should come as no surprise that this process helped evolve both our thinking about who we are and what makes good strategy work. For me personally, it was particularly interesting stepping in to the facilitative role for my two mentors, Eugene and Kristin, while also participating as a valued stakeholder in the planning process. Seeing as one of […]
2012 Goals and Strategy
We spent a good part of last year discussing our goals and aspirations — who we wanted to be, what we wanted to accomplish, and how we wanted to do those things. As we started aligning around a big picture, Rebecca led us through a more formal planning process to think through our goals and strategy for 2012. We’d like to share what we came up with, and we’d love to hear your thoughts. Vision and Mission All of our […]
Good Goals and Strategy
As you can tell from Kristin’s recent post, we’ve all been thinking about how to set effective goals, due largely to our own internal goal prioritization process. I recently completed a detox diet that happened to coincide with this process, and I realized that it offered some lessons on what makes a good goal and a good strategy. First, some background. About five years ago, I found myself in an unhealthy cycle of working way too much, eating poorly, and […]
Goals as a Liberating Force
I recently had a conversation with a leader who was frustrated with the ability of his people to set goals and to prioritize their time. It is a complaint I have heard often over the years. In many companies today, executive teams are in the habit of setting stretch goals that require everyone to constantly work at a sprint pace. Leaders want their organization to aim for the stars. They need results. Fast. Some even hope for innovation. Yet people […]