Quickie Strategic Thinking Exercise: Bad Practices to Make You Better

Reviewing the Brainzooming archives this weekend to find creativity-oriented articles to tweet, I found a forgotten series of “Creative Quickies” articles. These articles were intentionally short, with streamlined ideas designed to be easy for you to read, digest, and use. For various reasons, I finished the Creative Quickies series and settled in to slightly longer posts as the norm on Brainzooming.

To try cutting down on blogging time temporarily, I’m resurrecting the quickies approach for multiple subject areas.

Bad Practices to Make You Better

This first quickie is a strategic thinking exercise to change your consideration of best practices and case studies. People, especially at presentations, like hearing successful best practices and case studies, ostensively so they can repeat them.

Here’s an alternative strategic thinking exercise focused on BAD practices:

• Identify some of the strategic bad practices bad companies do, either in your industry or in related markets. To come up with a list of companies to consider, think about companies who are losing market share, getting skewered by customers for poor products and crappy service, or even brands that have completely disappeared, perhaps through bankruptcy.
• From a customer and a business strategy standpoint, list the bad practices these bad companies do (or used to do) that are particularly detrimental to success.
• Using the list of strategic bad practices, invest strategic thinking time to identify steps you need to take in your organization to avoid the same bad practices.

As helpful as it might be to focus your strategic thinking time on best practices to do, this strategic thinking exercise quickie is a great reminder that recognizing what not to do is equally important. - Mike Brown

The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding the strategy options they consider as we create innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.