Dr. Mark L. Vincent's Blog

For some time now we’ve been making a distinction between Process and Product when it comes to consulting:

• Product diagnoses and tells. Process listens and helps.

By Ron Mahurin, Senior Consultant

This post originally appeared here.

(Yet Strategy – and Process – Still Matter)

There is some debate as to whether the late Peter Drucker actually ever said: “culture will eat strategy for breakfast, every time.” The phrase does not appear in any of the 35+ books he wrote. In any case, the phrase has become an oft-cited expression in the organizational change literature.

With uncertainty and disruption being the new norm in business while planning horizons are getting shorter, business is starting to look like the typical situation on any given Sunday in the NFL. Winning football teams tend to be those most successful at managing the constant barrage of disruptors and the unforeseen. In this article, I’m suggesting that football understands how to succeed in spite of disruption in a way that makes just as dramatic a difference when applied in a business or nonprofit.

How does one lead without micromanaging, most especially when there is such high risk of liability/failure/ethical compromise?  What distinction can be drawn, really, between that of Management and Leadership, when it comes to function?

Recent work with a client led to developing these thoughts on the act of scapegoating. 

Design Group International is committed to learning and helping rather than selling and telling. Our starting point is asking questions of the client rather than urging a product or service upon them.

The generation that built our super highways, university campuses, and hospital complexes also populated and built many church houses, along with large educational wings, church camps, private school and numerous global mission and relief agencies.

We would like to invite all interested persons to the 2018 Stewardship Summit

23-25 January 2018 -- near Memphis, TN. 

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A recent privilege to work with an organization trying to move their strategic efforts forward resulted in the following note when we sent them the tightly distilled, one-page version of their plan (excerpted and adapted to the purposes of this blog post):