Posts
Are You Prepared for Post-Traumatic Growth?
Ananya was an IT specialist for a pharmaceutical company and part of the team that helped ensure 24/7 support for hardware issues across the enterprise. Her company had been experiencing record profits and sustained growth for a number of years when a promising clinical trial unexpectedly had to be aborted in a very public, painful…
Are Your People Flailing or Flourishing?
A few years ago, I served on a taskforce focused on building a talent pipeline in key industries like healthcare and manufacturing. It was a gathering of leaders from industry, government, and education, all interested in assuring that there was alignment between skills needs and the curriculum being taught in our educational institutions. One of…
Discover, Design, Do – Repeat as Needed: Our Approach to Strategy Development & Execution
Hutcheson Associates (HA) has deep expertise in helping organizations and communities in the development of strategic plans, in building local capacity to guide the ongoing implementation of the plan – adapting the plan as needed. Our approach includes three phases: (1) Strategic Discovery, (2) Strategic Roadmap Design, and (3) Strategic Doing. Strategic Discovery. The focus…
Promise-Based Management
How to you get people to move from talk to action? In our approach to strategic transformation we use series of short-term Strategic Action Plans to document the collection of action items people take on. Our methods are informed by promised-based management as described by Sull and Spinosa in a 2007 Harvard Business Review article.…
Henry Hutcheson
My name is Henry Hutcheson and I’m a junior at Purdue University studying technology and data science, majoring in data visualization. I anticipate graduating in May of 2023. I’m seeking projects and internships to apply what I’m in learning in my course work to real-world challenges . Using this page on my father’s company website,…
Mental Contrasting: Because Wanting It Bad Enough Isn’t Good Enough
In Strategic Doing, the agile approach to strategy we use at Hutcheson Associates, moving from “What could we do?” to “What should we do” involves evaluating a number of potential strategic opportunities using our “Big Easy” criteria. The Big Easy calls on the strategy team’s collective intuition to decide which opportunity will likely have a BIG…
Energizing Behaviors
Some behaviors promote energy gains. Other behaviors result in energy drains. We’ve all experiences both scenarios, right? Some teams and organizations leave us mentally, and even physically, exhausted. Others, however, leave us feeling more energized. Here’s a good list of energizing behaviors. Concern for others and interpersonal connections outside of organization-based roles Standing for something…
A Busy Start to 2021
What a busy and exciting time the first two months of the year has been. Here’s a little bit of what we’ve been up to. We’ve launched both Strategic Doing Pilots and Strategic Doing Transformation Initiatives to help organizational and civic leaders tackle complex challenges like: How do you design an entrepreneurial ecosystem within a large research university?…
Strategic Doing for Digital Innovation in Material Handling
Digital Innovation in material handling is not a technology play. It is an organizational challenge. We are bringing a new set of tools and frameworks to manufacturing leaders to help them accelerate digital innovation in material handling.
Is Your Organization a Virtuoso Performer?
If you’ve read our book Strategic Doing: Ten Skills for Agile Leadership I hope you read the forward. It was written by virtuoso cellist Yo-Yo Ma and he offers some wonderful perspectives. Yo-Yo has helped us gain some valuable new insights about organizational agility. Part of what makes a great musician a…well…great musician, is their brain’s…
I Love this Town
In 2009, Jay-Z and Alisa Keys collaborated on a release entitled Empire State of Mind. In the song Jay-Z raps about Brooklyn, Tribeca, and Harlem as Key’s belts the lyrics “these streets will make you feel brand new, big lights will inspire you, hear it from New York, New York, New York!” Their soaring tribute to New…
Are you setting “zesty” goals?
We really like this thinking from Ron Ashkenas. He urges leaders to set “zesty goals.” These are goals that are short term, high priority, and challenging – goals for which there is a sense that they must be achieved! This is not too dissimilar to the notion of looking for the “Big Easy” that we refer to…