Strategic & Tactical Planning

Forecasting vs. Goal Setting: There's a Hands-down Winner in the Race for Results

Forecasting looks to a "logical future," where the future is a straight extension of the line from past to present, perhaps with some deviations for expected external changes. Goal setting starts with what you want in the future.

Setting Expectations Year Over Year

The purpose of this article is not to highlight the down turn in the economy. Rather, it is to suggest that by understanding the environment and your customers' changing needs and then considering the following questions, you will put yourself in a position to leverage the upturn in the economy, much more quickly.

Measuring Up

"It is usually not what we don’t know that kills us. It is what we think we know that we don’t that kills us."

Capitalizing on the Change Curve

Imagine there was a relatively simple tool that could help you understand and predict how members of your team and organization would likely perform over a period of time. You may already know it as the universal change curve or the forming, storming, norming, and performing curve, a variation on the work of B.W. Tuckman that originally appeared in 1965.

Understanding the Strategic Planning Process

Baseball legend Yogi Berra once said, "If you don’t know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else." What a simple statement, yet really quite profound.

Build and Strengthen Your Agency-Carrier Relationships

What is reasonable for agencies and companies to expect from each other? What advice or requests do insurance industry executives and former industry executives have for the agency owners today?

Part 1 on An Entrepreneurship to a Professionally Managed Firm

Starting with the most basic premise, entrepreneurs can face either the initial challenges surrounding creating a new venture from scratch, or building up a recent acquisition.

Part 2 on An Entrepreneurship to a Professionally Managed Firm

In this issue we will identify and help you better understand the six key organizational development tasks.

Part 3 on An Entrepreneurship to a Professionally Managed Firm

In this issue, we will identify and help you better understand the four major stages that an agency/organization must pass through on its way to greatness as well as the typical characteristics of those stages.

Part 4 on An Entrepreneurship to a Professionally Managed Firm

In this installment, we discuss the tactical transitions that must be successfully executed.

We Don't Read Minds

I’ll address one shortcoming in this article: not publicizing a list of corporate goals and objectives in priority order. Without a public list like this, people at every level of the organization are forced to guess at the most important criteria for making decisions.

Are You Maximizing Your Present?

In many cases, the often-used phase, "It is not what we know that hurts us; but, rather, it is what we think we know that we do not, that gets in our way," still is appropriate.

Be Bold - Few Else Will

With many businesses operating lean, the result is staff members who are struggling to keep up, and senior managers who are likely being told to and/or are worrying about getting "more" with fewer employees.

Organizational Assessment - Why You Get The Results You Do

I've often used the term "operationalizing your strategy" for the process of getting every part and every person in your organization understanding and consistently doing whatever needs to be done to implement your strategy and achieve your business goals. In other words all parts of your organization are aligned, people, structure, processes, and working together, horizontally and vertically, to accomplish what needs to be accomplished.

Planning For Next Year – It Starts With Tomorrow!

Many folks tend to put off things like planning because they're reacting to customer needs; filing year-end reports and juggling holidays.