10 Corporate Myths

10. Everybody is replaceable

You wouldn’t be the same if you lost an arm, or a finger, why would a company stay the same when someone leaves?

9. Under-promise, over-deliver

Just deliver what you promised. Keep your word.

8. Take examples in the extremes. Apple, GE, Welsh, Jobs…

Steve Jobs is the best at being Steve Jobs. Period.

7. Innovate, innovate, innovate

Focus your innovation – not anybody can handle thinking outside the box (with freedom comes responsibility). The iPod was created by a secret team of 6 people and not by all 20000 Apple employees.

6. Vision, vision, vision

Having a vision is not enough. You should think peripheral vision…

5. Design is art

The tyranny of design must end :)… Designers (you know who you are)! Maybe you didn’t get the memo: art died some thirty years ago... Let’s recognize this loss and work together to reinvent it.

4. Design is creativity

The democratization (sic) of design reduces the imagination level and constantly drowns the best thinking.

In a company, creative thinking should mainly live in the realm of strategy and not in that of tactics (execution).

3. Leaders can be made

You can try. But who guarantees that you are a leader? Your business card?

2. Leaders, leaders, leaders

Most leaders are just bureaucrats.

“Executive ability is deciding quickly and getting someone else to do the work.” -- John G. Pollard

“In classical times when Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, ‘How well he spoke,’ but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, they said, ‘LET US MARCH.’” - Adlai Stevenson (via Tom Peters)

1. There is no I in team.
There is no I in leader neither... nor in 'what an old and lousy way to handle your company's team management strategy'

This is war not an AA meeting.

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Octavian Mihai

About strategy, leadership, innovation and creativity

Aight, this is a post of mine on my strategy group on facebook.
You have the right to disagree... or not...
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Let 'what' be a new or improved idea.
Let 'how' be a new or improved production method.

creativity = what + how
innovation = what * how (i.e. the product of...)

Good strategy lives in the realm of creativity.
Tactics are a series of specific techniques meant to implement the strategy (get the stupid things done).

We call half-ass strategy one that even if implemented correctly does not produce the expected result.

We call half-ass management one that implements incorrectly the predefined strategy.

Strategy needs not to be new or improved in order to succeed.

Nonetheless, a strategist holds the key to produce crazy productive and amazing results.

Now, may I ask, how many times a strategist implements the same old and safe patterns and then complains that the results are mediocre and his life is boring?

A good strategist is somewhat a risk taker, which is a personality trait...

So the moral of the story: good strategists and leaders are not made, they are born.