No one knows your business better than you. Our specialty is helping you advance your enterprise by getting more value from your information and organizational assets. Here are five typical ways we aid clients.
Strategizing
First and foremost, we provide veteran executive expertise on business strategy, marketing, information systems, and organizational learning.
Because strategy is closely intertwined with your history and business philosophy, we work hard to thoroughly understand this context. Clients value our strategic thinking as one of our greatest strengths, along with the ability to turn strategy into action.
Years of direct, hands-on entrepreneurial experience are blended with diligent study of top strategic researchers and thinkers.
We have worked with entrepreneurs, private businesses, non-profits, and foundations—and we actively borrow and adapt best practices from each.
Examples of this work:
- business & marketing plans
- new products/services
- financial pro formas
- information strategies
- technology initiatives
- process improvement
- facility master plans
Uncovering
We research, interview, survey, and analyze. We are miners digging for information.
On almost every project, we find organizations have lots of data—a high percentage of which is unorganized and inaccessible to decision makers. We find it and study it; we get the gold.
We hold with Peter Drucker’s observation that the most important information is usually outside the organization: information about the customers, competitors, and market dynamics. There are also extraordinary volumes of business wisdom waiting to be utilized. We find the pearls.
Our skills in this area include financial analysis and spreadsheet modeling, interviewing and surveying, excellent Web research, and familiarity in working with IT and data managers.
Examples of this work:
- financial models
- market research
- program assessments
- process mapping
- comparative matrices
- competitive intelligence
Guiding We work closely with your in-house team and typically help design and guide the process. Clients ask us to fill many different roles: project leader, conductor, coach, mentor, facilitator, or simply specialist. In all cases, we are committed to making collaboration successful.
We take time to learn each person’s perspective, aspirations, and fears. A team only moves as fast as its slowest member, so we do a lot of enrolling and mentoring.
In addition, we search out internal knowledge gaps within organizations and build tools to bridge those gaps.
Clients value the knowledge we bring from other organizations and from authors and experts who have influenced us. Cross-pollinating can energize an organization and we are pleased when we are the agent.
Examples of this work:
- process design
- genesis teams
- meeting productivity
- effective collaboration
Transforming An important differentiator in our approach is our ability to make business principles and information more visual, understandable, actionable, and profitable. To do so, we incorporate emerging visual and learning methodologies including data visualization, visual language, pattern language, concept mapping, information architecture, job-embedded learning, just-in-time learning, and e-learning.
We identify the information needed for planning, marketing, and managing a venture
—then design information tools that better support those activities.
We work with IT and other managers to augment and enhance existing information systems, and to improve learning and collaboration, enable more effective decision making and strategy formulation, and build organizational alignment.
Examples of this work:
- process & strategy maps
- business diagrams
- data visualization
- visual metaphors
- report design
- publications
Managing
Clients frequently engage us for assignments of strategic importance. We work with their top executives and managers—CEOs, vice presidents, product managers, department heads, and program directors.
In many cases, clients outsource managerial responsibilities to us that would normally be assigned in-house. We have an excellent track record in these roles.
Project management is in our roots and in our blood; clients find us proactive and disciplined.
When an organization decides to “go outside,” it takes a leap of faith that we feel bound to uphold by committing ourselves fully to the client’s success.
Examples of this work:
- planning interdisciplinary initiatives
- managing large and small special projects
- creating project management systems
