The Art of the War - Sun Tzu - Business Strategy

The Art of War is an ancient Chinese military treatise attributed to Sun Tzu, a high-ranking military general, strategist and tactician. The text is composed of 13 chapters, each of which is devoted to one aspect of warfare. It is commonly known to be the definitive work on military strategy and tactics of its time. It has had an influence on Eastern and Western military thinking, business tactics, legal strategy and beyond.

It is in my opinion a book that every Chief Executive Officer (CEO) or manager of any company should know about in order to help and take business strategic decisions.
After all this time, the ’Sun Tsu’ principles are still applicable for business with some interpretation.
Definitely, also an excellent useful tool in the toolbox for leaders to manage people and processes.


An example from the 'Art of the War':

"When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength."

Interpretation to the business:
This is a concept that is repeated several times. When a project or initiative takes too long, people get tired or bored, the competition knows too much about it, it gets outdated, and other companies or people take advantage.

About the picture: The beginning of The Art of War in a classical bamboo book from the reign of the Qianlong Emperor (source wikipedia)

Read more about other principles here (BusinessInsider).

IT Management Models

This is a collection conveying 26 different IT governance, management and delivery excellence models.

Models/frameworks include the following:
1. IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) Model
2. ISO/IEC 20000 IT Service Management Model
3. ISO/IEC 27000 Information Security Management Systems Model
4. COBIT 5 Model
5. Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI)
6. People Capability Maturity Model (PCMM)
7. ISO/IEC 15504 (SPICE)
8. Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3)
9. Portfolio, Programme, Project Management Maturity Model (P3M3)
10. Portfolio, Programme, Project Office Model (P3O)
11. PRINCE2 Project Management Model
12. IDEAL Model
13. Waterfall Model
14. Agile Model
15. Scrum Model
16. COPC-2000 Model
17. Lean Levers for IT Outsourcing
18. Cause & Effect Diagram
19. DMAIC Process Improvement Model (Six Sigma)
20. ISO 9001 Quality Management Model
21. Baldrige Performance Excellence Model
22. EFQM Business Excellence Model
23. Balanced Scorecard
24. Benchmarking Model
25. SERVQUAL Model
26. Change Management Model 

Challenges needing emotional intelligence (EQ)

Only the most emotionally intelligent leaders can manage the many challenges in business today.
Restructuring organizations and reducing staff to make them more productive means that there is a strong need to identify,
retain and motivate truly exceptional employees who can work effectively in teams.
EQ enhances teamwork.

Rapid technological and business changes require people to be able and willing to accept and implement change.
EQ enhances flexibility.

Globalization creates political and cultural challenges for leaders and employees.
EQ enhances problem solving!

In the mid-1990's Daniel Goleman, a psychologist and author did a lot of influential and pioneering work on EQ. Goleman believes that outstanding leadership requires a combination of self-mastery and social intelligence, which have two competency areas: perception and skills.

Leaders with high emotional intelligence can enhance the motivation and optimism in a workplace. It is also important because often because how often results are obtained can be as important as the results themselves.

What is a Divide and Conquer Strategy?

Today I wanted to learn more about what is exactly a Divide and Conquer Strategy.
The maxims "divide et impera" and "divide ut regnes" were utilised by the Roman ruler Caesar and the French emperor Napoleon.

Article 

A divide and conquer strategy, also known as “divide and rule strategy” is often applied in the arenas of politics and sociology. In this strategy, one power breaks another power into smaller, more manageable pieces, and then takes control of those pieces one by one. It generally takes a very strong power to implement such a strategy. In order to successfully break up another power or government, the conqueror must have access to strong political, military, and economic machines.

Furthermore, in order to maintain power and influence, large governments will often work to keep smaller powers and governments from uniting. In fact, this use of the principles within the divide and conquer strategy is most common. It is much easier to prevent small powers from linking forces than to break them apart once they have aligned.

Leaders who use a divide and conquer strategy may encourage or foster feuds between smaller powers. This kind of political maneuvering requires a great understanding of the people who are being manipulated. In order to foster feuds, for example, one must understand the political and social histories of the parties intended to take part in the feuds.

The strategy also includes methods with which to control the funds and resources of the small conquered parties. For example, a powerful leader may encourage a less powerful leader to make unwise financial decisions in order to drain the smaller power’s resources. This is often successful if the leaders of the smaller powers have inflated egos and delusions of grandeur. It is important to note that this form is only effective if the smaller power allows itself to be influenced by the larger power.

The divide and conquer strategy has been widely used throughout history. Both the Roman empire and the British empire played small tribes and groups against one another in order to control their lands and territories. It was used by the Romans when they took Britain, when the British Empire took India, and when the Anglo-Normans took Ireland. A staple political strategy, divide and conquer is still used by many countries today.

Pareto Principle (The 80/20 Rule) - Rethink Your "To Do" List

Originally, the Pareto Principle referred to the observation that 80% of Italy’s wealth belonged to only 20% of the population.

More generally, the Pareto Principle is the observation (not law) that most things in life are not distributed evenly. It can mean all of the following things:

   

• 20% of the input creates 80% of the result
• 20% of the workers produce 80% of the result
• 20% of the customers create 80% of the revenue
• 20% of the bugs cause 80% of the crashes
• 20% of the features cause 80% of the usage
• And on and on…

From here this article is an excerpt of a blog article from the Harvard Business Review - The Unimportance of Practically Everything.

It perfectly explains how to prioritize your "TO DO" list according to the Pareto principle in order to maximize your results.

When you make a "to do" list, prioritize each item by the amount of effort required (1 to 10, with 1 being the least amount of effort) and the potential positive results (1 to 10, with 10 being the highest impact.)

 Now divide the potential results by the amount of effort to get a "priority" ranking. Do the items with the lowest resulting priority number first. Here's a simple example:

        Task 1: Write report on trip meeting.
        Effort=10, Result=2, Priority=5
        Task 2: Prepare presentation for marketing.
        Effort=4, Result=4, Priority=1
        Task 3: Call current customer about referral.
        Effort=1, Result=10, Priority=0.1
 
See your new priority-based order? You do Task 3 first, Task 2 second, and Task 1 last–if at all.

This way, you ensure you do those important low-effort tasks that make up 80% of your success.

What is an ERP (Enterprise Ressource Planning)?

Enterprise Resource Planning provides applications that help manage the business functions:

- logistics
- sales and distribution
- marketing
- finance
- and human resources.

All this in an organization that may be spread across different continents.

Management the Development of a Project Team

Successful project teams do not happen on their own. They exist because project leaders possess the skills to guide their teams to be effective, and because those leaders
know how to manage a team to produce results.

With supportive leadership, motivation, and commitment, a project team will move efficiently through the project stages to a successful conclusion.

GOVERNANCE = CONTROL OF SERVICES

Governance is a term used to describe the management and control of services. So, for example, if the role of IT is to help a thriving company develop innovative products and services, the IT governance plan might include several new high-tech initiatives to help achieve this goal.
However, if a company is using technology to help it survive a downturn, IT governance is mainly concerned with efficiency, saving money, and sharing systems.

PRINCE2: Stage, Exception and Boundary

PRINCE2 is a structured and adaptable project management method for planning, managing and controlling any type or size of project.

Stage: At any one time, a Project Manager (PM) manages one section of a project, called stage. At the end of the stage, the project Board reviews the status of the
project to date and decides whether to continue to the next stage

Exception: An exception is a situation where it is forecast that there will be a cost or schedule deviation beyond the project's planned tolerance levels set by the Project
Board. The Project Manager prepares an Exception Report, which describes the exception situation.

Boundary: The term boundary is used in the context of Managing Stage Boundaries, a PRINCE2 process. PRINCE2 provides a mechanism for defining the boundary of a project
and its relationship to other projects. in defining the boundary of a project, as with a stage, the emphasis is always on the products that the project is required to deliver.
As a project nears a stage boundary, or end of a stage, the Project Board, assesses the information produced from the current stage and makes a key decision on whether
to continue with the project or not.