Focused Momentum

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Three tips for a sustainable post-pandemic plan.

Focused Momentum

Last weekend felt like the beginning of the beginning. Like many here in the US, my family celebrated the start of summer by joining two other families for a camping trip. We planned the trip this winter when Covid rates were soaring, and we were under Shelter in Place orders.

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The “new normal” realities of engaging in post-pandemic strategy development.

Focused Momentum

Just as the last year presented unprecedented management challenges, post-pandemic strategy development conversations will face issues never experienced before. Here are three realities to consider as your organization prepares to re-engage in strategic planning.

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What's the difference between a strategy and a plan (and which do you need)?

Focused Momentum

These days there is a lot of planning going on. Strategic Planning

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Is Context the Missing Piece in Your Strategic Thinking?

Focused Momentum

Let me know if this rings true for you. You are in a conference room (or now in a virtual meeting) where a team member presents a slide of data in a teeny-tiny font. You think you have seen these slides before, yet your eyes strain to identify the piece of data the presenter is discussing.

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Everything You Need to Know About Crypto

Speaker: Ryan McInerny, CAMS, FRM, MSBA - Principal, Product Strategy

This exclusive webinar with Ryan McInerny will teach you all about cryptocurrency and NFTs! Register to learn more about identifying crypto transactions, crypto asset market trends, managing risk and compliance, and supporting customers and partners using crypto-based payments.

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Why is Strategic Thinking Important - now more than ever

Focused Momentum

For years “strategic thinking” has been reserved for executive team meetings or board rooms as part of a firm’s strategic planning process. However, the highly dynamic environments we operate in today means that the assumptions and agreements that form the basis of strategic plans can shift dramatically between these highly structured planning process. Strategic Thinking

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The Risks of Postponing Strategic Planning in 2021

Focused Momentum

2020 challenged our tactical brilliance, but it was not the year to engage in strategic planning. So, as we begin 2021, many leadership groups wonder if they should re-engage their long-term planning efforts. Strategic Planning

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Time to Get Back-On-Track with Strategic Planning?

Focused Momentum

This year has been full of ups and downs for all of us. This roller coaster has taken a toll on long-range planning efforts, and rightly so. But, as we enter our second year of this pandemic, leadership folks have to wonder, are we there yet? Can we get back to our strategic planning?

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How to Discern Operational Targets from Strategic Objectives.

Focused Momentum

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.

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Break the Cycle of Setting and Forgetting this year's strategic goals

Focused Momentum

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.

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How to look for strategic business partners?

Focused Momentum

Partnering has become a favored strategy to achieve growth goals. Favored because it is often faster to partner than to take the time to build what someone else has established and in today’s world speed to implement can be the difference between success and failure. However, not every possible partner is the right strategic partner for your future success and partnering without thinking about it deeply can be catastrophic. Strategic Thinking

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Retail Reimagined: What It Means To Be An Innovative Retailer

Speaker: DeAnna McIntosh, Retail Growth Strategist

Join DeAnna McIntosh, Retail Growth Strategist, for this idea-sparking session on how to multiply and diversify your revenue (and impact) with zero ad spend, how to create disruption in your industry, and how to reimagine and innovate the retail business model.

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How to hire your next strategic planning consultant?

Focused Momentum

Bringing an outside expert in to assist a strategic planning effort is typically a significant consulting investment for an organization. Looking at multiple candidates, checking references and conducting a panel style interview are all key tactics to use to select the best fit for your organization, but there are specific things to look for when seeking help developing strategy

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Design Thinking, Systems Thinking, Strategic Thinking: All the same?

Focused Momentum

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. Strategic Thinking

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4 Disciplines Essential to Strategy Implementation

Focused Momentum

With a strategic plan complete, the leadership challenge switches from strategic thinking to strategic management. Fundamental to the successful management of a new strategic direction is an organization's ability to guide strategy implementation while managing the current plans and commitments. In this series, I will take you through four steps to guide any organization through the first critical months of strategy implementation. Strategic Management

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Is your glass half empty or half full?

Focused Momentum

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!

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3 Questions That May Reveal Your Hidden Strategist

Focused Momentum

This week, I was a guest on Dov Baron ’s Leadership and Loyalty podcast. This was truly an honor because Dov’s podcast has been ranked as the #1 top podcast on leadership by Inc Magazine. It was also a delight because Dov has a unique and genuine voice in the leadership development field. He explores the questions under the challenges all leaders face in striving to become a great leader. If Dov is new to you, check out Dov’s The Leadership and Loyalty Podcast. Strategic Thinking

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Modern Tech and More: Empowering Your Supply Chain for Success

Speaker: Cory Skinner, Founder and CEO of FactR

Ready to dive into new tech to protect your supply chain, but not sure where or how to start? In this webinar, Cory Skinner, Founder and CEO of FactR, will break down the new, innovative technologies and strategies that you can implement to mitigate historic challenges, and even teach you what NOT to do along the way!

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Want to engage future leaders? take a seat.

Focused Momentum

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.

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How to turn a budget cut into a strategic thinking opportunity.

Focused Momentum

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.

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Target personal strategic performance

Focused Momentum

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. Strategic Management

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Mergers and consolidations: concepts to embrace NOW

Focused Momentum

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.

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Exploring the Overlap: Cost Optimization and Digital Transformation

Speaker: Alex Jiménez, Managing Principal, Financial Service Consulting for EPAM

The largest banks have increased reserves for protection against deteriorating economic conditions. Should banks delay their digital transformation investments and focus on cost reductions? In this webinar, Alex Jiménez will walk us through that question and examine the prudent course of action.

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Sustain Strategic Focus: Align with External Cycles

Focused Momentum

Gaining a different perspective and discovering new influences on success are ideal outcomes of a robust strategic planning process. However, they don’t have to be packed away as you document your plan and move into implementation. The teams that immediately work to change their operational planning to include newly discovered external influences are better able to sustain strategic focus and accelerate performance against strategic goals.

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Our new normal: how we have responded to these strange times.

Focused Momentum

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.

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Virtual Meeting Burnout - three causes and how to combat them

Focused Momentum

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.

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New Remote Working Standards for Planning

Focused Momentum

Large group strategic planning meetings are typically conducted away from the office to foster an environment where folks engage with each other differently.

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The 4 Keys to Demand Planning in 2023 and Beyond

Speaker: Eva Dawkins - Senior Consultant, Supply Chain

Demand planning and forecasting processes are critical to the resilience and profitability of any supply chain, maybe now more than ever. Join Eva Dawkins for this exclusive webinar where she will cover everything you need to implement for success!

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An Obstacle to Resolve or a Bona Fide Emerging Issue?

Focused Momentum

A measure of strategic management capabilities is how well a leadership team can balance responding to market conditions and staying focused on achieving objectives set out in a long-range strategic plan. Testing of this balancing act starts in the early months of implementing a new strategic direction as operational teams start digging into new objectives. Strategic Management

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Learn why the pandemic should not disrupt your strategic management.

Focused Momentum

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?

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Commitment to Success; Make Tough Decisions Early

Focused Momentum

While it is true that one of the benefits of investing the time to define a clear strategic direction is that it helps in decision-making, it is also true that it does not make decisions. That is the job of leadership. Strategic Management

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We are Crushing the Curve, Now What?

Focused Momentum

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.

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The Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020: Initial Catalysts, Current Implications, and Future Impacts

Speaker: Elizabeth "Paige" Baumann, Founder and CEO of Paige Baumann Advisory, LLC

In this session, Elizabeth “Paige” Baumann will cover the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020, which also includes the Corporate Transparency Act. She'll take a deep dive into the catalysts that brought on the act, the current implications of the act, and what impacts the act has on the future of banking and finance.

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3 ways to put your mission statement to work

Focused Momentum

A mission statement can inspire and fulfill a unique role in your strategic management toolkit , but they often play a boring role in the organizations that have them. I confess, I too tend to overlook the mission statement when developing strategy with leadership teams, but it is NOT because I don't understand their strategic importance. It is because when given the chance, groups tend to want to spend our precious strategic thinking time wordsmithing.

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Don’t Bite! Your mantra to successfully lead strategy implementation.

Focused Momentum

If you are like most of us, building something you're proud of makes you excited to share it. But in strategy development, the enthusiasm of working hard to create brilliant new thinking can quickly fade when you get to the implementation phase. The initial optimism can turn to frustration and despair if you let it get picked apart in service to protecting the status quo. But this does not have to happen, simply don't bite. Strategic Management

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Dealing with the Coronavirus Disruption

Focused Momentum

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.".

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Connect Progress with the Plan at Mid-Year.

Focused Momentum

Leading a project, team, or company can feel all-consuming. There is so much time and attention taken by planning and managing that the equally important role of communicating is given short shrift. The pressure on time and attention is unusually high during the first phase of the strategy implementation when demand increases to manage the existing business while completing detailed planning to achieve future goals.

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7 Ways to Supercharge Your ABM Strategy with Real-Time Intent

Streaming real-time intent is a homerun for marketing and sales’ account-based marketing (ABM) strategies. With real-time buyer insights, you can be first-in-line to provide solutions and lead better, hyper-personalized conversations.

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Are Your Key Performance Indicators (KPI) Strategic?

Focused Momentum

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?

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Too Many Goals! Apply strategic thinking to motivate not overwhelm.

Focused Momentum

“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.

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Does a strategic plan limit you?

Focused Momentum

The short answer? Is that a bad thing? Limitations can be a good thing. They can provide a healthy structure that improves responsiveness to change. Strategic Management

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Five Leadership tips to Strengthen Strategic Results

Focused Momentum

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

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Digitizing Logistics: Harness the Power of Data in 4 Steps

Entering a new demand gen position in a volatile market is nerve-wracking. In demand generation, data is essential for knowing who you should target and how. In this eBook, you’ll learn how to identify and target your ideal prospects using different types of data.