Strategic Thinking & Strategic Action

Fostering strategic thinking and strategic action by organizational leaders since 2007.

Know who you are up against!
Strategy Lee Crumbaugh Strategy Lee Crumbaugh

Know who you are up against!

Part of understanding where your organization is headed is to identify with whom you are competing and will compete in the future. Competitors are a critical class of external actors. They shape the markets your organization serves. Their actions will affect your and contribute to the threats and opportunities that you face.

Your planning process needs to address your competition. Responding to, anticipating, and even surprising your competition are ripe considerations when you are developing strategies to get you to your goals and vision of great success.

A useful way to consider competitors is the degree to which they affect or can affect your organization, and to look at the degree to which your organization affects or can affect them. Competitors high on either measure, and especially on both measures, are important for both opportunistic and defensive reasons.

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Be better than the competition
Strategy Lee Crumbaugh Strategy Lee Crumbaugh

Be better than the competition

It’s a tough world out there! It’s likely, whether you recognize it or not, that you are in a cutthroat marketplace where some competitors resort to unethical tactics to gain an edge – lying, cheating, or even jeopardizing safety.

The side of business involving fierce competition is the “Red Ocean,” a concept popularized by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne in their book "Blue Ocean Strategy," published in 2005. “Red Ocean” is a metaphor for the "bloody" competition inherent in crowded markets, where businesses fiercely battle for market share.

This seemingly dystopian nightmare scenario is playing out in many markets today, involving large corporations and local businesses. From Volkswagen's emissions scandal to strip clubs blacklisting dancers, tales of "bad" competition expose the damaging consequences of unethical practices.

The good news? You don't have to compromise your integrity to succeed. You can thrive like the most sustainable businesses by being better, not worse, than your rivals.

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Why New Year’s resolutions fail: The problem of implementation
Strategic planning Lee Crumbaugh Strategic planning Lee Crumbaugh

Why New Year’s resolutions fail: The problem of implementation

Yesterday, New Year’s resolutions came to mind as I was writing year-end reports to my coaching clients.

A blog post on goal-setting and achievement that I wrote earlier this year, Don’t waste your time planning, unless…, cited research showing that 92% of people who make New Year’s resolutions never actually achieve them. While I recognize that what we resolve to achieve in the New Year can be a casual goal without a lot of commitment behind it, to me it seems silly to put a marker out there and then ignore it or only half-heartedly go after it.

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