Entries by Geoff Wilson

5 ways strategy deployment fails

Deploying your strategy isn’t easy, here are 5 reasons deployments fail. The reality of strategic management is that it requires having a strategy and actually managing with the strategy as the touchstone. The first part isn’t easy…plenty of management “stories” masquerade as strategy without actually being founded on real choices about what to do and […]

What Andrew Luck just taught us about protecting top talent

Andrew Luck’s retirement shows that if you don’t protect the talent in your organization, you won’t have it for long. Andrew Luck announced his retirement Saturday night.  Luck, the intriguingly smart and fantastically gifted quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts, basically explained that the constant cycle of injury and recovery he has gone through for the […]

The waiting is the hardest part

There is such a thing as strategic patience… I have a confession to make: I’m impatient.  It’s a fundamental trait that I have wrestled with for years.  I’d love to think that I’m not alone and that it’s okay because other people are impatient, too, but the reality is that impatience is not okay. Urgency […]

How do you respond to adversity?

Things are going to go sideways…so how do you respond? No strategy survives contact with the enemy. That’s a timeless truth that, while written for a military crowd, is valid in all parts of life. If you don’t like that one, how about this one:  “Man plans…God laughs.” In other words, no matter how much […]

When one more is too many, what do you do?

Focus need not be only about doing less. Focus is a frequent theme in our work.  Often, action-oriented teams do what they do, which is to take on more and more “things” until the collection of things is basically overwhelming. When organizations place one management layer of achievers on top of another management layer of […]

The strategic executive’s enduring dilemma

The hardest part about giving excellent advice is the hardest part about being an executive. One of the real disasters of the consulting profession is the consultant who really, sincerely, thinks he has it all figured out.  He’s the guy for whom no problem is unsolvable.  Usually, the advice on complex topics is distilled into […]

You are what you eat, whether you like it or not.

Your sources of revenue (and income) say plenty…mind them closely.  The New York Times released an article this week on McKinsey’s work with authoritarian and otherwise dangerous regimes across the world.  The article raises some questions on McKinsey’s choices on whom to serve and how such choices align with McKinsey’s Firm values.  There have been […]

Real dirt on your uniform

Sure, you want to show how hard you worked. But sometimes it’s better to just do the work.  “The optics aren’t good.”  Ugh.  That phrase is the start of something bad in many circumstances.  Sometimes, bad optics and a good outcome is much better than a really pretty but really awful outcome. Allow me a […]

So smart you don’t have to listen…

Lack of listening betrays lack of empathy.  Are you too smart to listen? You know that feeling: It’s that feeling that you already know the end of the discussion, so you don’t really have to be patient enough to listen?  Or, maybe it’s that feeling that your position of authority means you don’t have to […]