Category Archives: How to Improve Your Story Telling Chops

These articles provide the reader with practical insights and skills, centered on conceptualizing a strategic initiative as a story. As a story, it has a beginning, end, and compelling tension that moves it forward. It has an audience. It reveals truths and has a call to action.

What’s the #Strategy? Let Me Tell You a #Story

Advice for story telling in the leadership of a strategic initiative. The heroic narrative is the invention of a new condition. The romantic narrative is a return to a purer self. Examples from IBM and Domino’s Pizza. http://wp.me/pZCkk-10R Continue reading

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Coherence: It is Only a Good Plan (Strategy) If It Makes Good Sense

Coherence means that things make sense. In the context of strategy, it means that the committed resources, policies, and actions are consistent and coordinated. A plan is only a good plan if it makes good sense. Unfortunately, most organizations pursue multiple objectives that are unconnected with one another (and sometimes even conflict).They are anything but coherent! Insert the concept of coherence into your discussions. How? One way is to ask simple questions, “Does this make sense? Where are the gaps? Are there conflicting objectives?” Another way to encourage coherence is to activate the Chief Story Teller role. Imposing coherence and discipline on an organization is difficult and takes hard work by the strategic initiative leader.

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Strategic Leadership is “Replacing Old Stories with New Stories”

Leaders should see strategy as a narrative arc from the founding to the present launch of a strategic initiative. The techniques of corporate time lines and identifying turning points help with the analysis. Then, future cast for a new vision with these questions:What present problems and opportunities are relevant to our future? What are the scenarios of the future? Where (and over whom) will we find advantage? What are the insights? A current strategic initiative could be seen as an episode of an organization’s history, with a turning point. Continue reading

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Strategy Execution Priority #1: Effectively Communicate Strategic Decision(s)

Executives say that the top priority for strategy execution is to effectively communicate the decisions made. Three examples of good communications are provided. The basic message to the reader is to think through the announcement process. Continue reading

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Apple versus Samsung: Three Lessons for Strategic Initiative Leaders

Here are three lessons for strategic initiative leaders drawn from analysis of the Samsung Apple iPhone patent infringement verdict. 1. Tell the better story. 2. Make better strategic bets. 3. Value originality. Continue reading

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The “Call to Action:” A Useful Leadership Tool

A strategic initiative is a rejection of the status quo and with a movement towards a new vision. A call to action is a request to the audience that describes specific actions and the rationale for taking those actions. A well-constructed call to action helps people grasp a vision, contrast it with the status quo, and make a choice about their response.You will always get better support for a strategic initiative if the call for action is presented as a choice, and not a commandment. The article references several practical tools,and addresses the issue of the refusal of a call to action. Continue reading

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Use the Prospective Hindsight Technique to Improve Your Vision Statements and Story Telling

The practical technique of prospective hindsight – on both the disaster scenario and the delight scenario – will help your strategic initiative team identify risks and think more strategically about turning the vision the vision into results. The difference between a prospective story and retrospective story is also discussed. Continue reading

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Incremental Benefits Delivery: The Key to Sustaining Commitment to Strategy

Greg Githens offers four guiding ideas for managing benefits in strategic initiatives: 1) Different stakeholders have different ideas of and expectations for program benefits, 2) there are two types of benefits:economic and emotive, 3) people prefer their benefits early, and 4) partition benefits into compact, incremental releases. A skillful strategic initiative leader will develop an operating rhythm that delivers incremental benefits and sustains commitment for the strategic initiative. Continue reading

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Know The “Follow-The-Money” Story. How was Your Strategic Initiative Funded?

The leader of a strategic initiative needs to know about the investors and their performance expectations. Using the famous line from the movie, All The President’s Men, Greg Githens provides some practical leadership advice for understanding the funding of a strategic initiative. Continue reading

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Strategy-as-Story: The ABCDE Model

This tip for strategy and story telling (third in a series) describes the ABCDE model (assess, baseline, components, delivery, evaluation). It explains that strategic initiatives are chartered in the C to D steps. It also provides four useful questions that help gain strategic perspective: Where are we at? Where do we want to be? How will we get there? How will we evaluate ourselves? It also provides an example story that illustrates the principles. Continue reading

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