Strategic and Market Planning
Creating Demand
Submitted by Alan on Sat, 05/03/2008 - 08:58Welcome to the introductory page of the Creating Demand digital book. This digital book, on the AGILEdge website, focuses on issues, ideas and tools for creating demand for an organizations' products and services or for a share of the proceeds of future products and services (i.e. for investors in biotech/technology firms) or for a specific outcome (in the case of fundraising for nonprofits). So the focus is on what most would call sales and marketing excellence with a slightly broader view.
From what we've seen over the years, there are 2 major causes of failure or in the best case, mediocrity in this area.
First is really a failure to pay attention to reality and involves the quality and accuracy of information on which decisions and actions are based. The homework is not done. That is, the planning and decision making process is corrupted by inaccurate assumptions and/or so-called "knowledge" based on the past and/or a fixation on completing the plan format or on some "cool" solution.
This is further often complicated by leaders who ignore the reality of their team and assume that their department heads are fully informed about external and internal influences and issues. That is, the sales or marketing guy is fully aware of all key issues on the customer, the engineering guy knows the ins and outs of all available technology, the regulatory affairs buy is fully up to date on all regulatory, legal and process influences, the financial guy is an expert on … and so on.. . "Yep, all I need to do in my role as this here company's leader is get my team together, talk things through and spit out a plan, then we can play some golf…"
Leading High Performance Teams
Submitted by admin on Thu, 04/03/2008 - 06:53Welcome to the introductory page of Leading High Performing Teams. This is a digital book on the AGILEdge website focused on the issues of developing people and effective teams in organizations. Too often, we believe, this subject area tends to be corrupted by snake oil and short term
fixes that give people temporary confidence without long term benefit. Human nature, such that it is, is a reality that must be dealt with - not wished away or dealt with inadequately because of incorrect assumptions about it. Effective people and effective teams of people, as nearly all of us who have worked in a variety of organizations can testify, can be developed, maintained and engaged to do great things, but all too often, the attempt is made, but the result is not achieved.
The What
Submitted by Alan on Tue, 01/22/2008 - 06:38What are you focused on?
How effectively are you moving forward?
Developing the FOCUS for your organization and then achieving that focus in all your people and processes is never easy but almost always essential for success. Often this work is ignored or the need rationalized away. When done, it involves understanding your relative strengths and weaknesses, developing the needed strengths and then matching these with actions that help you pursue the best opportunities and protect yourself from likely threats.
