Paul Hobcraft

MAY 9, 2022

“ Strategy is useless without innovation; innovation is directionless without strategy” Below is an extract from “Reinventing Innovation” by John J Kao. ” Innovation fits with a designer’s definition of design: the ability to move from the existing to the preferred. The Innovation Pathway.

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BrainZooming

NOVEMBER 11, 2015

We have been working with a client that had done a lot of strategic thinking about a new initiative. Those are six starting places to use when you are doing strategic thinking about big lists. The thing is, they had done the hard strategic thinking and already had all the raw material they needed.

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CMOE

AUGUST 8, 2019

Military strategy is thousands of years old but the field of business strategy has only been around for about fifty years. Because this field is so new, there’s still a lot of disagreement about how business strategy and business models should be defined—and often among those who write about these topics the most!

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BrainZooming

MAY 23, 2016

One of my favorite things is when clients, blog readers, and Brainzooming workshop attendees use our strategic thinking exercises to explore new ideas. Imagine my surprise when Diane’s drawing turned out to be a representation of an innovation strategy formula we shared on the Brainzooming blog a year earlier.

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BrainZooming

MARCH 27, 2018

The combination of branding exercises effectively identified new language to describe its strategic direction and supporting strategies. During the exercises and conversations to develop its big strategy statement , we discussed the role that expertise plays in the organization’s brand.

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BrainZooming

JANUARY 4, 2016

They reported the team’s defensive coordinator, Bob Sutton, told them that when planning competitive strategy , “I want to stay out of ‘never’ and ‘always.’”. What fantastic competitive strategy advice to incorporate this time of year as you implement new strategies. Who Sees Predictable Competitive Strategy Moves?

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BrainZooming

MARCH 31, 2020

In a recent post, I mentioned a labor strike as a productive analogy for developing strategies during this time of global disruption. Facing a complete business shutdown, our team used a combination of strategic thinking and real-time course correction to stay engaged with and attempt to re-win the customers we couldn’t currently serve.

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The Inovo Group

APRIL 10, 2020

In this time of non-linear transformation, the ultimate winners will be those agile companies that are thinking now about their near-term survival AND their long-term advantage. A ‘dual-path’ strategy includes both ‘Today-for-Today’ and ‘Today-for-Tomorrow’ strategies that require new methods and tools to create.

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BrainZooming

JULY 11, 2017

As I explained it, our objective when leading a strategic planning process is to make sure the result is an innovative, implementable strategy. 9 Things to Deliver in a Strategic Planning Process. That specific phrase (an innovative, implementable strategy) is very important to a strategic planning process.

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BrainZooming

SEPTEMBER 29, 2017

Inspired by an article in The Wall Street Journal by professor Scott Galloway, they lay out five strategic imperatives Amazon uses to disrupt markets and grow. The Amazon Strategy DNA. Working from Galloway’s analysis, let’s look at how to incorporate a strain of the Amazon strategic success DNA into your own strategy development.

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BrainZooming

FEBRUARY 16, 2018

Last week, The Brainzooming Group was in San Francisco for the Social Media Strategies Summit , where Mike presented a content marketing strategy workshop and a talk on collaborative engagement. That’s important, because brand strategy has everything to do with cool. Start by making sure your definition is up to date.

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Innovation Excellence

AUGUST 13, 2016

In Henry Mintzberg’s 1994 landmark book, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, the author calls for a new method to create effective strategies. He notes that, “Strategic planning isn’t strategic thinking. Mintzberg draws a definitive line between those that create strategy and those that devise the plan,

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BrainZooming

JUNE 20, 2016

He streamlined traditional steps, introducing fun videos, and creating a tolerable experience for executives creating a strategic plan over a weekend. If this guy could do it in two days, we DEFINITELY could! Using a few basic posters, we described the strategic thinking exercises, using easel pads and sticky notes to capture ideas.

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BrainZooming

APRIL 22, 2016

I debuted a presentation on “Results – Creating Strategic Impact,” our mini-book on employee engagement ideas to boost an organization’s strategic thinking. Have them share suggestions for things they would experiment with, change, or definitely keep as is.

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BrainZooming

FEBRUARY 5, 2016

As you think about your career strategy , how do you see yourself? I had not really considered this career strategy question until the end-of-season speculation about which NFL coaches would be fired immediately after the regular football season’s final weekend. – Mike Brown.

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Innovation 360 Group

MAY 17, 2018

My experience spans across technology-enabled strategy and implementation to enable organizations (finance, banking, insurance, retail, telecom, logistics, healthcare) create value, take out cost, and develop competitive advantage. Enabling organizations – strategic roadmaps, IT optimization, operating model definition.

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BrainZooming

OCTOBER 26, 2015

Despite Seth Godin’s career strategy warning to not wait around for people to select you , there are plenty of situations where someone else has had to select you as THE RIGHT PERSON. That’s a good thing when it comes to your career strategy. It might be a boss that recruited and hired you for a new job.

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BrainZooming

JANUARY 19, 2016

I’ve just signed on to speak at the 2016 Social Media Strategy Summit in Las Vegas. The topic will be an update to the “Staying Sane as a Solo Social Media Professional” workshops I’ve delivered at previous Social Media Strategy Summit events (and elsewhere). 2 Ways to Decide When to Write What with Your Content Marketing Strategy.

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BrainZooming

OCTOBER 16, 2015

It’s also definitely not for the faint of heart. Your innovation expertise could also be in training, executing of innovation Strategy and Models, project management, and leadership. Exploring those varied types of expertise in future weeks will help determine this innovation expert definition yet. Marianne Carr. Marianne Carr.

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BrainZooming

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

Chuck has been an incredible influence on my career, especially as it comes to creative thinking skills. That was definitely true. Chuck was the first person I heard deliver an in-depth presentation on creative thinking skills. Enjoy the video and Chuck’s insights and expertise on how place influences creative thinking skills!

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BrainZooming

FEBRUARY 1, 2017

10 Questions to Identify Innovative Thinking in Salespeople. Thinking about innovative sales people I have known, how we teach strategic and creative thinking skills to sales teams, and strategic thinking questions we use to spur new thinking, here are ten questions to identify innovative thinking in salespeople.

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BrainZooming

SEPTEMBER 28, 2015

On Wednesday, I delivered the closing keynote at the Real Time Marketing Lab with a mini-workshop on using strategic thinking super models to help C-suite executives understand social networking and content marketing strategy. We definitely have the ideas and experience to make it happen for you!

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BrainZooming

FEBRUARY 23, 2016

A big part of making strategic planning fun, however, involves focusing on boring details that create a fun* experience. 11 Boring Details for Making Strategic Planning Fun*. Letting everyone know upfront that WE will handle turning the input into a strategic plan (so they don’t have to). – Mike Brown.

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BrainZooming

NOVEMBER 11, 2015

Because of this, the list was worthless for doing what I suspect everyone hoped it would do: provide a starting point for the strategic thinking needed to back into a definition of and explanation for what the new initiative would turn out to be. 6 Ways to Organize Ideas from Strategic Planning Exercises.

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BrainZooming

DECEMBER 14, 2016

The Brainzooming eBook, “11 Fun Ideas for Strategic Planning,” has generated lots of downloads since we published it during the early days of strategy season. The eBook shares ideas we developed in the past ten-plus years to create fun strategic planning exercises. 7 Types of Fun with Strategic Planning Exercises.

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BrainZooming

OCTOBER 1, 2015

It’s often a challenge to describe what Brainzooming is to people that haven’t participated directly in collaborative strategy or innovation workshops. We definitely have the experience and proven processes to bring your community together productively and successfully! – Mike Brown. What an incredible range of comments!

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Idea Drop

JULY 20, 2017

There are two distinct (though complementary) ways to work through a problem and develop a solution: we might label them ‘creative thinking’ and ‘strategic thinking’. The key principles of strategic thinking Limit your time: strategic thinking is all about efficiency.

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BrainZooming

SEPTEMBER 21, 2015

Anything about faith I try to link to strategy, creativity, and innovation, all pillar topics for our work and the blog. These connections aren’t difficult to make, having discovered over the past decade that my Catholic faith positively and meaningfully influences every aspect of how I think and what I do, even in business.

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BrainZooming

FEBRUARY 3, 2017

Successfully going from strategy to implementation, however, is critical to business success. Creating a strong, innovative plan is only part of the strategy equation. Built for Discomfort – An Alternative Prioritization Strategy for Innovation. Creating Change and Change Management – 4 Strategy Options.

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BrainZooming

OCTOBER 14, 2015

Creative Thinking – 12 Triggers for Finding Strategic Connections. That’s a bunch of creative thinking exercises for thirty minutes. We’ll definitely be going through it quickly, so I’m guessing even attendees will find value in these links. New, Innovative Ideas with What’s It Like. – Mike Brown.

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BrainZooming

NOVEMBER 10, 2015

You may have to do homework on yourself and your own background to flesh out the definition and range of your expertise. For organizational innovation success, contact The Brainzooming Group to help your team be more successful by rapidly expanding strategic options and creating innovative growth strategies.

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BrainZooming

JANUARY 11, 2016

Here’s an idea for a new strategic thinking exercise that can be a big help. 4 Ways to Examine Brand Performance as a Strategic Thinking Exercise. This is definitely a strategic thinking exercise idea from the Brainzooming R&D lab. First though, a little background.

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BrainZooming

OCTOBER 21, 2015

It’s not always easy to know when patience has outlived its usefulness, and the time to definitely act has arrived. Judging whether you are making progress can be way more abstract than you would think it ever should be.

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The Inovo Group

MAY 14, 2018

Effective futuring that includes the ability to gain insights into long-term futures with inevitable disruptions and discontinuities needs to be a key component of a company’s strategy and innovation efforts. RIM’s strategy depended on corporate IT adoption with centralized management, control and security of the devices.

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The BMI Lab Blog

JUNE 10, 2021

For the past decades, companies have been defining their strategy following a traditional approach: On the one hand, they analyzed trends, selected the most relevant ones, and designed their strategy based on a “clear view of the future”. The strategy becomes a portfolio of different, coordinated business models.

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BrainZooming

MARCH 14, 2017

We have tons of strategic planning questions, including a few we have singled out as more fun than others. We also have quite a bit on fun strategy planning, including one of our most popular new eBooks, 11 Fun Ideas for Strategic Planning. 3 Short, Funny Strategic Planning Questions. Yes, developing strategy can be fun.

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BrainZooming

OCTOBER 12, 2016

These 15 creative thinking skills to turn junk ideas into treasures are definitely worth considering, in my view, to help get you unstuck creatively. – Mike Brown. NEW FREE Download: 16 Keys for Finding Resources to Accelerate Your Innovation Strategy. Identify alternative internal strategies to secure support.

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