Strategic Thinking & Strategic Action

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

Are you ready to bat?
Strategic planning Lee Crumbaugh Strategic planning Lee Crumbaugh

Are you ready to bat?

Just as a batter needs to constantly monitor and process all these variables to make good decisions at the plate, as an organizational leader or business professional you should be keenly aware of what’s going on around you when you step up to bat. For businesses, this process is environmental scanning - which these days involves doing a deep dive on the internet and using AI to identify trends and forecasts that offer ideas on how you might proceed in the future.

Environmental scanning is critical, because the environment in which we all are operating is dynamic. Every day brings change – new opportunities and new challenges.

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Rise of the poker pros: 10 lessons for great success
Decision making Lee Crumbaugh Decision making Lee Crumbaugh

Rise of the poker pros: 10 lessons for great success

Is life a poker game? Or, perhaps better stated, to what extent does playing poker teach us about living the best life?

If you have read recent books by Nate Silver (The Art of Risking Everything), Maria Konnikova (The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win), and Annie Duke (Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away), all one-time professional poker players, you likely will be convinced that poker is a useful simulation of real life, albeit under controlled conditions (that is, a set of rules). The cool thing about Silver, Konnikova , and Duke is that they are much more that poker pros.

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Drift and big change challenge our success
Strategic planning Lee Crumbaugh Strategic planning Lee Crumbaugh

Drift and big change challenge our success

Every once in a while we stumble across a seemingly profound thought, the “aha!” moment when we see things in a new way, a concept or approach that helps organize, clarify, and make sense out of what we are seeing or experiencing. One of these “aha!” moments in my life as a strategist has led to deep and useful insights that I suggest anyone planning for future success will be wise to consider.

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Get real when you plan!
Strategic planning Lee Crumbaugh Strategic planning Lee Crumbaugh

Get real when you plan!

Rather live and plan under the delusion that you know what your situation and prospects are, why not turn to a time-tested method for making sure your strategic plan will be reality based? That time-tested approach is to do a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities) analysis.

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Your pricing says it all… But what does it say?
Strategy Lee Crumbaugh Strategy Lee Crumbaugh

Your pricing says it all… But what does it say?

If your business is typical of many that I work with, your customer list is a collection of those customers who fit your ideal client avatar and those who don’t. The ones who don’t deliver you enough revenue, or who resist paying a higher, more realistic price, or who are a pain to serve likely are in your customer portfolio because of one of two reasons: Either when you started out you didn’t really know who you wanted or were best equipped to serve. Or you took them on because you needed revenue and customers and you felt that you could not be picky. (Anyone breathing who offered you money looked great!)

Sound familiar?

The fundamental concept to get your head around if your customer base does not align with the ideal customer you are seeking is that of price positioning.

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We are people, not transactions
Strategy Lee Crumbaugh Strategy Lee Crumbaugh

We are people, not transactions

A client who runs a marketing agency and I have been having an ongoing conversation about establishing the best client relationships. The gist of our discussions has centered on the “old way” of selling versus the “new way” of selling.

Simply, the old way is pushy and presumptive: The client sits on one side of the desk and the seller sits on the other side of the desk. The focus of the seller is on the transaction that he or she is trying to make happen.

The new way is questioning, problem-solving, and consultative: The client and the seller both sit on the same side of the desk, figuring out the best solution for the potential client. The focus of the seller is on the relationship with the potential client.

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Is excellence - or failure - ahead? Answer five questions to know
Strategy Lee Crumbaugh Strategy Lee Crumbaugh

Is excellence - or failure - ahead? Answer five questions to know

We all would prefer to be involved with a business that is excellent rather than one that is in shambles, heading for failure. As a strategist who has worked on improving businesses of all stripes over five decades, I am happy to offer my prescription of what to focus on to take a business to the next level, to move toward excellence, rather than toward mediocracy or even failure. I propose asking five overarching questions as part of an organizational assessment.

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Bridge the strategy gap
Strategic planning Lee Crumbaugh Strategic planning Lee Crumbaugh

Bridge the strategy gap

With the recent collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in nearby Baltimore, bridges are on my mind.

Given my romance with epic bridges, it is no surprise that I have often likened creating a strategic plan to building a bridge to the future.

I have used the bridge analogy for years. As president of the Association for Strategic Planning (now the International Association for Strategy Professionals), more than a decade ago I started my quest to bridge what I (and others) called “the strategy gap.”

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What do your customers expect?
Strategy Lee Crumbaugh Strategy Lee Crumbaugh

What do your customers expect?

Targeting markets and customers/clients is an essential element of a strategic vision. But deciding who to serve is not enough. Knowing and addressing what the target market/customers/clients expect from the organization (or anyone aiming to serve them) is essential.

You need to determine targeted customer/client expectations.

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Desirable difficulties
Strategic thinking Lee Crumbaugh Strategic thinking Lee Crumbaugh

Desirable difficulties

Too often I see organizations and leaders take the easy road, the worn path, the usual course, going with the flow. The organizations and leaders I work with should not expect me to endorse that approach to business (or life). There is a direct line between difficulty and achievement, whether for athletes or business people. The easy road is almost never that direct line (ignoring the element of luck).

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Coaching and change
Coaching Lee Crumbaugh Coaching Lee Crumbaugh

Coaching and change

My fellow coaches and I use the Pygmalion Effect, not as a trick but as a valuable tool, by seeing the best in and expecting the best from our clients, building them up so they can excel at whatever they want and need to be good at and at progressing toward their loftier goals.

Simply, by expecting the best behaviors, we are more likely to see the best outcomes. Rise and shine!

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Business model question: Produce or provide?
Strategic thinking Lee Crumbaugh Strategic thinking Lee Crumbaugh

Business model question: Produce or provide?

When designing (or redesigning) how the organization works, consider the question of production versus provision. The organization’s underlying business model is designed to deliver products or services to customers, to create and capture value. But there is no reason that the starting assumption should be that the organization is the entity that creates the services that it delivers.

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The secret sauce of successful plan implementation
Strategic planning Lee Crumbaugh Strategic planning Lee Crumbaugh

The secret sauce of successful plan implementation

I have been working diligently with my clients the last quarter of this year to assure that they have their strategic business plans in place for the New Year.

Each now has a vision of great success, strategies for getting there, and action steps and strategic initiatives laid out for the next 12 months to move them toward their vision.

You might think with their action plan written, my clients are ready to achieve greater success when January 1 rolls around.

Well, without something else, maybe you can call it the special sauce of execution, the odds are too high that they will not implement their plans or that implementation may peter out after a strong start. Just like so many New Year’s resolutions are abandoned.

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How to build commitment to change, revisited
Strategic planning Lee Crumbaugh Strategic planning Lee Crumbaugh

How to build commitment to change, revisited

Implementing a strategic plan by executing action steps is a large-scale organizational change process. However logical and essential the change seems to those driving it, others will resist change and be a barrier to successful implementation. Gaining and maintaining commitment to the plan and its implementation is a critical step.

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Demand a great brand!
Strategy Lee Crumbaugh Strategy Lee Crumbaugh

Demand a great brand!

I have been editing the second edition of the seminal book on strategy for strategy professionals, Strategy in the 21st Century, written by my friend and professional colleague Randy Rollinson. It references developing a clear brand as a key driver of strategic success. Amen! That echoes what I know: Success demands great strategy and a great brand.

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AI revisited: Will it ever make perfect decisions?
Decision making Lee Crumbaugh Decision making Lee Crumbaugh

AI revisited: Will it ever make perfect decisions?

In our book, BIG DECISIONS, published in 2022, we took on the topic of whether artificial intelligence would soon (or ever) become the answer when we are looking for the right decision.

The idea is that we can maximize our gain from decisions is by using machines to help us make them or even have machines make them for us. But the question then and even more so now with the sudden emergence of OpenAI’s Chat GPT, Meta’s Llama 2, Anthropic’s Claude 2, Google’s Bard, and other groundbreaking AI large language models (LLMs), is can an algorithm be perfected to always yield "the right decision"?

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