Thoughts from the Pandemic Era 1/3

March 17 to June 17, 2020 – The longest quarter in my 49 year business and professional career. For 40 of those years I have been fascinated by and have built my career around helping client organizations to establish their definition of success (objectives, goals, willed future) and helping them to achieve their aspirations (key…

Read More

Thoughts from the Pandemic Era 2/3

In early June I read a thought-provoking quote from Connor Brown of the Ottawa Senators hockey club. He stated “It’s hard to do planning if you don’t know what you’re planning for”. It’s hard to argue with this observation. It seems to sum up what I’ve been feeling for 14 weeks now. In the absence…

Read More

Thoughts from the Pandemic Era 3/3

Connor Brown’s quote got me thinking. In these times of uncertainty and ambiguity, it’s more important than ever for organizations to define future success and to articulate various possible scenarios. In the short term should we be striving for significantly lesser financial objectives or greater financial objectives (e.g. the grocery chains)? Should we be setting…

Read More

Today’s Challenge – Separating the Wheat from the Chaff 1/3

In today’s complex, confusing, confounding and fast-paced world, it is more important than ever to be able to distinguish real overall business performance from intermediate measures and “noise”             We are inundated on a daily basis with talk of AI, Analytics, Key Performance Indicators and new paradigms to judge business success (such as “hits on…

Read More

Today’s Challenge – Separating the Wheat from the Chaff 2/3

Let’s turn to the world of sport to better understand this notion.  In regular season NHL hockey, the standings show games won, lost, overtime losses, goals for, goals against and total points. However, only one measure really counts: Total Points, the result of all subsidiary factors.  The regular season is won by the team with…

Read More

Today’s Challenge – Separating the Wheat from the Chaff 3/3

In business, we can rationalize performance around such factors as activity level, potential, customer satisfaction, quality and more but ultimately the only true measure of overall performance is sustainable or normalized profit.  The profit metric is the total score which sums up the effectiveness of all strategies, tactics, actions and follow through in a given…

Read More