Strategy and Management Insights

Image source: Harvard Business Review

From the pioneering work of Steve Blank leading to the Lean movement by his protege Eric Ries, we know the benefits of companies that operate by hypothesis and iteration. Startups embrace lean methodologies to help them capture product-market fit, and develop new features beyond an MVP. Instead of lengthy business plans and projections, lean firms operate by testing. We've seen similar insights helping engineering teams since the advent of Extreme programming, Agile, and later SCRUM. The basis of these movements derive from new understandings of human and organizational behavior. Why is strategy not dealt with the same way?

Image source: Harvard Business Review

Globalization, innovative technology, and startups are entering the big door of innovation. Existing, established companies are continously disrupted by this phenomenon and have to acquire startups for their growth in new sectors. Generations of executives have been trying to get their companies to be as innovative as the startups they either acquire or are disrupted by.

Image source: Small Business Trends

Everything we do today affects our future in some way. The actions we take and decisions we make when running a small business have a compounding effect. How well we plan in the present, impacts our businesses growth over time. There are some tactics and strategies you can follow to make sure your business is well prepared for whatever tomorrow brings.

Image source: Small Business Trends

Small business owners often don't make the right use of financial statements. They don't fully understand what they are, and can't read them properly. Although most people assume the business owners know these numbers, they usually don't have the knowledge they need for understanding and planning for their business throughout the year.

Image source: Entrepreneur 

Many business leaders are known to make decisions based on instinct and put a lot of trust in their inner voice. Richard Branson reportedly said, “I rely far more on gut instinct than researching huge amounts of statistics". However, this might not be the best growth strategy tactic if you're a small business owner. If your instinct turns out to be wrong, you don't have a corporate cushion to catch you when you fall.

Image source: Harvard Business Review 

Behind every successful company, there's a flawless business strategy execution. But in these days of digital transformation, if you're looking to disrupt the markets it's not enough to focus only on creating the best business model.

Image source: McKinsey Global Institute

A short-term approach at the corporate level has been the subject of debate for a long time. Research has been done, and systematic measurements of long-term and short-term thinking has provided us with evidence that companies with long-term views outperform their short-term peers across many fields.

Image source: Harvard Business Review

The human brain has a tendency to think linear - it just wants to make straight lines to simplify understanding. Although many situations this thinking serves us well, business is full of highly complex situations straight lines can't fix. Are you able to recognize them to logically process the situation, or do you rely on your gut?