Strategic Planning and Management Insights

Once you have created your strategic plan and have a clear vision of where you're going, you then need to figure out how to track and measure your success.

Culture is the thing that drives performance. In different organizations around the world, you may have heard about the importance of developing one. It provides a lot of benefits, such as open communication, good teamwork, and dedicated employees, which affect nearly every aspect of a company. Here are three steps you can take to start fostering culture within your organization:

In this episode of our Strategy and Leadership Podcast, we're joined by Melissa McComas,  the Chief Strategy Officer at Piper Mantis Literary. Melissa originally started out as a junior executive before moving into retail buying, and then into a director position. She eventually opened her first brokerage in 1997, matching buyers and users in the multimedia sector for both consumers and B2B clientele. In 2000, the company evolved to include a wide variety of services that help clients bring their ideas to life.  

When organization’s sit down for their strategic planning session, there’s usually a lot on the agenda. Everyone is bringing something to the table that they feel is urgent. The reality is, only a few different strategic priorities will be settled upon by the time the meeting participants are packed up and headed home. In order for a strategy to be effective, this is the way it has to be. 

Communication is such an overlooked component of leadership and business, even though you spend so much time doing it.

Improving your communication by 10 or 20% can give you extra hours every day to do things, move your team forward, and be the great leader that you are. But how do you create better communication with your team and throughout your organization?

At its core, leadership is about setting a direction for an organization and its people. Anytime we deal with people, we are inevitably dealing with extreme variability. This is evident in today’s realm of leadership courses, leadership styles and leadership consultants all trying to improve the leaders of today’s businesses, schools, non-profits, teams and governments. Ultimately, it depends on the people inside an organization that will determine what style of leadership is best for them. Nonetheless, in this article I’ll try to highlight some of the benefits of each style of leadership, including some examples of well-known people who I think best embody that style.  

Are you leading an organization or a business? Whether you are leading a big or small organization, or a non-profit or for-profit business, you need to have a strategic plan. Here are three reasons why: