Focused Momentum

JANUARY 13, 2021

If it is the start of a new year, it is goal setting time. If you are like most, you reviewed how well you performed against last year’s goals and then updated this year’s objectives with incremental adjustments and made a renewed commitment to keep them top of mind throughout the year. That the job done, right? Ah, no, at least not if you intended to set strategic goals for the new year.

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Focused Momentum

JANUARY 5, 2021

The start of a year provides an ideal opportunity to define new goals and set a new course for the coming year, and no year has been more anticipated than the start of 2021. Most of us believe 2021 will provide us a way out of this crushing pandemic and put us on a road to a new, safer, more stable future. Finally, we have the optimism to set goals for this new chapter in our lives!

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Focused Momentum

AUGUST 12, 2020

This article is part of our Strategic Thinking During a Pandemic series. Last week I was invited to participate in a panel on how to support the nonprofit sector through the pandemic. We have worked in both the nonprofit and commercial sectors since founding Focused Momentum in 1999, so I thought I had a reasonably good understanding of how to approach this topic.

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Focused Momentum

JULY 22, 2020

Welcome to our new conference room, playground, living room, gym, and oh yeah, COVID-veggie-garden. Like many of you, we have been struggling to figure out how to prevail during these stranger-than-strange times. Normally our business cycle has a consistent seasonality. The late winter and early spring is the time when we wrap up the strategic planning engagements launched in the prior year, and I concentrate on creating the content that we will build programs around for the next 12 - 18 months.

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Focused Momentum

JULY 13, 2020

Pandemic or not, businesses need to review plans for their next year. Leadership teams must think through how the world has changed and how they will respond to thrive and grow regardless. Teams must breakdown their goals and build collaborative plans to meet or exceed them. So, planning must proceed and, while w e are all rapidly becoming very well acquainted with the technology to connect virtually, we are missing the core techniques and tools that can transition a virtual meeting into a virtu

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Focused Momentum

JULY 8, 2020

Large group strategic planning meetings are typically conducted away from the office to foster an environment where folks engage with each other differently. Today, most of us are working remotely, and meetings are indeed "off-site" yet provide none of the benefits of the traditional off-site meeting.

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Focused Momentum

JUNE 25, 2020

Mid-year usually is the time to review progress against goals, and update your strategic thinking, given new changes to your plan assumptions. Is a mid-year check-in against plans relevant given the sweeping changes we are experiencing with this global pandemic? Yes, but we suggest a few changes to how you conduct a mid-year planning discussion to make it more relevant for these extraordinary times.

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Focused Momentum

MAY 5, 2020

My grandparents had twelve children. Like many of their friends and family members, they married and started their family in the early days of the Great Depression. They had a farm so they could feed their ever-growing brood. They struggled, but so did everyone else. They worked hard and eventually thrived. Later they watched uncles, brothers, and cousins leave their Pennsylvania farmland to travel across the globe as part of the US deployment in WWII.

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Focused Momentum

MARCH 10, 2020

I have a good friend just about to retire. In a text exchange over the last week, I inquired " Still set for the move? " His response. " Yes, the movers are scheduled, and I plan to give notice at the end of this month, only I look at my investment portfolio daily. Maybe I should wait.". For sure, now is a hard time to make a significant change like the one my friend is making, but should he reverse course and delay his retirement?

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Focused Momentum

FEBRUARY 25, 2020

Plans are set, goals are defined, budgets are negotiated, and a new year begins. Teams review their goals, their budget, and go right back to focusing on what their priorities were last year. Sound familiar? How does a management team ensure that their folks focus on making progress on the longer-term objectives while they manage ongoing operations?

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Focused Momentum

FEBRUARY 10, 2020

Thinking is very trendy these days. There are multiple articles promoting design thinking, the value of systems thinking and the need for greater strategic thinking skills, but are these all the same thing? No, not really.

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Focused Momentum

JANUARY 29, 2020

“What are the greatest challenges you face?”. This was the question I posed to stimulate a brainstorming exercise during a recent Strategic Thinking Workshop. “Too many goals. We have too many goals put upon us.” Said one soft-spoken participant. Heads of the other participants nodded in agreement. “And it is assumed we can deal with it.” Said another woman around the table.

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Focused Momentum

JANUARY 7, 2020

This last year was an ambitious year for Focused Momentum ®. We celebrated our 20th year in business. We expanded our content and programs and also worked with a bunch of new folks on their strategic plans. Yet, as the year drew to a close, I felt defeated. I wanted to do so much more! I scheduled a call with one of my most trusted advisers to talk about how the year went and what I was going to do differently in 2020.

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Focused Momentum

JULY 30, 2019

"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and pretty soon you have a dozen." -- John Steinbeck. I like rabbits and I love ideas, but too many of either and you have a problem. Managers consistently struggle with how to encourage innovation. In the last two posts, I discussed renewing strategic thinking months before budgeting as another discipline of strategic management.

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Focused Momentum

DECEMBER 9, 2019

Raise your hand if you were alive on November 22, 1963. I recently posed this question to a conference room of 30 senior executives and board members. We were in the opening section of a jam-packed strategic planning session, and this organization had a challenge faced by many today: How to engage more diversity in their thinking. This was not a new challenge for this organization.

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Focused Momentum

DECEMBER 2, 2019

As the fiscal year ends, the planning teams wrap up the annual planning and distribute next year’s budgets. Ideally, this would be a time of excitement as each new year brings new challenges and new opportunities. Unfortunately, more times than not, new budgets are met with disappointment rather than excitement. Disappointment because rarely do teams get all of the resources they requested, and reviewing the new budget dampens the excited to launch into a new year.

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Focused Momentum

NOVEMBER 14, 2019

“ It just sucks. Every year we try to make improvements, and it gets better, but it still sucks.”. This is a sentiment expressed by the CEO of a successful and fast-growth technology company on a conference panel last month. The other panelists, also CEOs and senior executives of growing companies, nodded agreement. What was the focus of their shared disdain?

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Focused Momentum

NOVEMBER 27, 2018

Creating a winning strategic plan is awesome. You feel great, your team is motivated, and you see renewed passion and commitment to shared success.

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Focused Momentum

NOVEMBER 14, 2019

“ It just sucks. Every year we try to make improvements, and it gets better, but it still sucks.”. A sentiment expressed by the CEO of a successful and fast-growth technology company on a conference panel last month. The other panelist, also CEOs and senior executives of growing companies, nodded agreement. What was the focus of their shared disdain?

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Focused Momentum

OCTOBER 15, 2019

In the recent Harvard Business Review article, Don’t Let Metrics Undermine Your Business , authors Michael Harris and Bill Tayler explore this question by taking a close look at how Wells Fargo’s strategy development and plan execution may have been a factor in enabling the horrible sales practices that cost it billions and possibly permanently tarnished its brand.

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Focused Momentum

AUGUST 28, 2018

Strategy development is the most creative work leadership teams get to do together; rather it should be. All too often poorly facilitated planning efforts become chaotic or worse, boring. Strategic thinking should be the most fun a leadership team has together, but without the right guidance, it can be viewed as mundane. Learn three ways to create real enthusiasm for your next planning effort.

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Focused Momentum

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

At times, we all must make tough choices in the present to prepare for long-term success. All too often we delay acting to change the status quo possibly hoping the issue it will resolve itself. When we take this “let’s just wait and see” course, we don’t protect anything, and we can put something very valuable at risk.

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Focused Momentum

SEPTEMBER 17, 2018

“Gain a fresh perspective.”.

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Focused Momentum

SEPTEMBER 25, 2018

For those with a fiscal calendar starting in January, the autumn months will be dominated by one thing: budgeting. By mid-September, the budget kick-off meeting has been booked, and negotiations have already begun on how next year’s assumptions need to change. This intense focus on the next year can be disorienting when much of the organization is still pressing hard to meet or exceed the current year’s goals.

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Focused Momentum

OCTOBER 8, 2018

The relationship between strategy and positioning are both the result of strategic planning in which you first set the context within which you operate, and then define the ultimate position you want to achieve within this context. A strategy is your plan for how to move from where you are today, your current positioning, and where you ultimately want to be, your ideal strategic positioning.

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Focused Momentum

OCTOBER 16, 2018

Strategic thinking capabilities are a huge asset to an organization. Finding good internal strategic thinkers and leveraging them in our planning projects significantly strengthens the strategic plan our clients adopt. Maybe you are just the stimulating thinker that is needed to produce your organization's next great plan.

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Focused Momentum

OCTOBER 25, 2018

Strategic planning participants often express the desire to be well prepared before the first group meeting. It is understandable that a dedicated and diligent new executive or up and coming leader might experience anxiety as they think about their first strategy discussion. After all, their boss will be in the room, all their peers and possibly a colleague or two with whom they don't see eye to eye.

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Focused Momentum

NOVEMBER 27, 2018

Creating a winning strategic plan is awesome. You feel great, your team is motivated, and you see renewed passion and commitment to shared success.

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Focused Momentum

DECEMBER 3, 2018

Strategic planning efforts ideally create a long-term “road map” leading to future success. However, maintaining momentum while moving down that road can be a challenge. This blog series offers five tweaks to how you lead through strategy implementation to strengthen strategic results. In this post, I share with you how you can begin limited implementation immediately and unleash new momentum needed to push hard on the more complex strategic goals.

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Focused Momentum

DECEMBER 12, 2018

Strategic planning efforts can produce high levels of anxiety in organizations. Worry is caused when new thinking changes the status quo leaving large numbers of folks concerned about the value of what they contribute in the new set of priorities. Since usually a smaller number of folks have been part of crafting the new strategic direction, the majority lack a deep understanding of the need to embrace a new direction.

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Focused Momentum

DECEMBER 17, 2018

In the last blog post , I discussed how necessary it is to set strategic context repeatedly during the early stages of implementing a new strategic direction. Reviewing the core concepts of strategic thinking and digging deep into long-range goals at the start of detailed planning, at decision-making milestones, and when results are visible is vital to ensuring a new strategic direction is well understood and embraced.

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Focused Momentum

JANUARY 8, 2019

66% of small businesses never make it to year 10; yet we were just starting to expand when we hit that milestone. Now, in 2019, I feel like I beat the odds again. This year Focused Momentum® turns 20! The significance of 2019 almost slipped past me. We were so busy in the second part of 2018 that I was 100% focused on my next deliverable. However, on one of my long hikes, my true planner DNA naturally let my mind drift towards setting goals for the following year.

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Focused Momentum

JANUARY 15, 2019

Implementation of a new strategic direction typically starts strong when the energy unleashed from the fun of strategic thinking is fresh. Later, once the transactional aspect of operations takes over everyone’s mindshare, it is harder to keep this energy alive, and thus the momentum on strategic goals can wane. One factor in lagging strategic focus is that leaders slide back to their comfort zone forgetting that they too must evolve.

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Focused Momentum

JANUARY 21, 2019

I have a small painted dish that sits on my desk that says, “Put on Your Big Girl Underpants and MOVE ON.” It was a thoughtful gift from a client. In a strategy session, when the group comes right up to a big possibly radical decision and stops, I am known to say, “Come on, we all put our big girl and big boy pants on today.” Then I facilitate them facing the hard choices.

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Focused Momentum

FEBRUARY 5, 2019

The optimism of a new year can quickly vanish when teams turn from planning to managing. The demands of managing transactions and interactions take over focus and attention to longer-term, more strategic goals wanes. When the organizational goals are set, inertia puts pressure to shift back to the status quo. Slipping back into the “comfort zone is sometimes fostered by leaders stepping back during the implementation of a new strategic direction.

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Focused Momentum

FEBRUARY 11, 2019

The short answer? Yes. Is that a bad thing? No. Limitations can be a good thing. They can provide a healthy structure that improves responsiveness to change.

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Focused Momentum

FEBRUARY 20, 2019

Role clarity is one of the most productive management exercises a team can engage in, so why it is so rarely used? I believe that one reason is that teams don’t have a tool to guide role clarity, so they don’t know how to engage in this type of exercise, and second, they don’t know when to it. This post will address both the how and when; first the when.

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