3 Corporate Values Questions

Ask yourself these questions about your organization:

  1. Do your values have relevance for your customers?
  2. Do your customers experience your values in some way?
  3. Do your values differentiate you within your industry?

4 Employee Recruitment Questions to Ask

  1. Who is in our target market, and where will these ideal candidates find us?
  2. How is our culture reflected in our branding and job advertisements?
  3. What attracted our best candidates to us, and what do they want out of a career?
  4. How are we tracking where our best candidates come from and what they want?

5 Onboarding Questions

Here are the five questions every employee needs to have answered if they are to have an exceptional onboarding experience:

  1. “What do we believe in around here?”
    Naturally, there’s a lot of “nuts and bolts” material that must be communicated during an orientation. But all those little details are expressions of your organizational culture. How you explain your benefits, time off, and other policies — and

[ Read more ]

5 Questions Leaders Should Be Asking All the Time

I believe there are some essential questions that are useful across a variety of contexts, including, and perhaps especially, the workplace. In fact, I gave a commencement speech last year on this topic, suggesting to students from the Harvard Graduate School of Education that there are really only five essential questions in life. Although the audience was future educators, I believe these questions are equally … [ Read more ]

5 Questions Boards Should Ask About IT in a Digital World

With a higher degree of digital fluency, boards can help C-suite leaders make better decisions about how to expand a company’s most successful technology initiatives and when to pull the plug on lagging ones. In our experience, board directors are more likely to gain such fluency if they routinely ask these five critical questions relating to the IT organization’s performance:

  1. How well does technology enable

[ Read more ]

25 Crisis Management Questions

Much of the training top executives receive around crisis management is little more than training in crisis communications—only one part of the broader crisis-response picture. Executives should ask themselves the following 25 questions about preparedness.
Understanding threats

  • What are the organization’s top ten risks and, relative to these, what are the top five “black swan” threats that could destabilize the organization?
  • For each black-swan threat, how

[ Read more ]

5 Questions Brands Need to Answer to Be Customer First

While most large companies are still in the early stages of developing a fully integrated marketing organization, we’ve found that the following questions are the most important ones to answer:

  1. Are you thinking about customer journeys rather than just touchpoints?
    The starting point for delivering value, not just talking about it, is understanding the end-to-end journeys your customers take to accomplish a task, such as buy

[ Read more ]

Tough Questions to Ask About Your Company’s Strategy

Way to Play

  • Are we clear about how we choose to create value in the marketplace?
  • Are we investing in the capabilities that really matter to our way to play?

Capabilities System

  • Can we articulate the three to six capabilities that describe what we do uniquely better than anyone else?
  • Have we defined how they work together in a system?
  • Do our strategy documents reflect this?

[ Read more ]

15 Key Transformation Questions

Bring the Future to Life

  1. Case for Change. Have we convinced the organization that the status quo is unacceptable?
  2. Compelling Intent. Is our story of the future meaningful to our people and securing emotional buy-in at all levels?
  3. Credible Solutions. Are the proposed solutions appealing so the organization, and will they work in our culture?

 

Inspire Deep Commitment

  1. Aligned Top Team. Do we have the right top team? Is

[ Read more ]

10 Digital Disruption Questions for Executives

  1. How are you deploying digital technology to proactively disrupt your industry?
  2. How are you keeping track of the “ratchet effect” customers have when interacting with businesses, both online and offline? Do you know not only what’s best-in-class, but also what is best-in-any-class?
  3. How differently do your customers experience your company online versus offline?
  4. How do you assess your company’s competitive essence and how it

[ Read more ]