Everyperson's strategy

 When developing a strategy, there are 2 opposing concepts that must be balanced - Risk and Reward. There are two known philosophies to take into account when determining the methodologies: “The best offense is a good defense”.  “The best defense is a good offense” Understanding these 2 philosophies and when each is appropriate, is a key factor in determining a plan of action. Generally speaking, risk and reward are proportionate - the greater risk a person is willing to take (potential loss), the higher the potential for reward. For example, there are different bets you can make at a roulette wheel. If you have $1000 to gamble and pick a specific number to bet it on, you have the opportunity to win $35,000, whereas if you pick red/black you only have the opportunity of winning $1,000. In both cases, the odds are that you are going to lose, but the risk is much greater when choosing a specific number. When choosing an objective, you have to understand what you want to accompli...

 Aspiring managers often go to business school to learn valuable leadership methodologies. They then go into industry to apply those methods with varying levels of success. The theories that are learned in school generally have to be adapted to specific situations, and shouldn’t be assumed to be a “one size fits all”. Methods that worked wonderfully in one situation may completely fail in another. Before asking a new team to do something, a leader must learn the landscape. They should generally focus on evolution as opposed to revolution. A small change can often make a huge difference, whereas a huge change can throw the entire group into chaos. As a software engineer, I often reviewed code and could not understand why something was coded in a specific manner, that looked like a foolish way to do it. It was only after changing it to what looked normal, did I find out that the standard method didn’t work for whatever reason, and in order to implement the feature, a weird workaround...

In our last article, we discussed using other people’s resources to overcome the bottleneck that budgets and resources present.  Today we’re going to talk about partnering with the enemy. Enemy is a strong word for a team that you find yourself at odds with, though it may often feel that you are at war with them. There is an obvious conflict with competitors, as you fight for every customer. This type of conflict is excellent for the market; it should help create a competitive environment driving innovation and cheaper prices. You have to be very careful when approaching an external competitor with a proposal to work together in certain areas because there are numerous laws protecting consumers for collusion and price fixing. That doesn’t mean that competitors can’t partner together for specific initiatives. The term for merging competition with collaboration is coopetition. Instead of going head to head with competitors on everything, often it’s worthwhile for both sides to define...

Resources are often seen to be one of the largest bottlenecks in getting things done. Whether it be budget constraints, infrastructure, number of people on your team or not enough time during the day. Have you ever thought of what you could accomplish if you had unlimited resources? In his book, “The 4 Hour Workweek”, Timothy Ferriss describes methods of streamlining your work and using virtual assistants to handle the daily grind. That method may work great for specific kinds of work, but for most of us it is not very practical. However, there is a lot we can learn from the concepts he wrote about. The resource limitations mentioned above can be mitigated by using other people’s resources. We’re not talking about tapping into their water or electricity and stealing, but rather making strategic agreements that will bring about a win/win for both sides. The first thing you want to look for is areas of either duplication or parallelism in other groups. Are they doing something similar to...