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Strategy

21 News bites offer insight and direction

Once again, action precedes clarity What can one glean from a collection of seemingly unrelated news bites? Perhaps the better questions are: What’s important enough and what is motivating enough to influence our thoughts and future actions anyway? You can’t make sense of someone, or some thing, without effort and some engagement. You have to take action. Get it from Karl E. Weick, organizational...
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Stickiness trumps persistence

Align your organization for optimal success/resilience With so much pressure and so many forces at work on your business it’s easy to come unglued. Consider your customer; supply chain risk frequently represents their number one threat to revenue. How does your list compare? The better question is how do you keep it all together? The bond that eludes us To deal with such marketplace pressure, I...
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Four takeaways you can’t beat.

Snapshots from our best posts in recent months. Knowledge and know-how helps us navigate a complex world. But information is useless if we don’t have time to consume it. Here’s the solution. Each quarter you’ll find a summarization post (like this one) that features three or four of the best Bastard posts of the last period. Short, to the point, and with a new takeaway. Now you’re feeling industri...
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Give your sales strategy a huge leg up!

Dive deep for more customer insight. The purpose of your business is to create customers. In fact, it is the customer who determines what your business is. Obviously customers are crucially important to sales efforts. But don’t we need to understand more about what makes them tick? Don’t we need to know more about the perceptions that ultimately drive their opinions and decisions? Would it help i...
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Business development requires bravery.

Who’s not afraid to stand up and reach out? It’s tough staying objective. Especially when it comes to your own business. It’s much easier to let the Vision go fuzzy and accept the deceiving, but compelling, comfort of the status quo. This form of comfort is a disease and it is never good for a business that wants to grow. Among many of the problems, comfort sustains an atmosphere that is suffocati...
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3 Elements of strategy you must have to succeed!

If you don’t know where you’re going, any old way will do. If your company is not working on surviving you have to be focused on growing, excelling and achieving goals. That’s a fact. Because, invariably, when we take our eyes off the target we usually miss. In other words, if you don’t get everyone rowing in the same direction, you’ll soon be working survival again before you know it. It can be a...
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A four-step prescription to help you drive markets

Create impact where it matters most. In my previous post I suggested that in order to gain the greatest insight we must “look broadly outside the industry.” Well here’s an example by way of a comparison of the metals industry to, of all things, the airline industry. I discovered some striking similarities as well as some interesting common ground. The exercise illustrates how, by simply having mor...
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Clues to building your future roadmap lie outside the industry

21 “sight bites” to help you find your way Like you, I am way more interested in 2011 than I am looking back. I want to know what we can expect this year—both the good and the bad. So please, “just give me the facts.” And like you, I need to know if we’re on the right track. Will our customers continue to be focused on the same things like reducing costs; and minimizing the environmental impact of...
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