New Year, New Vision
The first few days of January offer an excellent opportunity to take time to think through your vision for the year. Your vision can be for your company or organization, your team, your career, or even your life overall. What would you like to be able to say on 31 December as you look back over the year? Before you get too caught up in the day-to-day, before your calendar fills up with back-to-back meetings, block out an uninterrupted two hours that you can dedicate to this essential work.
Strategic Planning for Company You
Can one person go on an executive retreat? Absolutely! Setting aside dedicated time to think through your vision and strategy makes sense no matter what your role may be. Taking an executive retreat for yourself can be an excellent year-end activity as you start to consider what will define success in the year ahead. Your strategy sets the contours for action, for change, and for why and how you respond to what happens. Just as with companies and other organizations, Company You needs a reliable mechanism for creating that strategy. The executive retreat approach accomplishes just that. Follow this six-step process to set aside time and ask yourself the questions you should be asking.
Patient Capital and Content Marketing
Adopting a “patient capital” mindset in marketing means slowly building up an audience by delivering the highest value thinking in the highest quality manner possible. People may not buy today. It means planning at longer timescales — quarters and years rather than days and weeks. You deliberately and intentionally build your reputation by developing your ongoing credibility. In the same way that a patient capitalist defers expectations of return, you defer your expectations of immediate buying decisions by focusing on the long haul.
The Thousand People Who Matter
In most areas of B2B fintech or specialized institutional banking services, there are rarely more than a thousand key decision makers and influencers who can make a difference to your business. Potential audience size ties directly to content strategy. B2B financial innovators should focus on getting the highest-quality bespoke content directly into the hands of people who make buying decisions — no more and no less.
Thought Leaders and Gatekeepers
Operational effectiveness in creating and publishing thought leadership is essential in competitive, ideas-driven industries. But when organizations do not clearly map out who can make which decisions and under what circumstances, every gatekeeper ends up with veto rights. That messiness is exacerbated by the natural human inclination to have opinions and preferences and the difficulty of preventing those from spilling into bias.
What Free Means to Me
Earlier this month, I started offering a free hour of consulting to anyone in the world of fintech or financial services. It’s a free offer where I sit with people and help them work through complex communications challenges. This is why I’m doing it and what free means to me.
A Fable About Two Cats
Spotted Cat strategy or White Cat strategy? As marketers, we have a choice. Demanding and noisy or calm and quiet? The idea is simple. Take a patient, deliberate approach to marketing efforts, recognizing that attention earned may be of better quality than attention demanded. Especially in the worlds of financial innovation and fintech for the B2B market, patience is rewarded by an engaged and eager audience.
Clarity, Coherence, and Compassion in a Coronavirus World
Technology innovators and startups in the B2B space can make or break their strategy using thought leadership, but the coronavirus crisis is creating deep challenges for getting thought leadership out there. The key to all of it: adopt a strategy focused on clarity, coherence, and compassion. These are needed now more than ever.
Train Your Chihuahuas
Chihuahuas are notorious ankle-biters. Some owners and trainers attribute it to the small size of the breed. Others cite (probably) apocryphal stories that chihuahuas were bred to harass opponents in battle, keeping them distracted with a frustrating pack of nipping animals. Those of us more focused on the twenty-first-century workplace have our own chihuahuas to […]
The Eight Types Of Strategy Execution
After many years on the front lines of efforts to translate good ideas into good outcomes, I’ve observed a few common themes that define the contours of strategy execution. In general, strategy execution is defined by where a team, and above all, its leadership, operate, along three axes. Finding or recovering executional momentum means succeeding […]