"Things work out best for those who make the best of the way the things work out."

Top 10 Essential Requirements To Be A Great Strategic Thinker

Essential Element #4: You must have an extremely high level of awareness of what is happening around you and be open to absorbing all that you can. In any business, there are clues, often subtle, both internal and external to help guide future direction and to identify opportunities.

Great strategic thinkers take all of this in and then they set aside time to think about all the experience and information to guide them in the planning and working on the issues, challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

The Power of Your Cross-Functional Excellence

If you build broad cross-functional expertise, no idea will be wasted! Your mind can accept only those ideas that have a frame of reference with your existing knowledge. It rejects everything else. If your knowledge is functionally focused, you'll be open to new ideas related to your functional expertise only and will miss all other learning and innovation opportunities. If you develop a broad cross-functional expertise, no new idea will be wasted. It will immediately connect with the existing knowledge and will inspire you, energize you, and encourage your entrepreneurial creativity. The broader your net is, the more fish you catch... More

Seek the Optimum Balance of Opportunities

The task of a business architect and a process manager is to create systems, within a sensibly structured business, that inspires intrapreneurs, empowers employees, and enables people to achieve higher productivity and greater competitive advantage.

In their book, Control Your Destiny or Someone Else Will, an analysis of Jack Welch's GE and a business classic hailed as the unofficial GE Leadership handbook, Noel M. Tichi and Stratford Sherman cite the cause of a plant that makes wire, another that wraps the wire into coils, and a third that assembles the coils into lamps. If these are organized as three separate businesses, each optimizing its own performance, the totality may well not be optimized. Organized as a single unit, however those three plants can seek the optimum balance of opportunities: for instance, making a costlier wire may help to produce a cheaper lamp.

The Challenge for Small Enterprises

As young venture is organized around a new product or service meetings of the senior managers focus on problem solving and cash flow and have little or no time for identifying and exploiting opportunities. To overcome this issue dedicate one management meeting a month to looking for opportunities, new ideas, market trends, unexpected successes and competitive actions. Communicate the long-term benefits of investing time in these activities to your team members to ensure their willing and active participation.

Happiness – It's All in Our Own Hands

When you encounter a problem, try to look for the good points. Everything has at least one good point. Even sickness has its positive side. You get some extra rest or have more time to spend with your family or you use the period of recuperation as an opportunity to turn to dharma

References:

1. "The Practice of Management", by Peter Drucker

2. " Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices", by Peter Drucker

3. "The Frontiers of Management", by Peter Drucker

4. "Managing in Time of Great Change", by Peter Drucker

5. "Every Business is a Growth Business", Ram Charan and Noel. M. Tichy

6. "Lateral Thinking", Edward de Bono

7. Adapted from Sid Parnes

8. "Lateral Thinking Skills", Paul Sloane

9. Tichi, Noel and Sherman Stratford, "Control Your Destiny or Someone Else Will"