Can You Afford to Be More Strategic?

I look forward to the Monday edition of the Wall Street Journal. The break from the WSJ on Sundays is unnerving for me. I am an info junkie and on days I cannot read the entire Journal, I save up those sections for Sunday reading, helping to augment the now thinner Sunday edition of my local newspaper.

Monday’s WSJ reserves space for a “Journal Report” – on topics varying from issues facing Boomers during retirement to new medical technologies or, in the case of Monday, February 23, 2015 – C-Suite Strategies with an article titled: The Way to Become a ‘Strategic’ Executive.

And, even though the title may hinder your interest, if you don’t consider yourself a C-Suite tenant, I think every worker bee can glean some concrete suggestions for developing more strategic perspectives.

After surveying executives Ms. Herminia Ibarra, author of Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader, concluded that execs are better at acting strategic than actually thinking strategically, and most of the people she surveyed admitted that they don’t necessarily know how to hone their strategic thinking skills.

They do share some common challenges:

- setting a clear and differentiating strategy

- communicating the strategy and getting buy-in for it
- allocating resources to support the strategy in a meaningful way
- ensuring day-to-day decision-making aligns with the strategy, and
- translating strategy and operational decisions into action

Of the four practices she identified that could help you to be more strategic I thought Collaborate at the Top was the most interesting. We forget sometimes that, as executives of the same organization, we share in the same mission and though our exact deliverables differ, we bank on – and contribute to – the success of the whole.

Sharing ideas and best practices is key to implementing this practice for increasing strategic thinking. Inviting others to better understand how you and your team are creating success or overcoming challenges helps them to brainstorm ways they can adapt and modify – creating tools they can bring back to their own divisions or functions.

How do you share what you’ve learned, the good and the bad, in a way that helps others, but also helps you yourself to broaden your toolkit for ongoing strategic thinking? Could you be transparent with others about what is and what is not working? Can you really afford to be more strategic?

One of my recent blogs was about the power of the TED Talk. TED-style infomercials are a platform for sharing, but maybe just as importantly for organizing your knowledge and expertise. The worker bee to the C-Suite executive and everyone in between is required to organize and manage hundreds of pieces of data and processes and outputs and …the list is endless. Identifying an effective way to share what we are learning and what still needs refining is an important process in building our capacity for strategic thinking.

I asked in that blog: what would be your TED Talk topic? It would be a great exercise to engage your team in a brainstorming session that challenged them to “present” to one another on the best practices that could help others to break out of a rut. I bet it would help you break the cycle of Ms. Ibarra’s challenge #2: communicating the strategy and getting buy-in for it.

Email me with ways that you and your team work on building strategic aptitude.

For a copy of the WSJ article (if you don’t already subscribe): http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-key-to-becoming-a-strategy-minded-executive-1424664606

Yvonne Hundshamer

President, Blue Grotto Inc.
yvonne@bluegrottoinc.com

Storytelling for the masses - the TED Talk

I love that TED Talks are available on I “Heart” Radio. I found them one morning on a run and became entranced as I listened to an obscure topic presented by Mark Ronson – whose official title is music producer and DJ. Ronson spent sixteen-plus minutes expertly describing and demonstrating the art of sampling music.

At first, Ronson’s topic about artists co-opting elements of other popular music tracks may sound very niche, you might skip it if you thought you had nothing to learn from a guy who first made a name for himself DJ’ing in New York and Atlantic City night clubs, but I was hooked.

The track Ronson chose to highlight was by Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh, titled La Di Da Di. According to Ronson, it is the fifth most sampled song of all time – sampled 547 times – and by artists including Notorious B.I.G. and Miley Cyrus, who, Ronson noted was not even born yet when the track was first released in 1984.

Then, months later, I heard a song on the radio written and produced by Ronson featuring Bruno Mars – Uptown Funk – with a beat and even lyrics that reminded me of Twin Cities’-artist Morris Day and The Time and I could hear what Ronson was talking about: an artist’s desire to insert themselves “into the narrative of a song while pushing that story forward.”

I circled back to his TED Talk. We all have a desire to incorporate ourselves into a narrative and we all feel compelled in some way to help push a story forward at one time or another. That is why storytelling, as a concept, has become so popular – in social media channels, in the corporate conference room, in nonprofit fundraising. We co-opt the storyline from many places, mostly in an attempt to learn from someone else’s experiences.

TED Talk storytelling is not just a version of campfire lore. It’s the telling, and our re-telling, of another’s story that can motivate us, inspire us, educate us, and even protect us. Sometimes an anecdotal account helps keep us from making the same mistake ourselves.

That’s why the TED Talks work. They not only allow a storyteller to engage a live audience but there is an opportunity to share the storyline around the planet, literally. Think of how many times a TED Talk, whether it’s as brief as six minutes or as lengthy as sixty-one minutes, is streamed around the planet. Anyone with a connection can plug in. That’s how I heard Mark Ronson that day, on I “Heart” Radio.

As I said, anyone could easily have passed over his Talk, for a more well-known speaker, like Melinda Gates, talking about fighting disease in Africa. But the TED Talks make it easy to hear the stories of many other people. People whose own lens of their work or their passion can inspire and educate the rest of us. And that is why right below the ‘play’ button are the ‘Share’ icons – you can “Share this idea” on Twitter, Facebook and by emailing a link.

That’s the part where we come in – pushing the story forward, as Mark Ronson says. By sharing these narratives we help to spread the word, we subtly encourage reflection and dialogue, and we expose a little bit of ourselves letting others in on the things we find worthy of sharing (you now know my obscure interest in pop music).

The TED library claims “1900+ talks to stir your curiosity” and though I listen to many, I could never get through them all, and they add more every year. I am curious to know which TED Talks you have listened to and enjoyed or recommended. And I am super curious to know what your TED Talk topic would feature given the chance to expound to a live audience. Mine would likely be something along the lines of “are you really capturing and sharing your own story?”

Below is the video of Mark Ronson’s Talk: (https://www.ted.com/talks/mark_ronson_how_sampling_transformed_music)

And the Uptown Funk video: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPf0YbXqDm0)

 

Tell me if you hear the similarity to Twin Cities-funk leaders Morris Day and Prince.

 

Yvonne Hundshamer

President, Blue Grotto Inc.
yvonne@bluegrottoinc.com