Naked Strategy

While companies aspire to engage their employees, use crisis to innovate or accelerate their speed to market many simply fail to implement the changes necessary to achieve their goals. Why?

We have two minds. Every employee has two minds and so does every corporation in their culture.

When the two minds are aligned the goals are readily achieved. Trouble is one of those minds operates invisibly. Embedded habits, beliefs and assumptions drive the car of performance.

Dr. Bruce Lipton, cellular biologist, explains.

Sometimes it seems that innovators and value-adders just can't win. They're dammed if they do and dammed if they don't. Fly too close to the sun and your wings melt. Fly too far away and you achieve nothing.

As Max and Laurence discuss in the latest Naked Strategy, what entrepreneurs and risk-takers need to know is how close is too close, how far is far enough. They need to know where the line is and – if they're very lucky – develop some sort of sense as to when they're in danger of crossing it.

Yet instead of celebrating those who try but fail to achieve everything they set out to achieve, society's army of second-guessers and armchair quarterbacks like nothing more than to criticise those who have tried to achieve something but failed.

And then there are the politicians who spout the mantra of accountability when what they're really looking for is someone to blame.

All of which makes up enough criticism and derision to make you wish you never tried to fly at all.

So let's remember that there is a huge difference between someone who tries but fails to make something better and someone who is just doing a lousy job.

In the latest Naked Strategy, Max McKeown and Laurence Haughton discuss the Sub-Prime crisis and wonder how such smart people bought so many bad loans, how many people will lose their homes, and how many CEOs will give back their multi-million dollar bonuses?

Lessons learned: something for nothing only works for those who get theirs early!

In the week that sees Al Gore with a Nobel prize, Larry & Max ask whether it’s possible to be “too smart to be president”? Or are some people just bad at the power grabbing stuff that CEOs, Presidents, and Kings are good at?

Is it sour grapes from the power incompetents who pretend they are too good to have real influence? And what should we do about the despots, autocrats, oppressors, slave drivers, and tyrants who stab you in the back, take credit for other peoples work, and drive out great ideas because they make them look bad?

Finally, if you're faced with having to deal with zeros, frauds, and bastards, how do you handle them? According to Max, you've got three (and a half) choices. . .

How far does luck play a part in business success? How often is something that looks like a brilliant strategy actually just a series of lucky breaks? Max and Laurence think that luck plays a far greater role than we normally give it credit for. But that begs the question, how can you get lucky?

In the first Naked Strategy, Max and Laurence discuss Chrysler and wonder how a company that Mercedes paid more than $36bn in 1998 ended up getting sold for just less than $7bn. The crux of the issue? It's all about rhythm…