Business | Teik Oh

5 Steps to make your company Vision tangible

Aug 12 2014

How many of us have word-smithed a company Vision Statement, perhaps even after a weekend workshop locked up with our senior managers, or we may even have paid big money to have a consultant workshop it with us and create that perfect Vision Statement?

Great, I can see all those hands held up. Now, how many of us use that Vision Statement day by day to assist our companies move in the direction the Vision Statement envisions? Not too many hands up now!

How many of us can honestly say our teams understand the tangible behavioral aspects of our Vision Statements to the extent they use it on a day by day basis to assess their own performance in team-working, customer relationships, objective-achievement, procedural efficiency? Read More

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A Branding Opportunity – Hit or Miss?

Jul 30 2014

Here’s something that just happened to me, which I think is a branding opportunity gone amiss, and only somewhat recovered. I am doing home renovations and have to have 2 sensors of the home alarm disconnected, and booked a technician for today (the last day before work starts). I’m waiting and no technician arrives, so I phone the alarm company. I explain the situation.

Alarm: I rang and left a message saying the tech couldn’t come today….

Me: Where did you call?

Alarm: Your home phone.

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Let’s all stick to our own knitting!

Jul 28 2014

I’m about to insult lawyers.

The rest of you – you needn’t cheer quite so raucously. I only choose to use lawyers as an example of a highly trained group of professionals, skilled and experienced in what they do and good at their multi-faceted jobs, but because of that, think that they can self-handle other aspects of their business where different specialist skills and experience are required.

I could have chosen accountants, or doctors, or engineers (there, some of you are not so comfortable now are you?).

One of my clients is a firm of commercial lawyers specialising in insolvency. In their business they run the constant risk that their clients cannot pay. To give them their due they always perform at their best and never stint on service, despite this possibility, but now and then, they get caught.

In one such instance they worked for an owner of advertising billboards scattered around the suburbs. Having satisfactorily won the case for their client they found that the client is cash strapped and unable to pay them, asking for a payment plan over a year or so. Clearly not a good situation. The senior partner, true to the entrepreneurial spirit of the firm then negotiated a contra arrangement where they get to use two billboards and paste up advertising for the law firm over a year. In this way a $20,000 doubtful debt is used to gain $40,000 worth of billboard advertising – quite an advantage? Read More

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Leadership Vs Management

Jul 24 2014

harvard pic Harvard Business School change management guru John Kotter outlines the fundamental differences between Leadership and Management as follows:-

– Establishing direction vs Planning & Budgeting
– Aligning people vs Organising and staffing…
– Motivating & inspiring vs Controlling & Problem-solving.

In Kotter’s view, while management produces an order of predictability, order, and the capacity to attain desired short term targets, the qualities of Leadership prodeuces change, often to a dramatic degree and often potentially useful change to create a future vision.

In my consulting, I use my own process called vision-driven planning, first creating a vision for the group (in great detail, to the degree that it is internally viable and credible) which is then quantified through a Balanced Scorecard approach (“If we were to achieve our vision, how must we look and behave in the area of…”). The quantification of the vision is converted into Performance Measures, and then these are redirected as Strategies. Read More

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Creating Resilient Organisations

Sep 22 2011

The following appears in “Implementing an Effective Change Management Strategy” by Neryl East, MA, PhD, published by the Ark Group in association with Inside Knowledge.

While it might be admirable for organisations to strive to be resilient, change and strategic management specialist Teik Oh says resilience is not the end of the journey. Resilience is an element that needs to be embedded in the culture of the business.

teik oh small He believes that can only be achieved if the organisation and its leadership demonstrate some fundamental behaviour that point to resilience.

Resilience is not only important in the hard times or during change. It must also be demonstrated when business is going well. That can be a challenge for many leaders, who Oh says are generally suited to only one style of an economy.

Many perform well when the economy is also doing well. Other leaders rise to the challenge when the economy does badly; Oh points out that it is relatively easy to think of great leaders who have turned companies around. However, they may not have been so successful when the business was back on track. Read More

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Category - Business

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5 Steps to make your company Vision tangible

A Branding Opportunity – Hit or Miss?

Let’s all stick to our own knitting!

Leadership Vs Management

Creating Resilient Organisations