Key Strategy Tools

Launched by FT Publishing in January 2013, Key Strategy Tools: The 80+ Tools Every Manager Needs to Build a Winning Strategy by Vaughan Evans is two books in one – a strategy manual and a toolkit. It is proving to be invaluable reading for many entrepreneurs and managers.

It follows on from the success of Vaughan Evans’ previous book, The FT Essential Guide to Writing a Business Plan: How to Win Backing to Start Up or Grow Your Business - which was the top ranking book on business planning on Amazon throughout 2012!

This pathbreaking book looks at a business plan from an investor’s perspective.  What does your backer need to know?  What concerns do you need to address? What opportunities do you need to highlight and justify?

Launched in November 2011 in the U.K., The Financial Times Essential Guide to Writing a Business Plan: How to Win Backing to Start Up or Grow Your Business will help get you the backing you need for your business to succeed!

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A year ago I shared some musings on what it takes to excel at the world’s oldest profession.  Recent events have got me thinking about what it takes to excel at the world’s most glamorous profession: princess.

Earlier this month Kate rubbed shoulders with some genuine Hollywood royalty, including Barbra, Nicole and JLo (and her mum!).

And from all accounts she held her own – in looks, dress, bearing and chit chat.  Earlier on she seems to have gone down well too in Canada, at all sorts of events.

How did she get the job?  How come she does it so well?  What does it take to succeed as a princess? 

It’s worth thinking about.  Sure, the romantics will say that she fell in love with her Prince Charming at  university.  She is who she is and that’s all there is to it.

The sceptics have a different take.  They see her mother as the archetypal social climbing schemer, from council estate to stewardess to pilot hubby to new business venture to money to posh school/posh uni/posh mates for the kids, ultimately landing the ultimate family jackpot, a prince in the family and their own coat of arms.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle – no grand scheme from the outset, but some careful career planning and training once the prince had been ensnared.

Does Kate have what it takes to be a princess? Does she have what Di had? Or Grace?  Does she need what they had? 

Does she need the glamour?  Should she compete with the Hollywood glamour?  For how long can she compete? 

Think beyond the glam princesses to one who is so good at her job that she is revered as deity in her country, crown princess Sirindhorn of Thailand.

And think again: what does it take to be a good princess? In my next post, we’ll look at the key kapabilities needed to do the job…

Think of yourself as a business. Use the tools of strategic due diligence to assess if you would back you in your current job. If so, use business strategy tools to make yourself more backable.

Or use tools of strategic mergers and acquisitions to shift to your ideal job or business – one which you are passionate about and where you’ll be backable.

Backing You, MBA! How Thinking of Yourself as a Business Can Advance or Transform Your Career innovatively uses the very tools learnt at business school on yourself.  It will guide you in achieving career success post-MBA.

The book uses case studies directly relevant to MBAs – for example, Jennifer, the former financial due diligence specialist thinking of switching to strategy consulting or private equity, and Gary, the manager seeking to return to his former company armed with a career enhancing MBA and a strategy for acquiring and applying new skills.

It is out NOW! You’ll find it at leading bookstores and online here! If you’re a business student looking to advance or transform your career, this is the book for you!

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This post is probably just an excuse to write about Gauguin, having just visited the amazing exhibition at the Tate museum in London.  But at least the visit has stimulated me into opening the blog – after some months away while writing a new book, Backing You, MBA!

The layout of the exhibition is by subject rather than chronology, making the visit particularly stimulating and illuminating.  Entering the fifth room on Gauguin’s landscape painting, of Brittany, Martinique and Tahiti, takes the breath away.  And the room is doublyexciting, since one can linger there awhile knowing that the best – his Tahitian portraits – are yet to come.  Magic.

So what is there to learn for purposes of a career-oriented blog from a stockbroker who abandoned his family in Paris in the late nineteenth century and set sail for the South Pacific, with the express aim of “learning to live like a savage”?

The answer is everything.  He backed his passion, he gave up all, family and career, for his passion.  His family may have been the loser, and so too eventually Gauguin himself, as he rotted away, impoverished, cantankerous and syphilis-ridden, to an early death. 

But the winner was the world, able still today to marvel at the most mystical, moving, enigmatic, colourful and sensual paintings yet conceived by man.

Will you back your passion in 2011?

For each job or business, think initially of just these two criteria:

• Your relevant capabilities—How you would rate against the capabilities required for the job or business?
• Your experience—How you would rate against the experience needed to do the job or run the business?

 The first criterion relates to how well you think you would do the job, or run the business, if you got into it. How relevant are your skills, your innate talents, to the skills needed to perform the job successfully? How suitable are your qualifications?

 The second criterion is important in those jobs or businesses where experience is a serious barrier to entry. There may be a whole range of jobs you know you could do well, but your lack of relevant experience would make you hard to back. Not necessarily because you couldn’t do the job. More because prospective employers, or indeed your customers, would be looking for someone more experienced than you to be offering and delivering such a service.

 Some words of warning on the experience rating:

• When screening a long list, you may think you have no experience at all of doing a particular job. Don’t be dismayed. Think about what elements of your experience to date may at least be indirectly or tangentially relevant to that job.
• Remember that you’re looking primarily for relative comparisons, not absolute levels. You’re looking for jobs where some aspects of your past experience may be more relevant than for others.
• If you’re young, say under 30 (lucky you!), the experience criterion may be less relevant than for those of us who are not so young, especially for the over-fifties. Youngsters applying for jobs are typically assessed less rigorously on experience than on capability. And on potential capability.

Again, one or two jobs on your long list will now be screened out. If you really have few of the required capabilities and little experience for the job you covet, it’s better to axe it now rather than later. But in others your rough placing may emerge reasonably okay as it passes through the screen.

In the next post on career tools, we’ll take a first cut at how backable you are in each of those long-listed jobs…

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Carol Christen, eminent career strategist and author with Dick Bolles of the best selling What Color Is Your Parachute: For Teens, has just read Backing U! LITE and offers these regal thoughts:

“I love Backing U! LITE! If I were Queen of the World, I would give every one of the unemployed, under-employed and long-term unemployed a copy of the book! Then I’d know that everyone has an equal opportunity to learn basic job search skills and how to look at themselves through employers’ eyes – a perspective all wannabe successful jobseekers need to know. I found myself wanting to create visual storyboards for the four main characters, adding new elements to their stories with each chapter. The book works for linear thinkers and visual ones too. Quite an accomplishment. While the book may be intended for more experienced job hunters, it provides much needed information for university students too – about business practices, how employers evaluate potential employees and increasing individual backability. Backing U! LITE not only points out common challenges for career changers and entrepreneurs, but shows scenarios for overcoming them. Most definitely a win-win book, the kind I like best.”

Check out Carol on www.carolchristen.com. I wish she were Queen of the World…!

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The loss of David Laws to the British coalition government is a crying shame.  At a time of great economic uncertainty and impending cuts in public services and pay, he radiated competence.  He gave us confidence that the right man was at the helm.

He had no choice but to resign. That his abuse of parliamentary expenses was caused by his desire to maintain privacy around his sexuality, rather than to gain financially, offers no excuse.  It just makes it sadder. And so frustrating to those who supported him. He is a wealthy man, so why did he not just stop claiming any rent allowance?

He possesses so many of the Key Kapabilities (see Backing U!) needed to become a top politician – see my post last year on Sarah Palin.  His mastery of not just the Treasury brief, but that on Education before that, was evident to all.  His communication skills are so adept that my 13 year old son, along with 70% of a youthful audience, had no hesitation in voting for him in a debate on education at a youth centre in South-East London in March this year.

There are some impressive ministers in this coalition government, but none more impressive than Laws.  He will be back.

Gut feel is all that’s needed at this stage. You need to rank your long list by what you feel. You already have a vague notion of market demand and competition for these jobs, because you know something about them. These are jobs to which you aspire, where you believe the hwyl lies. Let your gut provide a preliminary view. 

You need to rank each of the long-listed jobs or businesses by four criteria:

• Number of people engaged in this job or business—Are there many people working in this field, compared to the numbers engaged in other fields?
• Growth in jobs or businesses—Is this a field where there will be growing demand for people over the next few years? Or is demand more likely to stay flat, or decline?
• Competition for jobs or among businesses—How ferocious is the competition to get these jobs? To what extent does the supply of people wanting to do these jobs exceed vacancies available? If this is a business, how intense is the competition between businesses? Is it intensifying?
• Job market risk—How risky is this job or business, compared to others?

 Take care to get the rankings of job market attractiveness the right way round (!):

• The more jobs available, the more attractive the market.
• The faster the growth, the more attractive the market.
• The more competitive, the less attractive the market.
• The more risky, the less attractive the market.

 How attractive are your long-listed jobs overall? One or two on your long list may already be screened out. If market conditions are unfavorable, you’re unlikely to be backable. You’ll be pushing uphill. But others on the list should come through okay.

In the next post on career tools, we’ll take a look at the second part of the process: how well placed you would be to get in and then succeed at this job or business.  Again gut feel is all that’s needed for now…

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The British public has been mesmerised by politics over the last week in a way unprecedented in my lifetime. 

How is this relevant to a career-oriented blog on backing your passion?  Bear with me…!

The general election on May 6th was so tantalisingly inconclusive.  By 4am on the 7th, when I called it a day,there was still little confirmation which way the country was moving.  So many results were quirky or anomalous that no clear pattern was emerging.

The next morning we found out.  The Conservatives had won the most seats, but not the majority they had long expected.  Labour had lost almost a hundred seats, but had proven surprisingly resilient in the cities and regions.  The Liberal Democrat bubble had been blown away and, far from gaining 20+ seats as the polls had suggested, they had lost more seats than gained.

And then the talks started.  Four days of Conservatives stuck in a room with arch-rival Lib Dems.  Gordon Brown announcing he will go to entice Lib Dems into talks with Labour – yet with no realistic prospect of a deal, given the mathematics. 

Then Brown resigned, the Queen asked David Cameron to be PM and we  had the first coalition Government since WWII – complete with an astonishing love-in between Cameron and Deputy PM Nick Clegg in the rose garden at #10.  Two men who had a week earlier been tearing strips off each other, smiling and joking and patting each other on the back.

Extraordinary times.  But can this whirlwind romance last?  Yes and no.

In the corporate world, there are three prime pre-conditions for a strategic alliance to work – that is, to be sustainable.  The organisations need to have shared objectives, a common time horizon and the value brought to the alliance by each party has to be fairly assessed and built into the power sharing in the new entity.

In this case, the Conservative and Liberal Democrat negotiators did a thorough job spelling out their shared objectives.  Their coalition agreement is as good as could reasonably have been expected for a document cobbled together over four days between formerly bitter rivals.

The time horizon has likewise been sorted.  Both parties are firmly fixed on a full term, five year horizon, with safeguards built in to ensure no one party cuts and runs.

It is in the power sharing that the mistake has been made.  The Conservatives no doubt argued for an allocation of seats based on their respective number of MPs (57:306), so four out of 23 seats to the Lib Dems.  The Lib Dems would have countered that the electoral system is biased and the allocation should reflect votes cast (23%:36%), giving nine seats to the Lib Dems. 

For a stable alliance, they should have split the difference, to say six or seven seats.  The Lib Dems got five.  Furthermore, they landed not one of the big three offices of state – the Treasury, Home Office and Foreign Office.

Once the early, pre-agreed legislation has been passed, the Lib Dems will find themselves marginalised.  As events unfold, they will feel that they are sitting in an effectively Conservative cabinet.  Their supporters will regard them as Cameron’s poodles.  Their activists will be less keen to stuff leaflets through letterboxes and knock on doors.

They will be unable to hammer out issues on a four-four negotiating basis as over the last week, but as five to 18. A seven to 16 ratio around the cabinet table, with one of theirs representing a heavyweight office, would have represented a healthier balance of power.

The Lib Dem negotiators did well on policy matters, but less well where it really matters, the power sharing.  Here Cameron’s team was too successful.  Their success is not conducive to coalition stability.

There is a lesson here for all of us.  Be careful in your negotiations.  Be too successful and the ball can bounce back to strike you.

When you join a new organisation, you effectively form a new alliance, a new coalition.  Your little organisation, UCo, merges with the big organisation, BigCo, to form a slightly bigger one.  It is in your interests to make BiggerCo a stable organisation.

So when you apply for a job and sit down with your boss-to-be to discuss pay and conditions, take care not to win outright!  Leave him or her with the impression of a score draw.  If you manage to negotiate too good a deal, there could be lingering resentment, leading to an unstable alliance. When the layoffs come along, guess who’ll be first out of the door.