These 12 Common Business Terms Seem Redundant, But They Have Practical Differences

If you’re involved in any goal-setting effort, you’re bound to run into a host of terms that all seem to mean the same thing. Here’s how to keep them straight.

When working with leadership teams and executives on strategy planning, we often throw around a lot of terms. Some of these terms can seem to mean the same thing, and they often end up meaning different things to different people. Here are some definitions I’ve coalesced and use in my work to keep things clear.

Purpose

I use this to describe what an individual or organization is meant to do in their heart of hearts. It’s something they can spend their entire lives pursuing and has infinite room for success. Some examples are: to rid the world of hunger or improve our lives through technological innovation.

Mission

I like to think of the purpose as the why, and the mission as the what. A mission defines what we want to achieve at the highest level. Some examples are: give every child three square meals a day or make tomorrow’s technology available today.

Vision

A vision describes a future state in rich detail. We use a vision to create a compelling view for what our success will look like once we’ve achieved our goals. Generally, this is written in prose over several paragraphs and provides key details and taps into core emotions.

BHAG

Coined by Jim Collins in his book Built To Last, BHAG stands for Big Hairy Audacious Goal. I look 10 years in the future, but some people go as far as 30. There are different types of BHAGs, but they are always compelling and time-bound. Good BHAGs will move you into a new league of play and should invoke the slightest bit of fear.

Priority

Priority defines the one thing you are dedicating the majority of your time to. Your priority is the thing you do prior to working on other tasks. It is often helpful to have a list of things that you are deprioritizing in return. Priorities are generally set for a year or quarter and can involve multiple tasks or projects.

Focus

Your focus is similar to a priority, but slightly more general. I think of a focus as a topic of interest or concern for a group or individual. A focus might be customer service, whereas a priority would be reducing the wait time for priority customers.

Initiative

I generally use initiative to describe a group of projects, often across departments, that achieves one or more key results in an organization. Some examples might include: improve safety to reduce shop floor accidents. This one initiative includes human resources, operations, facilities, and logistics.

Objective

Objective is defined as an area of focus that is clearly aligned with the long term strategy, reasonably narrow in scope, and compelling to the team. For example, a quarterly objective might be improve project management skills for all delivery staff.

Goal

A goal is similar to an objective but smaller and more specific; it also has a clear deadline and timeline. If the objective is improve project management skills for all of our delivery staff, then a goal might be have all delivery staff score over 90 percent on the PMI project management skills assessment.

Target

Used in conjunction with a key performance metric (KPI), a target is a specific number or measurement you’re looking to achieve. If your KPI is number of orders per day, your target might be over 200 orders a day for five consecutive days.

Key Result

If you’re using OKRs, then these are the specific, measurable, actionable things you are doing to move forward on your objective. Each key result is an independent task that adds value, not a series of steps in a project plan.

If your objective is improve project management skills for all delivery staff then your a key results might be 1) run three project planning workshops in March, 2) have two people go to the PMI certification class, and 3) hold a project retrospective on our last three projects.

Action Item

An action item is a commitment to do something. It has a ‘who’, a ‘what’, and a ‘by when’. With any action item, I want to know what I will have in my hands or see with my eyes that will tell me it’s complete. When running my weekly team meetings, I’m focusing on what actions people are committing to for the next meeting so that I can hold people accountable to what they’ve signed up to deliver.

I’m sure there are other terms that get thrown around in these types of sessions, but the ones above are the core terms that are good to know. While I like mine, they are not gospel. What’s most important is that everyone on your team agree to each word’s meaning so everyone has the right expectations.

3 Common Roles Found in Any Workplace Drama, and How to Rewrite the Script

Team drama takes on many forms, but it’s rarely effective. Look for these patterns and use these techniques to flip the script.

As a team coach, I often get brought into situations with a lot of drama and dysfunction. Sometimes drama is too ingrained and systemized to resolve and the team needs to be disbanded and rebuilt.

In many cases, however, we can turn the ship around by recognizing patterns and the roles people are stuck in. The most common pattern I see is the Victim-Villain-Hero triangle.

In the late 1970s, psychologist Stephen Karpman identified this common Victim-Villain-Hero pattern in many dysfunctional families and relationships. These roles caused the members involved to get stuck in a downward spiral. As it turns out, we can apply this same analysis to professional team situations.

Team members might switch roles at various times, but these three roles are key to the pattern. The resulting drama triangle between these roles causes the individuals to stay stuck.

The Victim

Feels powerless and feels that everything is happening to them. They act stuck and unable to make decisions or have control over the situation. Generally they are unhappy and ashamed of the situation they are in.

The Villain

Feels they are logically correct and morally justified in their actions. They are generally blaming, critical, and demanding in their behavior. They are generally focused on doing what they feel is right and fair to the larger group or community.

The Hero

Feels the need to rescue the victim from the villain. They will often act in a caring, supportive, and self-sacrificing manner to support the victim. However, the hero is often not addressing their own obstacles or bigger issues and instead diving in to save the victim so they, the hero, can avoid harder conversations and/or avoid addressing the villain.

When I start working with dysfunctional teams, I often see this drama triangle playing out. In complex situations, and workplaces there are often multiple triangles between multiple people and situations where a person can be a victim in one triangle and a villain in another.

The first step in changing the situation is making the team aware of the pattern they are in. I give them feedback on their behavior based on specific interactions, and I help them see how they are playing out a certain role. Sometimes, just this awareness is enough to change the dynamic.

Once we expose the pattern, I can start coaching them on how to react to these situations differently. For each role there is a different, and more empowering approach they can take to improve the situation.

The Victim can help solve the problem.

When someone feels themselves slip into victim mode, I suggest they shift to problem solving mode. Rather than wallow in their situation, they should brainstorm options. This might include resources they have and people who can help. I also suggest they shift from seeing the other person as the villain to instead seeing them as someone trying hard to live up to a high standard.

The Villain can focus on clear results.

When someone sees themselves becoming the villain, I encourage them to focus on the results they want to achieve and shift the blame and criticism. They should become a champion of higher expectations and desire and assert what they want rather than attacking the other person. I want them to ask for the other person’s help and commitment to reach their shared goal. A good champion will make the other person part of the solution.

The Hero can clarify their goals and expectations.

Being a hero can feel great. You get to put on your cape and pull the victim to safety. However, this is a not a sustainable approach. Instead, I encourage the hero to think more like a coach and to help the victim generate options he or she can implement themselves. I also encourage the hero to work with the villain to help them clarify their goals and expectations.

While not all drama is the result of the victim-villain-hero triangle, and not all triangles can be successfully turned around, knowing the patterns and trying these approaches can change the dynamic when you see a team in trouble. More importantly, being aware of the tendency can help you realize when you’re stuck in one yourself.

If Your Team Sets Goals, But Fails to Successfully Deliver Them, You Need This 1 Meeting

Teams can set a solid strategy and create great goals but then miserably fail on the dehttps://www.inc.com/bruce-eckfeldt/5-simple-ways-to-improve-accountability.htmllivery. Here is the one meeting that will make a difference.

Nothing is more frustrating than having a great planning session and coming up with a breakthrough plan for the quarter, only to have the team fall short on their targets. This shortcoming not only means lost time and increased risks, it’s hard on team morale, too.

Left unaddressed, this accountability problem slows down the team considerably until people leave or management steps in and shakes things up. To break out of this cycle, there is one aspect I focus on that helps rebuild the team’s planning and execution capability and morale.

That one thing is the weekly planning meeting.

The weekly planning meeting is when the team looks at its goals and their individual commitments to the team and figure out what they are going to focus on and accomplish over the next seven days. Seven days is the core work cycle of the team and all it takes to rebuild a team’s momentum.

The agenda for the weekly meeting is simply five questions:

1. What did you commit to for this week?

2. What did you accomplish?

3. What did you learn?

4. What do you commit to for next week?

5. What is your action plan?

For the first two or three weeks, I just ask the questions. I don’t probe too deeply, I just make sure I’m clear on what they are committing to, what they are learning, and what actions they are planning. My goal is to understand the situation and the dynamic. There are a several common patterns I find within these meetings; all of which have simple fixes.

1. Focusing on too many priorities in a week.

This happens when people feel pressure and are desperate for results. They hope that committing to lots of work will offset the lack of delivery. Instead, I try to take the pressure off and just have them focus on a few simple, but highly important, tasks. Once they have success and confidence, we can rebuild to a reasonable volume.

2. Focusing on something other than a key priority.

This can happen because there is an obvious obstacle they don’t know how to address or a fear of tackling something highly important and then failing. By refocusing on the main thing, breaking it down to simple set of tasks, and focusing on learning something, rather than finishing something by the end of the week, we can begin to make progress in the right direction.

3. Not having a clear sense of the goal.

Too often people make commitments that are vague and fluffy. Which means that they don’t really know what they are going to do or work on which in return means they can’t deliver at the end of the week. One of my favorite terms is definition of done. What am I going to see with my eyes or hold in my hands at the end of the week? Only after answering this question can we ask if that work product really helps us advance towards our goal.

4. Not planning time to do the work

This happens when someone hopes to find the time during the week to do the work they committed to, but then gets overwhelmed with day-to-day tasks. In simple cases, I help them set aside time to dedicate to the work. In severe cases, we focus on rebuilding their daily schedule and delegation plan to free them up to make time to work on weekly priority commitments.

5. Starting too late in the week.

This is a common case of procrastination. They push off the work until day five or six and then get caught waiting for someone else to reply or get back to them before they can finish. Here, I suggest the “eat the frog” approach to task management, whereby you start each day tackling the hardest, least fun task each morning so that you can get it off your plate and move on to something easier and more fun.

6. Spinning wheels on an obstacle.

Sometimes people report that they hit an obstacle quickly and then struggled with it for the remainder of the week or just shut down and stopped working. My best advice in these cases is that when you get stuck, raise your hand. One of the main reasons most businesses work in teams is so that you have multiple brains on a problem. By suffering in silence, you’re undermining your team. Instead, talk to someone and get some help.

While other situations do come up, these are by far the most common, and the most addressable. Usually after a few weeks of course correction and rebuilding, the team gets back into a productive grove. And, over time, by focusing on good, realistic habits and continuously improving on process, a team can overcome and makeup for lost ground.

Coaching Is a Powerful Management Tool, but Not Everyone Can Be Coached

Whether you’re a top executive or a recent grad, coaching could be a huge boost to your career. But it could also be a waste of money.

The professional coaching industry has exploded over the last decade. Today, I hear high-powered executives bragging at cocktail parties that they have not one but two or three coaches who help them with everything from leadership to public speaking to mindset.

As a leadership coach, I’m thrilled that so many people are hiring professional like me. However, like any trend, some people rush into hiring a coach who maybe shouldn’t. Here are a few questions I ask people who approach me about coaching and questions I suggest you ask yourself before you hire a coach.

1. How self-aware are you?

While this is a difficult question to ask yourself, it’s key to the coaching process. If you’re not willing, or able, to objectively look at your own thinking, behavior, and actions, then coaching may have limited impact. Those who get a lot out of coaching are highly aware of how their behaviors impact others and situations.

Check the language in your thinking. When something bad happens, do you immediately start blaming other people and finding excuses of why the external world conspired against you and put you in a bad situation? If so, you might want to first work on seeing how you contributed to the outcomes, too.

2. Are you ambitious?

Coaches can help develop great strategies and paths to success, but they can’t do the work for you. If you’re not driven to make changes and not willing to put in the hard work to implement the action plans, you might not get much out of coaching. You need to want the outcomes enough to do the hard work. If not, you might be wasting your money.

3. Do you hold yourself accountable?

Many people come to me looking to be held accountable and for me to drive the process. I have to explain to them that I can’t make them do anything. I can only help them get clarity on what they want, why they want it, and how they are going to get it. But they need to be in charge of doing the work.

If you’re not willing or able to take personal accountability for your commitments, then even the best coach in the world will not be able to help you succeed. That doesn’t mean you need to be perfect; failure is part of the process. But you need to “own it” and be willing to be self-critical. Don’t blame your coach for not making you do your work.

4. Do you have a growth or fixed mindset?

A lot of research has been done in the last decade regarding how your thinking can impact your ability to create change. Carol Dweck’s book Mindset presents this as the concept of fixed vs growth mindset. Which one you have will impact the effectiveness of your coaching considerably.

Put simply, a fixed mindset is one that believes your skills and abilities are innate and determined at birth. A growth mindset believes that while you have many natural gifts, you also have the ability to learn and grow through persistence and focused effort.

If you have a fixed mindset, you will not get much out of coaching. If you have a growth mindset, you will see change and improvement by working with a guide who can help you accelerate your learning process.

5. Are you curious to learn?

As a parent of four kids, I can say that one of the most difficult stages of parenting is going through the why phase. They want to know and understand everything. Ever answer is follow by the same question: …”but why daddy?”

While exhausting to me as a parent, this attitude in the people and teams I coach is an augur of success. People who are willing to ask why, and then why again, and then why a few more times, are much more likely to find root causes and make fundamental changes to they way they behave and think.

6. Can you keep things in perspective?

A big part of the coaching and development process is getting feedback, often a lot of it. Some of it will certainly be critical, and at times it will be difficult to hear. Your ability to take things in stride will determine if you are able to gain insight or if you close up and get defensive.

While you don’t need to answer all of the questions perfectly, know that you’ll be challenged in many ways by a good coach and being prepared to do the hard work will help you get the most out of it.

Want to Improve Your Leadership Skills? Focus on Critical Thinking

Highly successful leaders are exceptional critical thinkers. Here are five ways to improve your approach to strategic problem-solving and decision-making.

As a strategic business coach, one of my core responsibilities is leveling up leadership skills on the senior team. I like to say, if you want to grow and scale a business, you have to grow and scale its leadership. And one of the key skills I focus on is critical thinking.

As a business grows in size, so does the complexity and scope of its problems and challenges. Without good critical-thinking skills, leaders will make poor decisions and fail to take advantage of strategic opportunities. Very often, what holds the business back from reaching its true potential is a lack in the leadership of foresight and effective problem-solving skills.

Here are five key things I focus on when working with leaders to improve their ability to identify, analyze, solve, and implement effective problem-solving strategies.

1. Gather more and better data

The first thing I emphasize is that most teams try to make decisions with limited and poor-quality data. Good critical thinkers start by collecting as much high-quality data as possible. They don’t take things at face value. They question summaries and dig to make sure that they really understand what’s happening on the ground and maximize the raw information they have to work with.

This includes both structured and unstructured data as well as quantitative and qualitative information. It’s also important to look at history and trends and to compare the data you’re looking at with other benchmarks and norms. Good thinkers don’t rely upon summaries and averages; they go back to the source and get the raw information.

2. Learn how to separate fact from inference

Once you’ve collected information, it’s key to understand the difference between facts and inferences. Too often leaders will make an assumption about what’s really true and treat it as a fact when what they are really dealing with is an inference. This creates a shaky foundation for any future thinking and decision-making.

A fact is objectively observable by other people. An inference is something that includes an assumption or an opinion that may or may not be true. If you literally drive from New York to L.A. and it takes 58 hours, that’s a fact. If you use a map to calculate the distance and estimate an average speed to get to 58 hours, that is an inference. Don’t confuse the two.

3. Break things down to first principles

I encourage leaders and teams to think in first principles. These are the fundamental building blocks in thinking and decision-making. They are the core elements that are true regardless of situation and context.

They generally are found by asking clarifying questions, considering alternatives, and testing assumptions. Once you have a good set of first principles, you then have the elements you need to start creating new options and new solutions that you can be confident in.

For example, the first principle in tennis is that a ball hit with topspin will fall faster than one hit with backspin. A good tennis player knows how to use this in different scenarios to create strategic effects. By combining this with other principles, an expert player can make plays that leverage their strengths and exploit their opponent’s weaknesses.

4. Develop effective models

Another tool that can be very effective for teams and leaders is thinking in terms of models or analogies. While these are an abstraction and reduction of reality, and therefore wrong at some level, they can be useful for simplifying a situation and quickly finding alternatives and strategies.

For example, economies of scale is a model for how price changes with volume. While a specific situation may not follow the model perfectly, it can help a business figure out how to gain efficiencies by increasing the volume while holding costs the same.

The trick with models is to know where and why they work and how they can fall short. Models can help you quickly generate insights and strategies, but you need to be aware of their limits and not get lulled into a false sense of security about reality.

5. Continuously challenge your assumptions

Maybe the most important thing I focus on with leaders and teams is to create ways of testing and validating their assumptions quickly. If left unchecked, an assumption can lead to poor thinking and bad decision-making. This can be avoided by quickly going out into the real world and seeing if what you’re assuming holds up in the field.

By developing your critical-thinking skills, you’ll improve your decision-making and ultimately get better outcomes and long-term results. And while some of these steps may take some time and energy, they are good investments and will yield strong returns.

Why the Secret to Fast Growth Is to Sell Fewer Things to Fewer People

Growing your business quickly requires you to focus your strategy. Here are five steps that’ll get you there.

As a strategic coach, I work with companies to figure out how to go from a couple million to a couple hundred million in revenue, which is a very challenging phase of growth. The key to getting to that next level is zeroing in on a strategy that is both effective and highly scalable.

The irony is, the faster you want to scale a business, the more you need to focus your strategy. This includes choosing a specific product or service that you are uniquely good at as well as identifying a specific customer whom you serve particularly well.

That said, here are five key steps you can follow to identify a strategy that will allow you to scale more quickly and with less drama.

1. Identify your core customer

The first thing to do is figure out exactly who your best customer is. Clearly identifying the segment where you are most successful will allow you to focus your sales and marketing efforts and optimize your spending.

The fact is, most companies try to sell to too many types of customers and water down their efforts. Find the one that works best and double down.

The best way to identify your core customer is to look at your current customer base and ask three key questions: Who are your most profitable customers? Which customers are easy to serve? Which customers will promote you in the industry or have a reputation that allows you to sell more effectively?

By asking these three questions and seeing which customers rise to the top, you’ll begin to identify what types of customers you should go out and find more of.

2. Shed any and all bad fits

The next step is difficult for most companies but critical for scaling a business. Once you identify your customer you need to stop doing business with everyone else. This doesn’t mean you need to fire all your non-ideal clients tomorrow, but you do need to potentially raise rates, stop offering discounts, not provide extra services, and limit the time and energy you spend on them.

It also means you need to set up filters and qualifications in your sales and marketing funnel to remove prospects who do not fit your core customer profile. While it can be hard to say no, it will free up space for you to search for, find, and close better leads.

3. Hone your products and services

Once you’ve identified your core customer, you begin to see which of your current products and services create the most value for their business. By slimming down your portfolio and focusing on just those offerings that are the highest value, you can simplify your operations.

While there are many products and services you could provide, the fact is that you have limited time, energy, and resources. You should only focus on those that create the most benefit and that allow you to charge the highest prices to make the highest profit. Doing otherwise is just leaving money on the table.

4. Standardize your processes and procedures

The other benefit of limiting the products and services that you offer is that you can simplify your business. With a limited set of offerings, you reduce the complexity of your processes and procedures as well as the breadth of skills and experiences that you need on your teams. Focusing allows you to simplify and streamline many aspects of your operations.

5. Create a brand promise and guarantee

Now that you’ve identified whom specifically you sell to, what product or service you offer them, and what value you create, you can hone your marketing message. By creating a brand promise that clearly communicates to your target customer what it is you do and what benefit they will gain, you will make it much easier to generate leads and close deals.

A brand promise guarantee shows your prospect that you’re willing to put skin in the game and back your product or service with a meaningful and significant commitment. For example, Domino’s knew that delivering on time was so important that they would give you your pizza for free if it wasn’t there in 30 minutes. The rest is history.

Like many aspects of a business, identifying your core customer and core offering is not complicated, but it’s not easy. It takes focus and willingness to make tough decisions and not get distracted by shiny objects.

6 Ways to Develop Better Leaders That Won’t Cost You a Dime

Leadership is critical, yet most companies fail to invest in their people. Here are six ways to develop talent that won’t break the bank.

Leadership is critical to a company’s success. This is twice as true for high-growth businesses. Without enough leaders, scaling a business is next to impossible. It’s easy to find people who want to work, but without people to organize, inspire, and manage people, you’re setting yourself up for lots of drama with little productivity.

Many companies try to hire for leadership. This has two big downsides: first, it’s expensive. Direct and indirect recruiting and hiring costs will quickly add up. Second, it’s risky because a cultural ‘mis-hire’ can do real damage to an organization.

Instead, the best way to increase your company’s leadership is to grow it from within. Developing your current people as the next generation of leaders is your best bet. Investing in them will be cheaper than paying for recruiting costs and higher salaries. And your current team members are much more likely to already be a good cultural fit.

As a business coach, one of my favorite programs to work on is a company’s leadership development program, commonly known as an LDP. While each program’s content should be tailored to the companies industry and needs, here are six strategies you can use to create an effective program without needing to spend much, if any, budget dollars.

1. Have your senior team mentor.

Your senior folks have a vast amount of knowledge and insight into the business. Tap this resource by having them spend one hour a week with a rising star to help them understand the business and what the leader does to be successful. This could be in one-on-one or small group formats. Keep it mentoring, not training.

Let the junior person drive the conversation around what they want and/or need to know. The best part of the these types of programs is that the senior people often learn just as much, if not more.

2. Offer extra time off for learning events.

For those who are keen to get ahead and are willing to drive their own learning, offer a few extra days off each year to attend a conference or workshop to sharpen their skills. There are many free and inexpensive learning opportunities out there and often employees are paying to go to these events already, just give them the time. To help justify the investment, have them come back and host a morning seminar or lunch-and-learn to share with others what they learned and how to apply it to the business.

3. Hold weekly lightning talks.

Pick one lunch each week where a different person in the company does a 15-minute presentation on any topic they want (within reason). Give 15 minutes for Q&A and then have people score and give constructive feedback on the presentation as well as takeaways. This will not only distribute knowledge, it will help develop presentation and feedback skills. And it’s fun too.

4. Invite in outside speakers.

If you do a little searching, it’s not hard to find people who would be willing to come in and speak for little or no cost. Look for consultants who would jump at the chance to build a relationship. Another great strategy is to invite your customers and partners to come in and present their expertise and business. You can also reach out to authors and professional speakers who might be willing to do a discounted presentation if they’re already in the area.

5. Start a book club.

Many of the leadership teams I coach use this strategy to help them develop new skills as a group. Pick a book a month to reach and then spend 30-45 minutes discussing a few takeaways at your monthly meeting. If a full book is too daunting, find a summary to have everyone read. You can also find articles to read as a group. Many authors (like me) will provide discussion guides with their content for team discussions.

6. Recognize effort and accomplishments.

One of the best things you can do is make sure the people and teams, who are dedicating themselves to learning and showing measured progress, are recognized. This could be privately and/or publicly within the company. Recognizing success will both reward those who are already advancing as well as inspire those who may need a little nudge.

Like many initiatives, the most important thing about a learning program is to try something quickly, learn and get feedback, and then pivot quickly. The best companies succeed because they learn how they learn best and then fuel what works for them.

Agile Strategy: Here’s How to Plan for Fast Markets

Stop building rigid strategic plans that are obsolete before you finish them and embrace iterative triangulation.

Traditional strategic planning fails in dynamic markets. Most leadership teams spend months developing comprehensive strategic plans, only to find that market conditions have shifted by the time they’re ready to implement. Instead, the most successful companies use what I call iterative triangulation—a methodical approach that cycles through the core elements of strategic planning quickly and regularly, allowing them to incorporate new insights and market shifts without starting from scratch each time.

1. Why traditional planning fails in fast markets

Traditional strategic planning treats strategy development as a linear, one-time process. You define your purpose, analyze the market, develop your strategy, and execute for the next year or two. This approach assumes market conditions will remain relatively stable and that you can predict customer needs and competitive responses with reasonable accuracy.

Iterative triangulation works differently. Instead of trying to perfect each element of your strategy before moving to the next, you cycle through all the key strategic components in shorter timeframes, building understanding and making refinements with each pass. The core elements include defining your purpose, values, and BHAG; setting three-year goals and targets; understanding your core customer profile and their needs; developing a strategy canvas to identify white space opportunities; creating your differentiated value proposition; and determining operational focus areas that create strategic value.

The key is to move through this complete cycle quickly, typically in days rather than months. This allows you to capture market shifts and new insights while they’re still relevant and actionable. Each cycle builds on the previous one, creating increasingly refined and market-responsive strategic direction.

2. How to cycle through strategy quickly

Start each triangulation cycle by revisiting your foundational elements—core purpose, values, and BHAG. These shouldn’t change dramatically with each cycle, but market conditions might reveal new aspects of how they apply or new ways to articulate them that resonate better with customers and team members.

Next, examine your three-year goals and targets. Are they still relevant given current market conditions? Do they reflect new opportunities or threats that have emerged? Then dive deep into your core customer analysis. What’s changed about their needs, challenges, priorities, or decision-making processes? How are demographic and psychographic factors shifting? This customer intelligence often reveals the most significant strategic insights.

Use this customer understanding to update your strategy canvas and identify white space opportunities. Where are competitors missing the mark? What emerging needs aren’t being addressed effectively? This analysis should lead directly to refining your value proposition and differentiated positioning strategy.

Finally, translate your strategic insights into operational focus areas. What capabilities, systems, processes, or partnerships do you need to build or strengthen to deliver on your differentiated strategy? This operational translation ensures your strategic thinking drives real business improvements rather than remaining abstract.

Schedule Strategic Sprint Sessions—focused work periods where your leadership team dedicates concentrated time to one element of the triangulation cycle. Keep these sessions action-oriented and decision-focused rather than exploratory.

3. Turn insights into market advantage

The power of iterative triangulation comes from the accumulation of insights over multiple cycles and the ability to respond quickly to market changes. Each cycle should produce specific strategic moves, not just updated documents.

Maintain a system that captures key insights, assumptions, and decisions from each triangulation cycle. Track which assumptions proved accurate, which were wrong, and what new information emerged. This creates organizational learning that improves your strategic instincts over time.

Also, keep a repository for documenting how competitors, customers, and market conditions respond to your strategic moves. This real-world feedback becomes crucial input for your next triangulation cycle, helping you understand which strategic directions are gaining traction and which need adjustment.

Most importantly, build rapid experimentation into your process. When triangulation cycles reveal new strategic opportunities, design small tests to validate them before making major commitments. Launch limited pilots, conduct customer interviews, or test new operational approaches on a small scale. This empirical approach reduces strategic risk while accelerating learning.

Use each cycle to balance strategic consistency with tactical adaptation. Your core purpose and BHAG should provide stability, while your customer understanding, value proposition, and operational focus areas can evolve more dynamically based on market feedback.

4. Keep triangulation focused and effective

The biggest risk with iterative triangulation is letting it become either too rigid or too chaotic. Avoid rigidity by ensuring each cycle genuinely incorporates new market intelligence rather than just updating last quarter’s documents. Avoid chaos by maintaining clear timelines and decision points for each cycle.

Establish quarterly triangulation cycles aligned with your regular business planning rhythm. Dedicate the first month of each quarter to working through the complete strategic framework, the second month to implementing key insights and experiments, and the third month to capturing results and preparing for the next cycle.

Keep cycles focused and time-bound. Set specific deadlines for completing each element of the triangulation framework and stick to them. The goal is strategic progress, not strategic perfection. Some insights will require multiple cycles to fully develop, and that’s acceptable as long as you’re consistently moving forward.

Build triangulation leadership into your team by rotating who leads different elements of each cycle. This develops strategic thinking capabilities across your leadership team while preventing any single person from becoming a bottleneck in the process.

Iterative triangulation transforms strategic planning from a periodic event into a continuous capability. By cycling through strategic elements quickly and regularly, leadership teams maintain strategic relevance while building the market responsiveness essential for sustained growth in dynamic environments.

Why Your Company Needs a Strategic Council

Future success requires evolving your business—not just improving your current one. Here are four ways to stay focused on strategy.

As a former CEO who scaled a company to the Inc. 500 list multiple times and successfully executed an exit, I’ve experienced firsthand the challenge of balancing strategic vision with operational excellence. Now, having coached dozens of growth-stage company leaders facing this exact challenge, I’ve learned that the most successful companies don’t choose between strategic and operational planning—they systematically excel at both by creating distinct processes, teams, and focus areas for each type of planning.

1. Define strategic versus operational planning

Strategic planning is about changing and evolving your business to create differentiated value in the marketplace. It focuses on external insights around customers, competitors, and market positioning to identify where your company can establish unique advantages that competitors cannot easily replicate. Strategic planning asks fundamental questions: How do we position ourselves differently? What capabilities do we need to build? Where are the emerging opportunities in our market? What trends will reshape our industry over the next three to five years?

Operational planning is about running and improving your current business through continuous improvement, quality enhancement, and standardization of processes and delivery systems. It focuses on internal processes, delivery systems, and efficiency optimization to maximize value creation while minimizing waste and variability. Operational planning asks practical questions: How do we deliver more consistently? Where can we eliminate waste and redundancy? How do we improve quality and reduce costs? What systems need strengthening to support growth?

Every successful company needs both. If you focus only on strategy, you’ll never develop the operational discipline to deliver effectively on your vision. If you focus only on operations, you’ll optimize your way to irrelevance as markets shift and competitors innovate around you.

2. Establish a strategic council structure

The most effective approach I’ve implemented with clients is establishing a Strategic Council—a small group of senior leaders specifically tasked with developing and articulating strategy, separate from the management team focused on execution and operational efficiency.

Your Strategic Council should include the CEO plus two to three other senior leaders who bring different perspectives and expertise to strategic discussions. This group should meet at least every other week to review new market insights, customer feedback, competitive intelligence, and industry trends, then consider what impact this information has on your strategic positioning and planning decisions. Regular cadence ensures strategic thinking doesn’t get overwhelmed by operational urgencies.

The Strategic Council’s primary deliverables are the strategy canvas defining your market position, the value proposition articulating your differentiated offering, the operational model describing how you’ll deliver value, and the strategic roadmap outlining key initiatives and milestones. These documents become the foundation for all operational planning and execution.

3. Bridge strategy to execution quarterly

The critical handoff between strategic thinking and operational execution happens during your quarterly planning process. This is where Strategic Council insights get translated into specific priorities, initiatives, and resource allocation decisions that drive practical execution.

During quarterly planning, review what the Strategic Council has learned about market dynamics, competitive positioning, and customer needs. Then determine which operational improvements, process changes, and capability developments will best support your strategic direction. This ensures your operational excellence efforts align with and advance your strategic objectives rather than just optimizing existing processes.

The quarterly planning cycle also provides regular opportunities to assess whether you’re maintaining the right balance between strategic development and operational improvement based on your current business challenges and market conditions.

4. Watch for planning imbalance warning signs

Companies struggling with profitability as they grow typically aren’t focused enough on strategic planning. They’re improving delivery and efficiency but haven’t differentiated their value proposition or positioned themselves to command premium pricing in their market. They’re optimizing a business model that isn’t strategically sound, working harder rather than working smarter on the right opportunities.

Companies struggling with consistent delivery, quality issues, or customer satisfaction aren’t focused enough on operational planning. They may have compelling strategic vision and market positioning, but they lack the operational discipline and systematic processes to execute reliably at scale. Their strategy is solid, but their delivery undermines their market position and customer trust.

Monitor these indicators regularly and adjust your planning focus accordingly. Strategic planning without operational discipline creates unreliable execution. Operational planning without strategic direction creates efficient delivery of undifferentiated value.

Most leadership teams default to whatever type of planning feels more comfortable or familiar, but sustained growth requires intentional focus on both strategic evolution and operational excellence. Companies that master this balance don’t just improve their current performance—they build the foundation for continued success as markets evolve and competition intensifies. The best growth companies recognize that strategic and operational planning are complementary disciplines that reinforce each other when executed systematically.

Agile: Why Rigid Execution Is Slowing You Down

Companies that master strategic iteration—not rigid execution—are the ones that scale successfully. This is what it means to be agile.

I’ve spent over two decades working with founders and leadership teams to develop and implement growth strategies, I’ve witnessed firsthand how the business landscape has fundamentally shifted for growth companies. In my early consulting days, companies could often rely on detailed five-year plans executed with discipline and required minimal adjustment.

Today’s most successful organizations operate differently—while they plan just as rigorously, they need to adapt far more frequently. Having applied lean and agile methodologies in my own tech company before bringing these principles to strategic consulting, I’ve seen how the same iterative approaches that revolutionized software development can transform strategic planning and execution at the leadership level.

1. The planning paradox

Most leadership teams either don’t build a strong enough strategic plan — or worse, they build one and then stop using it. True agility isn’t about ditching plans altogether. It’s about building the right plan and then updating it quickly and intelligently as new information comes in. In today’s market, trends like AI are compressing the window between insight and action.

Leadership teams that cling to outdated plans risk falling into the same trap that took down companies like Blockbuster, Kodak, Nokia, Pan Am, Blackberry, and Toys R Us. Long-term planning is still critical—but the ability to update that plan quickly as conditions shift is often what separates success from failure. The goal isn’t to abandon strategic thinking but to make it more responsive and dynamic.

2. Build to iterate, not to perfect

The most effective strategic plans I’ve helped develop are designed for modification from the outset. Rather than creating comprehensive documents meant to guide organizations for years, successful leadership teams build strategic frameworks that can accommodate new information and changing conditions.

This means structuring plans with clear assumptions, decision points, and adaptation triggers. When market conditions shift or new data emerges, these agile plans provide guidance for what to examine, what to preserve, and what to modify. The planning process itself becomes a capability rather than just a deliverable.

Companies that excel at strategic iteration treat their plans as living documents that evolve with market intelligence. They embrace regular review cycles and create organizational rhythms that support strategic adaptation rather than stubornly sticking to a plan that is not longer valid.

3. Compress decision cycles

In rapidly changing markets, the ability to process new information and adjust strategy quickly becomes a core competitive advantage. The organizations that consistently outperform competitors are those that can move from market insight to strategic adjustment to tactical execution in compressed timeframes.

This requires different organizational capabilities than traditional strategic planning demands. Leadership teams need robust mechanisms for gathering market intelligence, processing strategic implications, and communicating adjustments throughout the organization. The goal is maintaining strategic coherence while accelerating strategic responsiveness.

The most agile companies I’ve worked with establish quarterly strategic reviews that combine traditional performance assessment with forward-looking market analysis. These sessions focus not just on how well the current plan is working, but on what new information suggests about necessary plan modifications.

4. Create strategic learning loops

True strategic agility emerges when organizations treat strategy implementation as a learning process rather than just an execution challenge. This means building feedback mechanisms that capture market responses, competitive reactions, and internal capability development to inform ongoing strategic refinement.

The lean startup methodology’s build-measure-learn cycle applies powerfully at the strategic level. Leadership teams can test strategic hypotheses through targeted initiatives, measure market and organizational responses, and incorporate learnings into strategic adjustments. This approach reduces the risk of major strategic errors while accelerating strategic optimization.

The most strategically agile organizations I’ve advised maintain explicit hypotheses about their market positioning, competitive advantage, and growth drivers. They design experiments to test these hypotheses and build organizational processes to incorporate learning into strategic iteration.

5. Balance consistency with adaptability

Strategic agility doesn’t mean constant change or strategic chaos. The most effective leadership teams maintain consistency in their core mission and values while remaining flexible about tactics and market approach. This balance provides organizational focus while enabling market responsiveness.

Clear strategic principles help teams distinguish between core priorities that should remain consistent and tactical moves that should adapt to changing conditions. This clarity prevents strategic drift while enabling necessary pivots. The most successful companies maintain unwavering focus on their fundamental value proposition while continuously refining how they deliver and communicate that value.

Effective strategic agility requires building organizational capabilities for rapid learning and adaptation while maintaining clarity about enduring strategic commitments. This balance becomes increasingly crucial as market cycles compress and competitive advantages become more temporary.

In today’s dynamic business environment, the ability to iterate strategy quickly and intelligently has become as important as the ability to develop strategy thoughtfully. By applying agile and lean principles at the leadership level, organizations can maintain strategic focus while building the adaptability required for sustained competitive advantage.

Here’s Why Risk Is Something Your Company Should Embrace

Scaling companies succeed not by eliminating risk but by understanding and managing it intelligently.

Most executives I meet treat risk like a necessary evil—something to minimize, avoid, or reluctantly accept when pursuing growth opportunities. However, this defensive mindset misses the real opportunity that risk represents for strategic leaders.

In my years working with companies navigating complex market transitions, I’ve seen how the best leadership teams flip this conventional thinking entirely. They don’t just tolerate risk; they actively seek out situations where their superior risk capabilities give them license to make moves that leave competitors standing still. The companies that scale most dramatically aren’t necessarily the safest—they’re the ones that have learned to turn uncertainty into a strategic weapon.

1. Risk as an opportunity

Smart leaders recognize that in high-growth markets, risk represents opportunity as much as threat. While competitors hesitate or avoid uncertainty, companies with superior risk intelligence can move boldly into spaces that others cannot or will not enter. The goal isn’t eliminating risk but leveraging it strategically—calculated risk-taking in areas of strength creates sustainable differentiation, while systematic risk management protects against threats that could derail growth.

This strategic approach requires a fundamental shift in how leadership teams think about uncertainty. Instead of asking, “How do we avoid this risk?” the better question becomes, “How do we manage this risk so effectively that it becomes a competitive advantage?” Companies that master this mindset often discover that their biggest growth opportunities exist precisely in the areas where competitors are most afraid to venture.

2. Apply a systematic risk assessment

Effective risk management starts with comprehensive identification rather than reactive responses to problems as they emerge. Most leadership teams address risks only when they become obvious, missing opportunities for proactive management and strategic leverage. Implement a three-step risk assessment process for all strategic initiatives that go beyond traditional risk management approaches.

First, brainstorm and identify all potential risks that could impact execution—involve diverse perspectives to capture risks across market, operational, strategic, and financial dimensions. Push beyond obvious risks to identify second-order effects and interconnected vulnerabilities.

Second, each identified risk should be assessed based on the likelihood it could occur and the potential impact on strategic objectives; then, a clear prioritization framework should be created. Consider the potential severity of each risk and how it could affect key stakeholders, resources, and timelines.

Third, for each significant risk, decide whether to avoid it through alternative strategies and approaches or mitigate it through specific plans that reduce impact, such as insurance policies, contingency funding, or operational isolation strategies.

3. Identify strategic risk opportunities

The most sophisticated leadership teams go beyond risk mitigation to identify strategic opportunities where their risk management capabilities create competitive advantages. Rather than viewing all risks as threats to avoid, they actively seek areas where superior risk intelligence enables bold strategic moves that competitors cannot or will not attempt.

Develop “Strategic Risk Mapping” that identifies risks your organization manages significantly better than competitors, then design strategies that leverage these capabilities. If your team excels at technology implementation risks, you might pursue digital transformation strategies that competitors avoid due to technical uncertainty. If your financial risk management includes sophisticated scenario planning and stress testing, you might pursue aggressive expansion during economic uncertainty when competitors pull back due to capital constraints. If your operational risk management enables rapid scaling without quality degradation, you might pursue market share strategies that overwhelm competitors who cannot match your execution speed.

Create explicit documentation of your risk management strengths through systematic analysis. Examine what types of uncertainty your team navigates well, which risk categories you have successfully managed in the past, and where these capabilities might enable strategic moves that create market differentiation. Look for patterns in your historical risk management successes—do you excel at managing people risks, technology risks, market risks, or financial risks?

4. Embed risk intelligence in decision-making

Risk management becomes effective when it’s integrated into regular strategic decision-making processes rather than treated as a separate analytical exercise. High-performing teams build risk thinking into their standard processes and frameworks, ensuring that risk intelligence enhances rather than hinders strategic agility.

Create “Risk-Informed Decision Protocols” that require explicit risk assessment for all strategic choices above defined thresholds but structure these protocols to accelerate rather than slow decision-making. Before approving new initiatives, strategic partnerships, or significant resource commitments, teams must identify the primary risks, assess their likelihood and impact, and define specific mitigation strategies. However, the goal isn’t exhaustive risk analysis but rapid risk intelligence that enables confident action.

Establish standard risk questions for strategic discussions: What could go wrong with this approach? What early warning signals will indicate problems? What contingency plans do we have if primary strategies fail? What risks are we accepting, and why? Maintain a “Strategic Risk Dashboard” that tracks key risk indicators alongside traditional performance metrics, ensuring risk intelligence remains visible and actionable throughout implementation.

Strategic risk management isn’t about eliminating uncertainty—it’s about building organizational capabilities that turn uncertainty into competitive advantage. By systematically assessing risks, identifying strategic opportunities to leverage risk, and embedding risk intelligence into strategic decision-making, leadership teams can move more boldly and strategically than competitors who view risk only as a threat to manage.

Selling Your Business? Use These 5 Strategies to Protect It

Selling your business involves hidden risks that can erode its value. Here’s how to protect your company during the transaction process.

As a former tech founder and CEO who scaled a company that made the Inc. 5000 list multiple times before successfully exiting, I know firsthand the complexity and stress that selling a business creates. I’ve since coached dozens of growth-stage companies through strategic planning and exit preparation, witnessing how the deal process tests even the most substantial organizations.

Failing to prepare properly hurts valuations and creates unnecessary drama—and kills many potential deals entirely. The distraction factor alone can derail your growth trajectory precisely when performance matters most.

1. Know the real workload

Many founders vastly underestimate the time and energy demands of selling a business. Due diligence requests alone can consume 20-30 hours weekly from key team members for months. Daily business operations often suffer when leadership gets pulled into endless data rooms, buyer meetings, and legal discussions.

This performance dip doesn’t just hurt your current financials—it directly impacts your final valuation and can trigger devastating “retrade” where buyers demand price reductions before closing. Preparing properly isn’t just smart business—it’s valuation protection.

2. Build operational resilience

Before entertaining any acquisition offers, ensure your business can run without your constant attention. Implement robust meeting rhythms, clear accountability structures, and documented processes that allow the company to maintain momentum even when leadership bandwidth is constrained.

The strongest position for any sale is a business that demonstrates it can thrive with minimal founder involvement. This operational maturity preserves value during the transaction and increases buyer confidence and willingness to pay premium multiples.

3. Conduct mock due diligence

Nothing creates more unnecessary stress than scrambling to produce documentation buyers request during active deal negotiations. Proactively compile all contracts, financial statements, customer agreements, employment documents, intellectual property records, and operational data into well-organized repositories.

Consider engaging your accountants to perform a “quality of earnings” review before any buyer does, identifying potential issues on your timeline rather than during critical negotiation phases. Companies that approach due diligence confidently often maintain stronger negotiating positions throughout the process.

4. Assemble an experienced transaction team

The quality of your deal advisors directly impacts your outcome. Your neighborhood attorney or tax preparer rarely has the specialized knowledge required for selling a business. Invest in an investment banker familiar with your industry’s valuation models, an M&A-focused attorney who closes deals regularly, a transaction-experienced accountant, and a personal wealth advisor who understands the tax implications of various deal structures.

The right team provides market intelligence, negotiating leverage, and structural options that frequently pay for their fees many times over through improved deal terms.

5. Limit internal awareness

One of the most overlooked risks in business sales is the impact of transaction rumors on your workforce and customer relationships. Employees hearing about potential ownership changes often update their resumes before updating their projects. Customers getting wind of a sale may delay purchases or reconsider relationships.

Limit deal knowledge strictly to those essential to the process, implement confidentiality agreements, and develop careful communication plans for various scenarios. Maintaining business momentum requires maintaining team focus on growth rather than ownership speculation.

The difference between a successful exit and a disappointing one often comes down to preparation and focus management. By establishing clear deal parameters, building operational resilience, and assembling the right support team, you can navigate the complex sale process while protecting the business performance that makes your company valuable in the first place.

Are You Sourcing Real Feedback? Or Just Hoping for the Best?

If you want to update your strategy intelligently, you need high-quality inputs — not guesses about what might happen in your market.

In my experience scaling a technology company and coaching dozens of leadership teams through strategic transitions, I’ve learned that the quality of strategic decisions correlates directly with the quality of market intelligence feeding into those decisions.

The most successful leaders don’t rely on intuition alone—they build systematic approaches to gathering, processing, and acting on market feedback. Having applied lean principles in both software development and strategic planning, I understand that rapid iteration requires rapid learning, and rapid learning requires intentional intelligence gathering.

1. The intelligence imperative

Leadership agility isn’t just about moving fast; it’s about moving fast based on the right information. Too many leadership teams are flying blind because they don’t have consistent, reliable sources of market feedback. Without systematic intelligence gathering, strategic decisions become guesswork dressed up as analysis.

Great strategy depends on pattern recognition — and pattern recognition depends on surrounding yourself with high-quality signals. The most effective leadership teams build systems for continuously gathering insights, separating noise from signal, and feeding fresh data directly into their strategic planning process.

2. Customer intelligence as a strategic foundation

Your current and former customers represent your most valuable source of strategic intelligence. Schedule quarterly “strategic insight calls” with your top accounts, focusing on market trends rather than account management. Ask specific questions: What changes are you seeing in your industry? How are your priorities shifting over the next 12-18 months? Which vendors are you evaluating and why?

For churned customers, conduct exit interviews within 30 days of departure. Ask what alternative they chose, what market factors influenced their decision, and what industry trends they observed. These conversations often reveal competitive threats months before they appear elsewhere.

3. Expand your intelligence network

Create an advisory board with 5-10 people across prospects, partners, vendors, industry experts, and competitors. For prospects who didn’t choose you, schedule “market insight calls” 3-6 months after their decision. Position this as market research and ask what solution they selected, what factors drove their decision, and what trends they’re seeing.

Develop strategic partnerships with complementary vendors who serve your target market. Schedule quarterly conversations to share market observations and customer trends. Identify 3-5 industry analysts or consultants who track your market and engage them through speaking opportunities or information exchanges.

For competitive intelligence, attend industry events your competitors frequent, monitor their hiring patterns and partnership announcements, and connect with their former employees through LinkedIn for perspective on strategic direction.

4. Leverage your board

For those with boards, send specific intelligence questions to members prior to your meetings: What market trends are you seeing across your portfolio? Which competitive threats are emerging in similar companies? Allocate 20-30 minutes during board meetings for market intelligence discussion rather than just performance reporting.

Schedule quarterly one-on-one calls with each advisor focused purely on market insights. Prepare specific questions about industry trends, competitive positioning, and emerging opportunities. Request introductions to relevant industry contacts—CEOs in adjacent markets, industry experts, or customers of your competitors. Most board members will make these introductions if you’re specific about the intelligence you’re seeking.

5. Build systematic intelligence processes

Establish regular intelligence-gathering rhythms: monthly customer insight calls, quarterly partner discussions, and annual industry expert interviews. Create a shared intelligence database where all insights are documented using consistent categories—market trends, competitive threats, customer needs, and partnership opportunities.

Reserve the first 30 minutes of monthly leadership meetings for intelligence review. Conduct quarterly “intelligence synthesis” sessions where your leadership team identifies patterns across all intelligence sources. Assign one team member responsibility for coordinating intelligence gathering and ensuring insights influence strategic decisions.

6. Transform insights into strategic advantage

Conduct monthly “pattern recognition sessions” where your leadership team reviews intelligence gathered in the previous 30 days. Look for themes across multiple sources—similar competitive threats mentioned by different customers and consistent market trends reported by various partners.

Translate patterns into strategic hypotheses, then design experiments to test them. If intelligence suggests customers prioritize integration capabilities, create pilot programs to validate enhanced integration features. If competitive intelligence reveals service delivery struggles, test superior service as a differentiator.

Establish quarterly “intelligence-to-strategy” workshops where leadership explicitly connects intelligence insights to strategic decisions. Ask: Which insights challenge our current strategy? What new opportunities do our intelligence sources suggest? Track metrics like the percentage of strategic decisions influenced by intelligence and the accuracy of strategic predictions based on intelligence insights.

Strategic intelligence gathering isn’t just about staying informed—it’s about building the information advantages that enable superior strategic decision-making. By systematically gathering insights from multiple stakeholder groups and feeding those insights directly into strategic planning processes, leadership teams can move quickly and confidently in dynamic markets.

How to Move Fast Without Sacrificing Quality

Strategic advantage goes to the teams who plan faster, spot gaps sooner, and adjust quickly.

After facilitating strategic planning sessions for dozens of fast-growing companies, I’ve observed a consistent pattern that separates high-performing leadership teams from those that struggle with execution. The most successful teams don’t create more sophisticated plans—they create plans faster and iterate on them more frequently. Having scaled my own company through multiple strategic pivots, I learned that strategic clarity emerges through action and feedback, not through extended analysis.

Here’s my framework for getting started:

1. Speed over perfection

Most leadership teams make a critical mistake: they move too slowly through the strategic planning process, trying to get every detail right before they even start. But speed matters. Agile leadership teams work through the entire strategic process quickly, not because they want to be sloppy but because they know that clarity comes from movement. By rapidly mapping out assumptions, spotting gaps, and integrating new information as it comes in, they build better strategies and adapt faster.

In fast-changing markets, strategic agility is not about moving faster for the sake of speed — it’s about uncovering the truth faster and acting on it before competitors do. The goal isn’t rushing through strategic thinking but accelerating the feedback loops that improve strategic thinking.

2. Time-box your planning sessions

The biggest enemy of strategic speed is open-ended planning sessions that expand to fill whatever time is available. Without clear boundaries, teams fall into analysis paralysis, exploring every possible angle rather than making decisions with available information.

Implement a structured five-stage process with clear time limits for each phase, allocating total time based on the importance and complexity of the issue at hand. Begin by defining the strategic problem or opportunity you’re addressing. Next, define what success looks like—specific, measurable outcomes that indicate you’ve solved the problem. Establish criteria by which you’ll evaluate potential directions—factors like market size, competitive advantage, resource requirements, and strategic fit. Generate and discuss the options you want to consider, ensuring you have multiple viable alternatives. Finally, complete your justification and risk analysis for your chosen direction.

Set clear time boxes for each stage. This structured approach forces teams to move systematically through strategic thinking while preventing endless deliberation on any single element.

3. Build on rough drafts, not blank pages

Starting strategic planning with blank documents creates unnecessary friction and wastes valuable thinking time. Teams that begin with frameworks and rough strategies move faster because they’re refining rather than creating from nothing.

Use the “Strawman Strategy” approach to accelerate initial planning. Before your planning session, designate one team member to create a rough strategic framework populated with best guesses about priorities, market positioning, and key initiatives. This strawman isn’t meant to be accurate—it’s meant to be wrong in productive ways that stimulate discussion. Present this draft in the first thirty minutes of your planning session, then spend the remaining time identifying what’s missing, challenging assumptions, and improving the framework.

Teams consistently generate better strategies faster when they’re reacting to and improving a flawed starting point rather than building from scratch. The key is framing the strawman as a thinking tool, not a proposed solution.

4. Test assumptions through action

Traditional strategic planning relies too heavily on research and analysis to validate strategic assumptions. However, in dynamic markets, the fastest way to understand strategic viability is through small-scale implementation and market feedback.

Implement “90-Day Strategy Sprints” that transform strategic hypotheses into testable experiments. Instead of spending months researching whether a new market segment represents an opportunity, design a 90-day pilot program to test market responsiveness with minimal resource commitment.

For example, if your strategy assumes customers will pay premium prices for enhanced service, create a pilot program offering premium service to a subset of existing customers and measure both uptake rates and customer satisfaction.

Document your strategic assumptions explicitly at the beginning of each sprint, design specific tests for the most critical assumptions, and establish clear success criteria before implementation begins. This approach provides real market intelligence much faster than extended analysis while limiting downside risk through small-scale testing.

5. Accelerate decision cycles

Most leadership teams slow down strategic execution by applying the same decision-making rigor to every strategic choice, regardless of reversibility or resource implications. This approach creates bottlenecks that prevent rapid strategic iteration.

Apply the “80% Confidence Rule” to strategic decisions based on their reversibility. For strategic choices that can be modified or reversed without major consequences—like pilot programs, marketing approaches, or operational process changes—make decisions when you have 80% confidence rather than waiting for 100% certainty. Reserve extensive analysis for irreversible strategic commitments with significant resource implications, like major acquisitions or fundamental business model changes.

Establish clear criteria for categorizing decisions: reversible decisions get expedited treatment with defined decision timelines (typically one-week maximum), while irreversible decisions follow more thorough evaluation processes. This approach dramatically accelerates the pace of strategic implementation while maintaining appropriate caution for high-stakes choices.

6. Build strategic rhythm

Strategic planning shouldn’t be an annual event followed by months of execution without course correction. Dynamic markets require ongoing strategic iteration that maintains momentum while avoiding constant organizational disruption.

Establish “Strategic Pulse Meetings” that create a regular strategic rhythm without overwhelming operational focus. Schedule 90-minute monthly sessions focused exclusively on strategic progress, market intelligence, and course corrections.

These meetings follow a consistent format: the first 30 minutes reviewing strategic metrics and progress against goals, the next 45 minutes discussing new market intelligence and strategic implications, and the final 15 minutes making immediate strategic adjustments or flagging issues for deeper analysis.

Quarterly planning sessions extend to half-day strategic reviews that address more significant strategic evolution and set clear priorities. This rhythm ensures strategic thinking remains active and responsive while preventing the disruption of constant strategic pivots. The key is maintaining a consistent focus on strategic progress without letting these sessions devolve into operational problem-solving.

Strategic speed isn’t about sacrificing quality—it’s about recognizing that strategic quality emerges through rapid iteration rather than extended deliberation. By moving quickly through planning cycles, testing assumptions through action, and maintaining strategic rhythm, leadership teams can build competitive advantage through strategic agility.

How You Make a Plan Matters More Than the Plan Itself

Many companies fail to recognize that the planning process itself ultimately determines whether a strategy succeeds or fails.

Throughout my years advising leadership teams on strategic planning, I’ve witnessed a consistent pattern: companies often judge the quality of their strategy by the sophistication of the final document rather than the strength of the process that created it. The most effective strategic plans I’ve seen weren’t necessarily the most elaborate or analytically impressive—they were the ones developed through processes that prioritized engagement, clarity, and commitment from those responsible for execution. When the planning process itself is overlooked, even brilliantly conceived strategies often fail to gain traction.

1. Process over documents

Many companies spend significant time developing a detailed strategy but overlook the importance of how that strategy is created. The planning process itself—who is involved, how decisions are made, and how alignment is built—is what ultimately determines whether a strategy can be executed successfully. Without the right people in the room, clear discussions, and real commitment, even a great strategy is likely to fail.

An effective strategic planning process includes the right mix of stakeholders, open and honest conversation, clear decision-making, and a focus on building alignment across teams. It creates a shared understanding of goals and ensures the people responsible for execution are fully committed. Without this foundation, even the most well-designed strategy will struggle to gain traction.

2. Engagement creates ownership

The fastest way to undermine strategic execution is to have a small group develop the plan in isolation and then “announce” it to the broader organization. This approach almost guarantees resistance, misunderstanding, and lackluster implementation.

Instead, involve key stakeholders early and throughout the process. This doesn’t mean everyone needs equal input on every decision, but it does mean intentionally engaging those who bring valuable perspective or will be critical to implementation. When people participate in developing a strategy, they develop a sense of ownership that drives commitment during execution.

The most successful planning processes I’ve facilitated carefully balance inclusivity with efficiency. They create meaningful touchpoints for input while maintaining a clear decision-making structure that prevents analysis paralysis. This balance ensures the resulting strategy reflects diverse perspectives while remaining focused and actionable.

3. Debate surfaces reality

Strategic planning discussions should be forums for honest conversation about market realities, organizational capabilities, and potential obstacles. Too often, these sessions become performative exercises where participants say what they think leadership wants to hear rather than surfacing uncomfortable truths.

Effective planning processes establish psychological safety that encourages candid dialogue. They create space for challenging assumptions, questioning historical approaches, and acknowledging competitive threats. Without this honesty, strategies end up built on wishful thinking rather than reality.

The quality of these conversations directly impacts the quality of the resulting strategy. Plans developed through robust debate and thoughtful consideration of multiple perspectives consistently outperform those created in environments where dissent is discouraged or difficult conversations are avoided.

4. Clarity drives alignment

Ambiguity is the enemy of execution. When strategic plans contain vague language, undefined terms, or competing priorities, they create confusion that paralyzes implementation efforts. The planning process should drive toward clarity on goals, roles, resources, and metrics.

This clarity emerges through the discipline of making explicit choices and tradeoffs during the planning process. Which opportunities will you pursue and which will you deliberately ignore? Who owns each strategic initiative? What resources will be reallocated to support priorities? When these questions remain unresolved, execution inevitably stalls.

The most effective planning processes I’ve observed include structured mechanisms for ensuring this clarity—from decision frameworks that force prioritization to responsibility matrices that make ownership unmistakable. These mechanisms transform abstract strategic concepts into concrete action plans that teams can implement with confidence.

The strategic planning process itself is as important as the content of the resulting plan—perhaps even more so. By focusing on engagement, honest dialogue, and clarity throughout the planning journey, organizations develop not just better strategies but the shared understanding and commitment required to turn those strategies into reality.

Discussion Questions:

How does our current strategic planning process build or undermine ownership?

Where might we be avoiding difficult conversations during our planning discussions?

What specific mechanisms could we implement to increase clarity and alignment?

A Great Strategy Is Useless If People Don’t Get it

A strategy that remains clear only to leadership is a strategy that will fail in execution, no matter how brilliant it might be on paper.

In my work with scaling companies across various industries, I’ve consistently found that the difference between organizations that execute effectively and those that struggle isn’t the sophistication of their strategy—it’s the clarity and simplicity with which that strategy is understood throughout the organization.

Having facilitated hundreds of strategic planning sessions, I’ve seen firsthand how executives often mistake complexity for depth, creating strategies that sound impressive in the boardroom but collapse in implementation. The most successful companies invest as much in strategic clarity as they do in strategic development.

Democratize your strategy

A strategy that only your leadership team understands isn’t enough. For a company to execute effectively, everyone—from middle managers to frontline employees—needs to clearly understand what the business is focused on, whom it’s serving, and how it wins. When your strategy is too complex or your positioning is unclear, people waste time, duplicate efforts, and make decisions that pull the business in the wrong direction.

A simple, well-defined strategy benefits more than just your internal teams. It helps suppliers, partners, and vendors understand how to support your goals. It gives customers clarity about what you offer and what you don’t. It makes referrals easier because your network knows exactly whom you serve. And inside your business, it streamlines decision-making, capability-building, and long-term planning. Simplicity isn’t just a communication tool—it’s a strategic advantage.

The simplicity stress test

Most leadership teams overestimate how well their strategy is understood throughout the organization. To assess real strategic clarity, I often conduct a simple exercise with clients: Ask people at different levels of the company to write down in one or two sentences what the company does, whom it serves, and how it differentiates. The inconsistency of responses is typically eye-opening.

This exercise reveals not just communication gaps but strategy gaps. When frontline employees can’t articulate your core positioning, it’s not simply a messaging problem—it reflects fundamental uncertainty about where the business is heading and why. This uncertainty manifests in misaligned priorities, decision paralysis, and wasted resources.

The most effective companies I’ve worked with can pass this clarity test at every level. Their strategies aren’t necessarily simple in development, but they’re simple in articulation—clear enough that anyone can understand and apply them to daily decision-making.

Clarity creates decisiveness

Strategic clarity accelerates decision-making throughout an organization. When everyone understands the core focus and positioning, they can evaluate opportunities and challenges through a consistent lens. This shared understanding eliminates the need to escalate countless decisions to leadership.

Consider how many decisions are made daily across your organization—from resource allocation to customer interactions to product development priorities. Without clear strategic guardrails, each decision becomes a potential detour from your intended direction. With clarity, these countless daily choices align naturally with your broader objectives.

The most strategically nimble companies I’ve advised maintain simple, transparent positioning that functions as a decision filter. Team members at all levels can quickly assess whether an opportunity fits the strategy or represents a distraction, creating organizational coordination without bureaucratic control mechanisms.

Simplicity enhances external relationships

Strategic clarity extends beyond your internal teams to shape how external stakeholders engage with your business. When customers clearly understand your positioning, they bring you appropriate opportunities and refer complementary business. When partners and suppliers know exactly what you’re trying to achieve, they contribute more effectively to your success.

This external alignment often creates compounding advantages. Customers who understand your focus bring you more of the right work. Referral sources who grasp your positioning send you qualified leads. Partners who comprehend your strategy help extend your capabilities in complementary ways.

By contrast, businesses with ambiguous positioning find themselves constantly educating stakeholders about what they do and don’t do—a time-consuming process that creates friction in every relationship.

The communication investment

Achieving organization-wide strategic clarity requires deliberate, sustained communication efforts. It means distilling complex strategic thinking into memorable language, creating visual representations of your positioning, and repeatedly reinforcing key themes through multiple channels.

The most effective companies treat strategic communication as an ongoing initiative rather than a one-time announcement. They incorporate strategic reminders into regular meetings, create environmental cues in physical and digital workspaces, and regularly test understanding through informal conversations and structured feedback.

This investment in communication pays dividends through faster execution, higher engagement, and more aligned decision-making. When everyone understands the plan, implementation accelerates dramatically.

Strategic simplicity isn’t about dumbing down your approach—it’s about distilling complex thinking into actionable clarity that enables everyone to contribute to your success. By making strategic understanding universal rather than exclusive, you transform your strategy from an abstract document into a powerful operational advantage.

Discussion questions:

How consistently could people across our organization articulate our core strategy?

Where do we see evidence of strategic misalignment in day-to-day decisions?

What communication mechanisms could we strengthen to improve strategic clarity?

Stop Drowning in Data and Start Winning

The most effective leaders maintain a clear distinction between day-to-day operations and long-term strategy. Here’s how to separate the two.

The most common mistake I see leadership teams make is conflating operational excellence with strategic progress. This separation isn’t merely semantic—it fundamentally changes how teams allocate resources, make decisions, and ultimately, grow. So you have to measure these two classes of metrics separately.

Operational dashboards track internal day-to-day performance—like revenue, profit margins, and customer satisfaction. When it comes to operations, these are crucial metrics, but they measure the effectiveness of your current business model—not your progress toward future competitive advantage.

A strategic dashboard should help leadership monitor progress toward competitive advantage and long-term outcomes, such as share of wallet with ideal customer segments, adoption rates of next-generation products, or development progress on proprietary technologies that will create future barriers to entry.

Follow these tips when building your dashboards:

Align With Your Value Proposition

A strategic dashboard, again, is all about long-term. It should track a small set of well-defined, balanced KPIs that reflect your most important strategic priorities and help you stay focused on future value creation. The goal is to improve decision-making, keep teams aligned, and ensure accountability.

Start by identifying the core priorities that matter most for long-term growth—those that go beyond day-to-day operations and directly support your strategic goals. Then, translate those into measurable indicators.

What makes a metric truly strategic is its connection to your unique value proposition and competitive positioning. The question isn’t just, “Are we performing well?” but rather, “Are we building the capabilities and position that will create sustainable advantage?” This distinction changes everything about how leadership teams allocate their attention and resources.

Keep it focused and balanced

The power of a strategic dashboard comes from its selectivity. While operational dashboards might track dozens of metrics, effective strategic dashboards typically focus on 5-9 core indicators that collectively tell a complete story about strategic progress.

This selectivity serves two crucial purposes. First, it forces leadership to achieve clarity about what truly drives future value creation—a discipline that itself improves strategic thinking. Second, it creates focus throughout the organization by signaling what matters most amid countless competing priorities.

The most effective strategic dashboards I’ve helped develop maintain balance across several dimensions: leading and lagging indicators, financial and non-financial metrics, and measures that span different time horizons. This balance ensures that short-term pressures don’t override long-term value creation and that financial outcomes don’t come at the expense of building sustainable capabilities.

Link Strategy to Execution

A well-designed strategic dashboard bridges the gap between abstract intentions and concrete tactical execution. It transforms lofty strategic objectives into measurable, manageable components that teams can act upon and track over time.

This linkage solves one of the most persistent challenges of strategic implementation: connecting high-level direction with day-to-day decision-making. When teams can see how their work directly impacts strategic metrics, they make better prioritization decisions and allocate resources more effectively.

The most successful companies I’ve advised use their strategic dashboards as central alignment tools. They review these metrics in leadership meetings, incorporate them into team objectives, and reference them when making trade-off decisions. This consistent connection between metrics and decisions ensures that strategy drives action rather than remaining a theoretical exercise.

Evolve

Strategic dashboards shouldn’t remain static. As your market evolves, the competitive landscape shifts, and strategic priorities adjust, your dashboard must evolve accordingly. The metrics that mattered during market entry may differ from those that matter during scale-up or maturity phases.

Effective leadership teams review their strategic metrics quarterly to ensure alignment with current priorities and annually to ensure alignment with evolving market conditions. They’re willing to retire metrics that no longer serve as useful indicators and introduce new ones that better reflect changing strategic imperatives.

This willingness to evolve measurement approaches differentiates truly strategic organizations from those trapped by historical reporting conventions. The question isn’t “What have we always measured?” but rather “What should we measure now to guide future success?”

A thoughtfully designed strategic dashboard transforms strategy from an occasional planning exercise to an ongoing management discipline. By focusing leadership attention on the metrics that truly drive future value creation, you create the conditions for sustained, strategic growth rather than merely efficient operations.

Action Items

Here are some questions to help you design your strategic dashboard:

• What capabilities drive our competitive advantage, and how might we measure their development?

• How effectively do our current metrics distinguish between operational performance and strategic progress?

• What leading indicators would give us earlier visibility into our strategic momentum?

Having guided dozens of leadership teams through developing and implementing growth strategies, I’ve observed that the difference between companies that successfully scale and those that plateau often comes down to how well they measure their strategic results. The companies that grow most consistently are those that measure what truly matters for long-term value creation.

Want to Increase Innovation and Drive Change in Your Organization? Try This 1 Simple Meeting

While most productive meetings need an agenda, an Open Space meeting intentionally doesn’t use one.

Many years ago, when I was CEO of the first technology company I founded, we started having all-day quarterly meetings with our staff. Because many of our people worked remotely and on client sites, we rarely all saw each other at the same time, so these meetings became important for maintaining our cultural cohesion.

The first quarterly meeting we held was full of presentations and breakout sessions centered on different topics we knew. While the meetings were successful, we also got a lot of feedback reminding us that we missed several topics and that some of the topics could have used more or less time.

It’s important to mention here that our company was one of the first Lean/Agile consulting firms. We were steeped in new ways of building teams and processes. So, when one of our developers came back from a conference where they used a crazy meeting format called Open Space Technology which has no predefined agenda and let’s attendees choose the topics. We tried it. And ever since then, it’s become one of the most powerful meeting formats I know.

Open Space meetings don’t work for every meeting, so you can’t do away with agendas forever. However, Open Space meetings are great when you are bringing together a group of people who have many different potential topics to discuss and the priorities are not immediately clear.

I use this format for summits and retrospectives where we need to uncover the topics as a group and prioritize them as we go. Open Space meetings are also great when you suspect new topics will come up during the process and you’ll need to re-prioritize them in real time.

Here are a few simple guidelines for running your own Open Space meeting.

1. Choose a theme or a focus

While I keep the agenda open, I do create a general area of focus for the meeting. I’ve used “sharpen the axe” to focus on process improvement or “stronger bonds” to think more about team engagement and culture. Choose something that identifies a know concern but still leaves the topics open.

2. Set good ground rules

A meeting with no agenda needs good ground rules to stay focused and work well. Here are the three that I use.

“Vote with your feet”: If you’re not learning or contributing, move to a different topic.

“Yes, and”: (No “buts” rule.) Don’t tear down ideas; find a way to build on it.

“Tackle issues, not people”: Focus on the underlying issue, and don’t make personal attacks.

3. Start with a brainstorm

Every Open Space meeting starts with a discussion of the theme and a brainstorming of topics. Make sure you’re not being critical at this stage; be open to any potential discussion topic. Don’t rush this step; often the best topics come up late in this process and after a long moment of silence.

I have team members write ideas on index cards (one per card) so that we can organize as we go. I keep extra index cards around so we can add new ones as they come up during the session.

4. Select discussion facilitators

The power of an Open Space meeting is that you are empowering people to talk about what they want to talk about. Choose, don’t assign, facilitators who are most passionate about the topics.

5. Work in self-organizing teams

I generally set up multiple rounds of meetings in time slots of 30-45 minutes with 15-minute periods for regrouping. For each round, I get volunteers for 3-5 topics and then have people self-organize into meeting groups.

After the round ends, we regroup and each facilitator presents a short summary of the discussion, key insights, and any recommendations for the larger group.

6. Document notes and action items

Make sure to have each team submit a one-page summary of the discussion including the topic, the facilitator’s name, names of those who attended, key discussion points, takeaways, and any other recommendations.

This summary can be handwritten on paper and taped to a wall so people can see the results. If you have good connectivity, you can also collect information on an online document as you go.

7. Reflect on the process and learning

At the end of the meeting, take some time to reflect on the process. At the end of the meeting, I like to have each person share their biggest takeaway along with one personal action item. You can also have people rate the meeting and suggest changes for future formats.

Open Space meetings are not a lazy-person’s substitute for properly planned meetings. Instead, they are a tool you can use when the situation calls for deeper dives into emergent topics. And remember: like all powerful tools, you need practice to use Open Space meetings. You also need to know when, and when not, to apply them.

Most Companies Get Pricing Their Products and Services All Backwards. Here’s How to Get Your Right

Don’t leave money on the table. Here’s how to get your pricing right and put more money in your pocket.

While it’s not hard to price a product or service to sell, it’s much harder to find the one that maximizes profits. Many companies play it safe, leaving too much money on the table as they try to maximize their close rate rather than the amount of cash that goes to the bottom line.

Here are some of the key pricing factors to consider. While there is no magic formula, experimenting with these strategies will increase your success and the amount of money that falls into your pocket at the end of the day.

1. Think about its value, not its cost.

Many people start the process of figuring out how to price their products or services by the costs that go into producing and delivering them. While you need to know your costs, that’s not how you should determine your price.

Instead, start by calculating the value you create for your clients. How much more revenue do they make? How much more profit? Do you increase sales or lower costs or remove risks? Answer all of these questions and then use this data to calculate your optimal pricing.

2. Calculate the cost of inaction.

One thing many people fail to do is calculate the prospect’s cost of inaction. It’s easy to see the cost of your product or service, but often times the client’s real cost comes from doing nothing. Be sure to consider the factor of time on these costs as well. When a buyer has less time, they have fewer choices and face increased risk and pressure. You should increase your prices accordingly.

3. Remove the buying risk.

Sometimes clients are hesitant to buy because they are not sure you can deliver on it even though they can see the benefit. While testimonials work well to convince people, sometimes you need to use a stronger strategy. If buyers remain skeptical but interested, offer them a satisfaction guarantee (we keep working until you’re happy) or a money-back guarantee (you get all or part of your fee back if you’re not happy).

If you’ve done a good job prospecting, these will be rare. Work into your fees a small percentage of clients that don’t work out or result in extra work. It’s often easier to do this than what you would spend on sales and marketing

4. Deliver a 10x return.

A good rule of thumb is that you want your clients to get getting a ten times return on your fees. So if you charge $50K for your services, then they should be seeing $500K or more in value. This could be top line growth, reduction of expenses, or a removal of high-impact risk. Ten times leaves the buyer with a solid business case for the sale.

5. Sell on emotions, but justify with logic.

The research shows that people make decisions using emotions and then justify them using logic. People want to do business with people they know, like, and trust. Yet we often forget that and try to push a sale through based on business rationale.

By demonstrating that buying your product or service is easy, that working with you is a pleasure, and that you can be counted on to deliver the results you promise, you will be able to demand a premium price in the market. While other reasons might make business sense, people would rather pay more for knowing they will enjoy the process.

6. Have a rock solid positioning stratey.

Your best pricing strategy is to have a great positioning strategy. Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow explains how the challenge in business is standing out. One of the best ways to do that is to focus on a specific type of customer and to offer a unique and interesting set of qualities and attributes based on their needs.

Doing so will make you stand out and make it hard for prospects to choose your competitors. When you’re the only option that truly meets the needs of your target customer, they will happily pay more because you solve their problem well without the fluff and complexity of other options.

7. Don’t set your pricing in stone.

Since customer situations and the value of your product or service are continuously changing, consider changing your price as well. We pay a lot more for next-day delivery (far more than it costs the company) and we pay many times more for a soda in a movie theater than we do at the supermarket. Why not charge different prices for different situations?

While pricing is both an art and a science, getting it right is critical to business success. There are many factors to consider and variables to estimate. Just keep in mind that just like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the price that works best is the one that your customer are willing to pay.

6 Books About Managing People That Every CEO Should Read

If you’re a CEO who struggles with managing people, here are six must-read books that will help you up your game.

Being a CEO doesn’t come with an instructional manual. And for most founders who end up in the top job of their business, they usually have little to no management and executive experience. Most early-stage, high-growth business leaders find that they have created a successful, thriving business but have no idea on how to manage people.

As a business coach, I work with many first-time CEOs who have big ambitions but also know they need help to grow themselves and their companies. One of the things I do is help them be better leaders and better managers by leveling up their skills and perspectives. Learning to better manage their teams is usually on top of the list.

While there are many ways to learn, here are six of the best books I’ve found on how to better manage people that I recommend to all my CEO clients. If you’re a new CEO struggling to manage your team, this is a great starting point to develop your people skills.

Drive by Daniel Pink

Pink does a great job in breaking down the complex issues of what motivates people into three basic areas. With my CEOs, we speak about AMP: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Any time we discuss how to motivate a team or an individual, we check in on these three elements and how they can use them to drive engagement and performance. It’s a simple concept that can lead to big results, when applied well.

Crucial Conversations, by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler

Business is full of tough conversations. Unfortunately, many people deal with this by either avoiding conflict or picking a fight. These authors explain how to get clear with your own needs and wants first, create an environment that will foster deep connection and sharing, and honestly listen and consider other people’s needs and wants. Only then can you find true solutions and put in place a plan of action that will create real change. This is a book on life, but it’s great for the office, too.

Radical Candor, by Kim Scott

While many people avoid giving feedback to direct reports and colleagues, Scott does a great job of explaining why the truly professional and caring thing to do is to provide radical candor. Only through open, honest, direct, and timely feedback can someone grow and learn. Saying nothing is not being nice–it’s being apathetic.

Now, Discover Your Strengths, by Marcus Buckingham

I’m a big fan of personal and professional development and I recommend to all of my executive clients that they create a culture of continuous improvement. And while everyone has weaknesses that need to be managed, you’re far better off focusing on your strengths. Buckingham does a great job of helping people find the things they are good at and passionate about, to fuel their growth.

Mindset, by Carol Dweck​

This book is a game changer for most managers. Dweck shows us why regardless of our skills, experience, genetics, or aptitude, the most influential factor on our ability to learn is whether we think we can do something or not. Those people with a growth mindset will be far more likely to change, and those with a fixed mindset will be far less likely. So before you put together the training plan, coach the mindset first.

Power of a Positive No, by William Ury

I still remember the first time I read this book and how it changed both my professional and personal life. One of my core values is to be of service to people and help them. But I found myself saying yes to everything and trying to help everyone and as a result spreading myself too thin and not being very effective. Ury taught me to develop a clearer picture of my bigger goals and purpose and to use that to say “no” to many requests so that I could say “yes” powerfully to the ones that truly mattered to me.

The six above are just a start. There are countless other books on managing people and how to create a great culture in your company. And you should strive to read all of them if you want to be an exceptional leader. People management is not just a good skill to have, it’s what will drive your professional success and the success of your company.