We’re excited to announce that our Managing Partner, Anthony Taylor, will be speaking at the Engage Strategy Conference that will be held April 28-30 in Portland, Oregon. Hosted by Cascade Strategy, the leading strategic planning software provider, this conference aims to develop excitement around strategy, help senior leaders and managers to develop and focus their teams, and to share strategic insights between attendees.
After you’ve developed your vision, mission, and values, the next step in the strategic planning process is defining your objectives, strategies and tactics (i.e. how you will carry out your strategic plan initiatives).
Jacob Engel, the CEO of YEDA LLC, a consulting and leadership training company in New York joined us for this episode of our Strategy & Leadership Podcast. Jacob’s work began in his family business that was started by his father, a Holocaust survivor. Over time, Jacob developed this organization, and when the financial market crashed in 2008, he was approached by various organizations and communities for guidance on developing and reinventing their businesses. Jacob has also written about the leadership ideas that his father shared with him, in his book, The Prosperous Leader.
Your organizational values consist of all of the behaviours that exist within your business - not just the positive values you want to have, but also negative or neutral behaviours that are being acted out.
Values and behaviours are closely tied to your company culture and can have an impact on those within as well as outside of your organization. Evaluating and understanding the current values and behaviours that are active within your organization can help you pinpoint which ones you would like to continue to reinforce and reward, and which ones you hope to change or add to your organization (i.e. what types of behaviours do we hope to see in the future?)
In this episode, we were joined by Paul Supal, the President at DigiStream Investigations. DigiStream is a private intelligence firm, specializing in research and investigation. Their role is to uncover, interpret and preserve open source intelligence for a variety of clients. Paul joined the organization in 2004, when there were around 20 staff members. Over the past 13 years, the organization has grown to include 265 employees, or “streamers”.
Innovation is one of the keys to growing your business and increasing its competitiveness that you can include in your strategic planning process. It can help you to improve your productivity, reduce costs and become more profitable. Because small to mid-sized companies usually aren’t as capable of benefiting from economies of scale to the same extent that big companies can, the ability to innovate becomes even more important.
