Due Diligence
Your due diligence is probably wrongGlobal Advisors: a consulting leader in defining quantified strategy, decreasing uncertainty, improving decisions, achieving measureable results.
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Decreased uncertainty, improved decisions
Global Advisors is a leader in defining quantified strategies, decreasing uncertainty, improving decisions and achieving measureable results.
We specialise in providing highly-analytical data-driven recommendations in the face of significant uncertainty.
We utilise advanced predictive analytics to build robust strategies and enable our clients to make calculated decisions.
We support implementation of adaptive capability and capacity.
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Thoughts
Global Advisors’ Thoughts: Empathy and understanding – why they are the qualities that help us achieve our own happiness and success
By Marc Wilson
Our team had just finished a book review presentation on Dale Carnegie’s “Making Friends and Influencing People”. Jane (*name changed) looked troubled: “Isn’t this stuff about manipulating people?”
Therein lies a paradox in showing empathy: without empathy for others, you face less influence, friendship, love and success. But if those are your goal rather than the sincere care for others, then your empathy is not really empathy at all.
Many people might react to empathy as “soft.” But empathy is a mark of incredible strength. It dares us to care. It requires us to put ourselves to one side. It requires us to be vulnerable – otherwise all we are doing is showing sympathy. Empathy requires self-awareness and skill.
Sympathy is easy. Sympathy does not go as far as empathy – it keeps us distant from the situation someone else is experiencing. It places us in danger of being condescending. Empathy requires us to put our self into their situation as them – not us.
Empathy gets the best out of those around us – and opens us up to be a better version of ourselves.
I find it incredibly difficult to manage a balance. A balance of being sufficiently confident and willing to share my own experience in an unbiased and helpful way – while removing enough of myself to allow someone else to find their own path and live their own experience. To be an empathetic leader, I believe I need to care about my team being at their best at work and in life.
Skills such as active listening are important to remove ourselves from the coaching we give others. But I think empathy requires us to be authentically present and involved in a way that facilitating someone else’s own solution does not.
Empathetic leadership challenges me to use my own experience and position in a way that is open to the challenges and experiences of others. And most critically demonstrates that I act out of care and acknowledgement of them.
Empathy requires that we know our self well enough that we are able to remove our projections of our own biases and feelings from the situation, appreciate the other person’s view of the world and how that impacts the situation for them.
Think about how you respond to others. How often do you respond to their experience, feelings and fears based on your own fears? Do your responses contain the word “I?” Do you fear genuinely experiencing the world as them? Do you seek to affirm your own view and experience through your response? Are you scared as being seen as similar to the other person in their own “deficiencies” and “imperfections”? How many of these imperfections are merely your own biases and fears?
Read more by clicking here: http://www.globaladvisors.biz/thoughts/20170627/empathy-and-understanding-why-they-are-the-qualities-that-help-us-achieve-our-own-happiness-and-success
Strategy Tools
Strategy Tools: The Growth-Share Matrix
The Growth-Share Matrix was introduced almost 50 years ago by Bruce Henderson and the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). It is considered one of the most iconic strategic planning techniques.
The Growth-Share Matrix is a framework first developed in the 1960s to help companies think about the priority (and resources) that they should give to their different businesses. At the height of its success, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Growth-Share Matrix (or approaches based on it) was used by about half of all Fortune 500 companies, according to estimates.
The need which prompted The Growth-Share idea was, indeed, that of managing cash-flow. It was reasoned that one of the main indicators of cash generation was relative market share, and one which pointed to cash usage was that of market growth rate:
“To be successful, a company should have a portfolio of products with different growth rates and different market shares. The portfolio composition is a function of the balance between cash flows. High growth products require cash inputs to grow. Low growth products should generate excess cash. Both kinds are needed simultaneously.”—Bruce Henderson.
The two axes of the matrix are relative market share (or the ability to generate cash) and growth (or the need for cash).
For each product or service, the “area” of the circle represents the value of its sales. The growth–share matrix thus offers a “map” of the organization’s product (or service) strengths and weaknesses, at least in terms of current profitability, as well as the likely cashflows.
The matrix puts each of a firm’s businesses into one of four categories. The categories were all given memorable names – cash cow, star, dog and question mark – which helped to push them into the collective consciousness of managers all over the world.
Fast Facts
Modern portfolio theory (MPT) can be applied to business portfolio decision-making
- Shareholders seek to maximise company profits while minimising risk
- However, lower risk businesses are usually accompanied with lower returns and high risk businesses with higher returns
- Comparisons between various risk and return profiles can be measured using the Sharpe ratio – return per unit of risk
- Combinations (degree of balance sheet investment) in individual portfolios could realise higher returns per unit of risk than what is achievable in an individual business unit – some combinations are not always obvious
- By exiting a higher risk-return portfolio BU J, ABC would be able to increase its return per unit of risk from 4,3 to 4,5
- It is often psychologically difficult for businesses to exit high return portfolios
- Emotional decision-making can be muted by applying the logic of modern portfolio theory in the board room
Selected News
Quote: Dee Hock
“An organisation, no matter how well designed, is only as good as the people who live and work in it.” – Dee Hock
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