General Business Topics

Articles about business, management, and leadership

Know Your Environment! (IFE/EFE)

The cornerstone of any decision making process is to know the environment in which you work. However, “knowing” your environment simply is not enough – in terms of strategic management, anyways. What we need is a way to list these factors, rate them relative to...

A Real SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis is a great tool to understand your operating environment. However, misusing this tool can – at best – prove to be useless. This post is a quick introduction to the SWOT, how to use it, and how to get the most out of it! If you’re reading this post,...

Understanding Mission and Vision

The first step to any strategic management (or planning) process is defining the Mission and Vision of your organization. So…what does that mean? Very simple: A mission is what you do, your purpose, the reason you exist. A Vision describes what you want to become, how...

Getting Started in Strategic Management

I think I’ve jumped-the-gun a bit with my posts. I realized that I began discussing advanced applications and tools in the Strategic Management process but never actually defined what strategic management is! Strategic Planning is PART OF Strategic Management Every...

Making Rational Decisions (QSPM)

How do we make decisions? Depending on the size of the company or program, that answer tends to be very involved. Turning the question on me, I would reply with a number of different metrics: Cost, Political issues, technical worthiness, and so on… The problem is that...