Want to keep people motivated and committed? Always focus on what you have done and then what needs to be done

Why is strategy so important? As you can imagine there are lots of reasons for why strategy is so important.

I am not going to cover all of them here as I will lose the will to write and you will likely lose the will to read (anybody who has read Grant's paper on his resource model for analysing the internal corporate environment will know what I mean and if not having just read this piece in brackets you will know what I mean).

The reason I was thinking of is less well documented but also one of the most crucial. Recent psychology research has shown that as human beings we renew our motivation and commitment to a goal through to acts. First recounting what we have done, this demonstrates commitment and then reviewing how much we still have to do. (http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=2008-00466-001)

The reason strategy is important in this is that it defines what you needs done and helps you frame current and past activates in how they help towards achieving that strategy.

So if you are running a marathon you are better thinking about the training you have done and how far you have gone and then immediately focusing on how much you still have to do to finish (probably mentally including the word “only” in front of that figure is a good thing), rather than just how far you have already come.

We had some great news yesterday. Strategic North has been shortlisted for the finals of The Manchester Evening News Business of the Year 2011 awards in the "Best Young Business" category. Here is the link to the MEN website

http://bit.ly/pM7BmL

Or you can check it out on our Facebook page

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Strategic-North-Ltd/320561227039

A huge thank you to all our clients because without you we would not be in the running for this award

Are you busy or are you effective?

We all know the culture, the one where you need to be seen to be there at 8am (or earlier) and make sure that you are not seen to leave until 7pm. The culture where you check your Blackberry late at night to get the last reply in and there is a mental leader board of who replies the latest. This is the same culture where people compare how many emails they get in a day.

I am sure you are busy, really busy.  We are all really busy, right?

But here is my question.

How effective are you? You have a strategy of where you are taking the business, your team, your brand (or at least I hope you do, if not you just got yourself a great big “step 1”) so after a full 12 months when you look back how far along are you? Does it represent the 40-70 hour weeks that you have invested? Can you clearly see the return on all that time?

I am willing to bet that you are not answering with an unequivocal “Yes, I can see it and we are storming ahead”.

Let’s start with some scientific facts. It takes someone 25 minutes to focus on a task to the point that they are being truly effective. If you are interrupted and distracted that resets the clock and it takes you 25 minutes to get back to the point you were at mentally before the distraction. I know, I know, you are the exception that proves the rule. If the scientists had examined you they would have found that you were different they just didn’t find someone like you in all the people they did test and I am happy for you to maintain that delusion.

So here are some simple steps to start doing more with the time you have got. Remember time is the most precious commodity you have and no matter what you do it is depreciating everyday.

Here are some rules:

How well do you know the whole elephant? by Steve Padgett

At the end of a workshop we’d been running last week a senior manager from the R&D side of a large pharmaceutical business complemented Mike and I by saying “it was great having facilitators whose understanding of the [disease area] really shone through”. Given that 2 weeks before the workshop, there would have been space left on a postage stamp if I’d captured all my knowledge on that particular therapy area, it got me thinking in order to build great strategies how much specialist knowledge do you really need?

Working almost exclusively in the life sciences space, mostly on behalf of commercially driven biopharma companies, I’m very aware of how large and complex the healthcare beast is.  The process of bringing innovative new drugs to market and making them commercially successful is often a very long and challenging one that involves many hundreds of people with a wide variety of very different specialist skills. Consequently it isn’t any great surprise that it’s fairly common for functional silos to emerge; clinical vs commercial, local vs global, discovery scientist vs clinical programme director, payer needs vs patient and physician needs the list goes on. Far too often the divide between these different “bits of the elephant” gets in the way of creating a joined up whole that has the clarity and single mindedness to inspire and drive brands, teams and organisations towards success.