Are you a CEO or Senior Partner who wants to stay in touch with current business thinking? A junior professional who wants to fast-track your career? A success-driven manager who wants to be more effective in your professional life and business practice?
Leading business author, global consultant and former Harvard Business School professor David Maister presents career-spanning insights on managing, strategy, client relations and careers in this series of advanced seminars on professional business principles.
Strategy in Professional Businesses
For many firms and companies, strategy is a process of selecting market segments to compete in, clients to target and service to offer. Unfortunately, this analysis only gets you to the starting gate, since most sensible competitors will also identify the most attractive markets and services. "Doing strategy" in a professional business means creating an organization that can outperform competitors on sometimes obvious things, but one that wins through more diligent execution. In this seminar series, we will explore the policies and practices necessary to create the dynamic, energized organization that can act and respond strategically.
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14. The Courage to Manage | (17:14) |
How does a manager get his or her operation to begin to behave strategically? What systems are needed and what personal behavior by the manager?
NOTES FOR THE EPISODE:
Timeline: 00:29 — As I Reported earlier in this seminar series, the single biggest barrier to implementing strategy is managerial courage. What makes super-successful companies (and managers) so impressive is not what they are doing, but the...
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13. Ready, Set, Go: Fast-track Strategy | (14:43) |
How can companies get started on operating strategically with a minimum of bureaucracy and planning? How to focus on the four key improvement areas of all sensible strategic plans.
NOTES FOR THE EPISODE:
Timeline: 00:29 — Here’s how it’s done. You divide the company into small teams or business groupings (by location, by discipline, by industry). Go for the smallest sub-groupings you’ve got, keeping the teams as small as po...
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12. Competing through Organizational Functioning | (20:26) |
Modern organizations often have complex structures with departments, industry teams, major account teams and geographic locations. How does a company ensure that these overlapping structures function smoothly together?
NOTES FOR THE EPISODE:
Timeline: 00:39 — When one reviews the topics we have covered in this podcast series – values, collaboration, being a one firm firm, achieiving success not be having better ideas than the next person but by operating across the firm ...
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11. More Things in More Places | (22:36) |
What is the key ingredient in the successful implementation of any multidisciplinary and/or geographic expansion strategy? Expansion is not what you do in order to achieve excellence - it's what you are allowed to do after you have achieved it.
NOTES FOR THE EPISODE:
Timeline: 00:30 — Most professional businesses from banks to ad agencies to accounting firms have the hope that they can grow multidisciplinary relationships with key accounts. However, most attempts to create one-stop shopping strategies ha...
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10. Why Merge? | (23:09) |
What are the separate goals that professional businesses seek in engaging in mergers? We identify a number of types of mergers and examine the pro's and con's of each of them.
NOTES FOR THE EPISODE:
Timeline: 01:40 — What might be the benefits to client (or customer)s of a professional company merger? Consider five kinds of mergers that I refer to as the MENU, BULK, DOTS, ALCHEMY and CRISIS mergers. 01:56 — The Menu Merger Th...
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9. Adapting to the Future - Whatever It Is... | (17:42) |
How do you ensure that your firm is good at identifying emerging needs, examining them and devising responses? A set of managerial processes is described to ensure that an professional business can evolve along with its marketplace.
NOTES FOR THE EPISODE:
Timeline: 00:48 — The strategic challenge for professional businesses is not to forecast the future, but to ensure that the company is effective at adapting or responding to (already observable) market changes, whatever they may be. Consi...
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8. Justifying the Company | (16:49) |
In an organization where every decentralized operating unit is responsible for its own strategic plan, what is the role of the company itself? This seminar explores how to ensure that the company or firm acts as more than just a holding company.
NOTES FOR THE EPISODE:
Timeline: 00:11 — In this weeks’ seminar, entitled Justifying the Company, I’ll explore how companies can make sure that they are more than the sum of their parts, more than just a federation of people or business units sharing ...
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7. Play Nice - Creating the Collaborative Firm | (20:31) |
How do you get people in multiple disciplines, industries and offices to work for the good of the firm? A wide variety of approaches, ordered from high to low effectiveness are discussed.
NOTES FOR THE EPISODE:
Timeline: 00:30 — As noted in my previous seminar on the ONE-FIRM FIRM, professional businesses can achieve distinctive competitive advantage by promoting firmwide collaboration. However, these companies. divided into different department...
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6. The One Firm Firm | (20:28) |
What do Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Accenture, Latham and Watkins and Hewitt Associates have in common? A commitment to a model of professional business management which stresses teamwork, collaboration and and institutional loyalty.
NOTES FOR THE EPISODE:
Timeline: 00:12 — Hello, I’m David Maister. In this weeks’ seminar, entitled, THE ONE-FIRM FIRM I will discuss the common approach to firm management and strategy that is used by some of the world’s most successful profes...
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5. Values in Action | (16:51) |
Why don't most firms actually live up to the standards and values espoused in their mission statements? Because it's one thing to say you believe in something; it's another to be willing to be held accountable.
NOTES FOR THE EPISODE:
Timeline: 00:31 — Most companies have mission and vision statements, all of which stress client (or customer) service, teamwork and goals of “being the best place to work.” They are truly inspirational and, if implemented, would...
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4. Strategy Means Saying No | (17:45) |
Why do most firms in an industry end up looking very similar, offering the same services to the same clients, stressing the same client benefits? Because they don't have the courage to accomplish true differentiation by saying no to off-strategy work.
NOTES FOR THE EPISODE:
Timeline: 00:29 — I was helping a prominent global company explore the strategy of achieving high levels of client (or customer) service. We were discussing ways of investing resources and redesigning processes to accomplish this goal. The ...
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3. Practice What You Preach | (15:09) |
What do the Most Successful Businesses in a 139-business, 15-country database do to achieve doubled margins and doubled growth rates? Appoint managers who know how to excite, enthuse and energize their people.
NOTES FOR THE EPISODE:
Timeline: 00:54 — In this episode, I will present some evidence that there is only one competitive advantage in business. It is one sparkling diamond with a number of facets — different ways of describing the same thing. The facets o...
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2. Strategy and the Fat Smoker | (19:50) |
Why is Strategy Like Staying Fit? Because we know what to do, why to do it and how to do it, but still not everybody does the right things. Why strategy is more about developing resolve than is about analytical plans.
NOTES FOR THE EPISODE:
Episode description: Why is Strategy Like Staying Fit? Because we know what to do, why to do it and how to do it, but still not everybody does the right things. Why strategy is more about developing resolve than is about analytical plans. Timeline...
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1. How to Create A Strategy | (14:55) |
What is a Strategy and How Do You Develop One? This episode explains the sources of competitive advantage, and describes a process to be followed to identify a competitive strategy.
NOTES FOR THE EPISODE:
In this first seminar in David Maister’s new series, Strategy in Professional Businesses, we will discuss what exactly strategy is in a professional business as well as who should be doing the creative strategic thinking and action-planning. T...
