Linking seemingly unrelated ideas is an important trait of a great leader. The ability to see the possible impact of an action or decisions to other parts of the organization is vital in decision making. It is also a key ingredient in innovative thinking.

How to develop the ability to see the big picture? For one, only through lifelong learning can big picture thinkers generate enough materials to connect the dots. A Leaders vision cannot be mapped out clearly without big picture thinking. Predicting possibilities from different relationships cannot be done without big picture thinking. People who refuse to continuously learn cannot possibly be big picture thinkers. Learning can come in many forms; love of reading, observing people and events, stepping back and questioning our experience, formal training and so on. If there is no reference point to compare an idea with then how can big picture thinking happen?

Big picture and creative thinking is infectious. Spend time with big picture thinkers. Observe how they think. Observe how they base decisions on. I got the opportunity to observe this when I was in a meeting with both the CEO of a successful HMO company and its owner. The questions they raised were interesting. Their team focused the discussion around two things: the departments they are managing, the process they are currently using. The CEO questioned the status quo. Instead of focusing on incremental improvements on the current process, the CEO asked the executive to look at revamping the entire process instead. He asked how a completely revamped and improved process would affect the respective departments and improve the service to the customer. He stepped back and looked at the bigger picture. He questioned the status quo.

Big picture thinking is about asking the right questions. It’s about questions that challenge conventional thinking. It’s about questions that bring out the root cause of issues instead of accepting the first reason that comes to the collective minds in a meeting. Big picture is about getting the root of the question “why?”.

Finally, big picture thinking is about looking at events and situations through the lens of data. Data drives big picture thinking decisions of leaders while everyone else goes with their gut feel. Gathering data, looking at it, finding relationships between different sets of data, validating cause and effect through data is an important ingredient in big picture thinking. Decision making is made using data.

Do you want to go up the corporate ladder? Do you aspire for a key leadership role? If so then you need to develop your big picture thinking abilities. It is a pre-requisite to leadership success.

Are you a big picture thinker?

We often get sucked into the details for our day-to-day life that we get lost. Stepping back and looking at the bigger picture is a truly helpful exercise. Big picture thinking is a common trait among successful leaders. Getting stuck, holding on too much on the details and refusing to see the bigger picture is a very common behavior.

I had the privilege the work with a few great leaders both in my corporate and consulting life. These people are always on a very fast career or business path. They have the ability to climb to 10,000 feet for a helicopter view of events and situations. Once they have a good grasp of the big picture, they also have the ability to deep dive to the process level.

The core of big picture thinking is learning and experience. They are ‘learning animals’. They do not merely go through life. They ‘learn’ their way through life. They experience it. They learn from the lowest to the highest ranking employees. It does not matter to them what the learning source is. They simply seek knowledge. They are also proactively learning as they go. They are not afraid of looking silly when asking questions. You cannot connect the dots of the bigger picture if you don’t have an idea where the dots are.

They are also courageous enough to take the lead or make tough decisions despite the uncertainty. They can only soak enough data points and knowledge. They come to a point that they have to take a decision or action from what they know.

They are also courageous enough to challenge the status quo. What may have worked five years ago may not necessarily be the best today. The answer “this has been the way we have been doing it for the last few years” irritates them.

They are curios enough to go outside the normal boundaries. They will seek what other areas their decisions will impact rather than whats obvious. They ask questions like “Who else will get affected by this decision? What other departments will be involved other than what is mentioned?”

Do you want a more successful career? Start practicing “big picture” thinking. It will bring you closer to your ‘big dreams’ and goals.

Strategies are applicable to both the corporate and our personal lives. Without strategies or a structured approach to planning, we might as well float around in the ocean of life. Floating and waiting where our company, career or personal life takes us.

There has got to be more to life than waiting for waves influencing our direction. Well, there is something better and it’s not limited to companies. From October all the way through December, most of our engagements are for facilitating Corporate Strategies. It is interesting that creation of Strategies is not a normal exercise for a lot of companies here in the Philippines. It is a very important exercise that a lot of our local companies do not practice or do not practice well.

The art of creating or modifying strategies is simply looking a few years down the road and asking what will our industry look like in 5-7 years?

Both in corporate strategy and personal life, we often forget to focus on growth. Company strategies and personal goals are half-baked if they are not rooted in growth somehow. When designing business plans or new products we need to take into account scalability. Can my product, service or business grow? Will there be room for growth or is there a limit to the product and service I provide? This goes the same with personal strategies. Am I planning to grow in the coming few years? It is a waste of time to plan to be in the same situation for the coming five years. That is boring and meaningless.

Agile programming has become a recent hit because it allows the company to keep development projects moving forward. Parts of the application are being programmed or coded then it is immediately tested. The traditional “waterfall” approach was to write thousands upon thousands of programming codes before the system actually hits testing phase. This usually takes weeks and even months.

The same should hold true for strategies. There are no perfect strategies. Strategies need consistent reviews and adjustments. We cannot predict a hundred percent the effectiveness of our strategies. Corporate Strategies need not be written in stone. The same with personal or career strategies. There will always be at least two uncertainties. One, the soundness of the strategy. Two, our ability to execute it well. We need to keep our eye on these two in order to have a successful strategy and execution of plans.

Strategies are usually looked at as high-level concepts and activities. Like most things in life, it can be simplified. Simple is good. Simple works. Simple strategies bring better results.

Lately, I read something truly interesting from the book ‘How Google Works’ and emailed a few questions companies may need to answer to 36 Senior Filipino Executives and 3 Senior Foreign Executives. It was odd, but not surprising, that all 3 Foreign executives replied and only 1 Filipino executive commented on the questions.

Now, these questions are from one of the best-managed company in the world – Google. These are questions that drive Google leaders to think hard about where the company will be five years from now. These questions drive the strategies and policies they make.

If these questions are interesting and important enough for Google executives to have sleepless nights, why are they not enough to raise a concern from our own Senior Filipino Executives?

Is it because the best companies in the world are humbled by the fact that success does not last forever? Is it because we are focused too much on tactical and day to day operations to think about where we want to be and how to get there. Is it because we accept mediocrity? Is it because we find such questions too hard to answer? Is it because we have no sense of urgency? Is it because we don’t care enough about the companies we work for? Is it because we put our own agendas before the companies? Is it because we don’t know where to start? Is it because we are ashamed to reach out for guidance?

Whatever the reason, we need to resolve it. The questions are important enough to have the Regional Manager of a large Japanese conglomerate, the CEO of the largest Shipping company and the Marketing Director of one of the biggest software development company in the Philippines respond back.

The question is important enough to have Google constantly think, debate and come up with answers.

These questions may be important enough to have a second look and come up with possible answers. We then need to take these answers and implement them in our own businesses.

• Do you want your company to stay relevant in the near future, here are questions we need to answer

• What do the ongoing changes in technologies mean for our company?

• How will our industry look like five years from now?

• Do customers currently love our products or service? If not, what can be done better?

• How can our business be taken away by a smart and well-funded competitor?

• Is hiring great talent a top priority of our management team?

• What percentage of our new products or service are built on data?

• Does our internal decision-making process lead to the best decisions? Do we compromise our decisions to please most stakeholders?

• Are our employees free to try something really innovative for the company?

• Who does better in the company – information hoarders or information sharers?

• Do internal silos facilitate the sharing of information or restrict it?

“No business wins forever, it is inevitable. Some would find it chilling. We find it inspiring” Eric Schmidt

“How Google Works”
A book by Eric Schmidt & Jonathan Rosenberg, with Alan Eagle

The fourth quarter is the season for Strategy Planning. Actually, a few companies started their StratPlanning last October.

The most successful companies have an annual Strategy Planning session. They do not leave their success to chance. They will not leave their success to ad hoc decision making. Success is intentional and not circumstantial.

There are countless ways to run a strategic planning session. If not properly checked, the approach of a company takes, can get very complicated. The more complex the business model, the more complicated the strategy.

In my years as a former head of strategy for a large commercial Saudi Bank and currently a management consultant for medium and big companies, I have seen strategies that succeed and some that fail. This quarter alone, we facilitated the Strategy Planning Sessions of over four major companies and counting.

Let us share with you what sets the successful strategies planning apart from the rest.

1. Strategic Workshops must be simple and practical. The steps must be simple and clear. No complicated graphs that have no real meaning. No powerpoint slides that have paragraphs upon paragraphs on data. Simple simply works.

2. Strategic Workshops must paint a clear vision of what the company wants to achieve, when is the target and how will success be measured.

3. Strategic Workshops must transparently raise business issues and risks. If we cannot acknowledge our challenges then we are bound to be held back by them from succeeding. If we have challenges with Department heads working together for the good of the company then how can we expect success? If we have terrible customer service then how can we expect to succeed?

4. Strategic Workshops identifies business opportunities. We cannot grow our business if we simply do the same thing over and over again. We need to be innovative with our offerings in relation to the business opportunities out in the market.

5. Strategic Workshops are collaborative. Crafting the strategy must not be left to a few individuals. Successful strategies are a result of management team effort.

6. Strategic Workshops must come up with actions. Given that we understand where we want to be, we need to plan a path to achieving the company objectives. We need to assign accountabilities. Who will deliver what initiative? What is his/her target? It has to be a single person accountable and not a department. Holding a single accountable produces more chances of success.

The best laid strategy can fall short. Yes, it will be useless unless properly executed. We have seen solid strategies thrown out the window when the company went into ‘business as usual’ mode. Their strategic plans were reviewed years later.

We have a huge conglomerate client who’s group CEO was frustrated with their ability to execute. She said that important initiatives have a tendency to quiet down when she was not asking about them. The same initiatives would come back to life only after she inquires about their status. A case in point was an initiative that was taking 10 years of on and off progress. This important initiative was suppose to improve their collection process.

Executing Initiatives does not need to be complicated as well. It will boil down into a few basic things.

1. People assigned the responsibility of executing a project or initiative must be trained. Some managers we worked with had a tendency to assign important change initiatives to key personnel without providing them the proper training. These are subject matter experts in their own rights. However, successfully managing a project was new to them. They would accept the challenge and fail. Why? Because they did not know what to do. A successful high-end retail company in the Philippines asked us to train their CEO & Senior Executives on the art of execution. At the end of the workshop he realized that they were also falling in the same trap. They were assigning projects to their management team and not providing them the necessary skills. When the managers (project managers) fail, they get blamed. Due to this revelation, the French CEO tasked his HR Director to have all 240 managers trained in Effectively Executing their projects.

2. Successful execution will require time from the senior executives. This usually boils down to around one and a half hours a month. This is valuable time given to projects that need guidance and direction. When we asked the same Group CEO mentioned above if she could spend one hour every three weeks for a Steering Committee meeting, she made sure to free up her time for it. She sat in these project status reviews (Steercom) while the project managers provide their status report one by one. For the projects that were falling behind, they got the chance to explain the reason for being behind and request for direction or resource as needed. In the first two months there were 10 key projects being executed and reviewed. At the end of the second month, 2 projects were already completed.

Strategic Planning need not be rocket science. They are not complicated activities. However, they are valuable to the success of any company regardless of size.

Try the tips mentioned with your Stratplanning and execution sessions. They will work wonders for your company.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to us.

Salt and Light Ventures and I are working on an inexpensive public workshop that will help attendees make a difference in their life and the life of the people around them. It applies simplified best management practices into the way we live our day to day life.

Here is a simple outline to give you an idea. We are still fine tuning this. We will blast this in the next few weeks.

Make a Difference

Program Overview
Most of us go through life just going with the flow. Events around us tend to irritate us. We talk to friends and relatives about the traffic situation, high cost of education, security, our boss, corruption, snail paced government agencies and so on.

What most of us forget to include in our conversations are possible solutions. Discussion on how we can make our world a better place. Ideas on how we can make our life a better life. We are so engrained in so much negative talk that we miss out on opportunities to make things better.

“Be the change you wan to see in the world” Mahatma Gandhi

In our workshop, we will show you how to improve the way we look at our lives and the world around us. Together, we will work on identifying what is really important for us. We will also discuss how we can achieve goals that are important for us.

You may be in for a surprise. A number of best management practices can be applied to our personal life.

See you there.

Jordan

Key Learning Objectives
– Turning your frown into a smile
– Learning how to identify clear and balanced goals
– Figuring out how to achieve your goals
– Understanding how to overcome obstacles
– Applying a simplified version of management best practices into day to day living

Who Should Attend
– Everyone who wish to make a difference in their life and the life of the people around them. That’s you.

Outline
The Difference
– What do you want? Visioning (Painting a clear picture of where you want you our life to be)
– Where are you now? SWOT Analysis (identifying your strengths that can lead to opportunities, weaknesses that can pose as a threat)
– What is stopping you? Risk Management (what can go wrong with your goals/plans and how to mitigate them)
– How do you get there? Planning (what actions to take and how to prioritize them)
– Forward one step at a time. Execution (reviewing progress and adjusting your plans)

Make a Difference
– Sharing your blessings. Reaping the benefits (big and small results needs to be shared with others)

Methodology
– Interactive workshop. As we go through the tools and tips, we will be applying them to each participant. We all have our own unique circumstances and goals.
– Coming out with a clear and simple plan to improve our lives and careers.
– In the end; you go home with a goal, a plan and a clear understanding on how to execute.