Last month, we introduced our 2021 Business Trends report based on in-depth conversations with top CSOs in our Outthinker Strategy Network. We will be expanding on one of these trends every week with the intention of supporting your organization’s strategy for the next year and beyond. This is our ninth installment. Newsletter subscribers will receive

We have heard the adages like “work on your business, not in it” and “come up to see the forest for the trees.” At McKinsey they urged us to continually take the “top management perspective” by zooming up to look at the business overall before jumping into the details.

Earlier this month, we introduced our 2021 Business Trends report based on in-depth conversations with top CSOs in our Outthinker Strategy Network. We will be expanding on one of these trends every week with the intention of supporting your organization’s strategy for the next year and beyond. This is our third installment.

This year, as we recover from a massive shock to all forms of structure and life as we once knew it, we have a chance to create the future. We will dust ourselves off, begin to rebuild, and attempt to return to a sense of normalcy.

The Ultimate Strategy Is “be good” a part of your 2021 strategy? If not, you should reconsider. When I was in business school, we learned that companies exist to do one thing: maximize shareholder value. At Outthinker, we’ve been talking for years about how this belief has become defunct. Companies are realizing that focusing solely

Last week I got to spend five and a half hours with one of the most influential strategic thinkers alive today, Gary Hamel. He has written five global best-selling books, published 17 papers in Harvard Business Review, and has taught at London Business School for 30 years.

We are dealing with unprecedented change invoked by the COVID-19 pandemic. What we need more than ever is a sense of hope. So, we’ve taken The Outthinker Process – a strategic process that helps business leaders step outside of conventional thinking to redesign their business models and strategies – and reformed it specifically for what

The word “strategy” too often brings to mind images of uptight executives in boardrooms, with heavy binders and spreadsheets, debating critical choices. Experts will tell you strategy is “a plan of action designed to achieve a major or overall aim.” Strategy is a science, and it’s serious.

This week, I was in Erie, PA, then Chicago, now I’m in Seattle to present two talks. Stepping out of the arrivals area at the Seattle–Tacoma Airport activated a vivid memory of stopping at the seating area there, eight years ago, to conduct a phone interview with Time Magazine. A few weeks later, my photo

I’m angry, not jetlagged. It’s 4:30am and I’m banging on the keyboard from my hotel room desk when I should be asleep, fueling for a keynote I deliver to a thousand electronics executives in four hours. What tossed me out of bed and pulled me to my laptop was not the three-hour time difference between New York