My heroes

The PYRAMID PRINCIPLE

The first thing I was taught in my first 14 days as a management consultant was something called “The Pyramid Principle” by a nice American woman with very large glasses. This was in 2001.

The Pyramid Principle was developed in the 1960s by Barbara Minto, at the time a communications consultant at McKinsey. Next year Barbara will be 88 years old.

When working with my clients on business issues, I keep coming back to the core principles of the pyramid structure, as it helps me to help my clients creating well-structured communication.

Trillion dollar coach

Former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt’s book, “Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell” reveals the best bits of wisdom from the legendary executive advisor.

And then you might rightfully say, Bill who? Most outsiders will not have heard about Campbell who originally started his career as a college football coach.

Bill Campbell was dubbed the “trillion dollar coach” for the collective value of the companies with which he worked. He acted as an unpaid mentor at Google but also coached executives at eBay, Facebook, Apple and Twitter.

Measure what matters

when Andy Groove start working at Intel, one of his biggest achievement was to implement a simple, yet powerful method of transforming the company strategy into clear Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).

OKRs is a collaborative goal-setting methodology used by teams and individuals to set challenging, ambitious goals with measurable results. OKRs are how you track progress, create alignment, and encourage engagement around measurable goals.

Huge fan of this when going from planning to execution of the strategy.

Playing to win

Typically, companies fall into the trap of not making deliberate choices as they evolve and consequently ending up trying to be everything for everybody – a strategy that seldom works in real life.

In his classic work on strategy – and one of my all-time favorite books on the topic - “Playing to Win” Roger Martin explains how to make clear choices.

Strategy can best be expressed as an integrated set of choices, something he calls the Strategic Choice Cascade. Focusing on Where to Play - and How to Win.