• Can you describe your company´s identity in a few words?
• Does your company´s identity match the key success factors for your business?
• Do you use your company´s identity as the basis for strategic decisions?
• Is your company´s identity integrated into its key processes?

Source: Return on Identity / Ulrich Pidun, Daniel Stelter / Boston Consulting Group (BCG), March 30, 2006

Subject: Management Questions

Traditional Measurement Needs
Financial

• Are we focusing on the right financial measures to judge the success of our company/divisions/units?
• How much of our value is reflected in our balance sheet? Do we have the right balance between financial and non-financial measures to address key intangible assets beyond the balance sheet?

Operational

• Do we have the right short-term operational measures in place to respond quickly when an activity central to

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Subject: Metrics Questions

One barometer for how innovative is your organization can be determined by answering the following questions with a yes or no.

1. Has one person been chartered with the overall responsibility to manage the corporate-wide innovation process?
2. Are there performance measures – both tangible and intangible – to assess the quality of your innovation practices?
3. Do your training/educational programs have provisions to incubate and spin-out new products

… [ Read more ]

Subject: Innovation Questions

Below is a sampling of the kinds of questions you should ask before you make a final decision to fire an employee.

1. Does the firing violate discrimination laws or other federal, state or local statutes?
2. Is the reason for firing in line with company policies and procedures?
3. Have any assurances, written or oral, been given to the employee about length of employment or job security?
4. Has the reason for

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Subject: Human Resources Questions

For each “bad” action, ask the team:

• What choices could we have made to avoid the bad action?
• What choices did we make that should have been avoided?
• What misinterpretations of events, motivations, and actions did we make that led to the bad action?
• What were the correct interpretations?
• What do all these imply about what we should and shouldn´t do going forward?

For each “good” … [ Read more ]

Subject: Project Management Questions

Even the most seasoned sales veterans sometimes struggle to get more than a few questions into the process of general discovery before quickly trying to push products. To improve your success in this area, break those discovery questions down into four subcategories:

• Marketing questions: How do you go to market? How do you distinguish yourself from your competitors? What are your biggest competitive challenges?
• Operational questions:

… [ Read more ]

Subject: Sales Questions

For every asset that supports business critical service, Visible Ops recommends the following questions be answered:

• What does it do?
• What is the hardware platform?
• What is the operating system platform?
• What applications are installed?
• Who is responsible for this asset´s uptime?
• What service(s) does it support?
• Who is authorized to make changes?
• What does this box do for the business?
• What will happen when this box stops working completely?
• What will happen when the

… [ Read more ]

Subject: IT Questions

• Workforce planning and workforce analysis: Which employees are eligible for retirement in the next two to five years? Do they possess critical skills? Which jobs and skill sets will be impacted? How will you replace these skills once these employees retire? What are the critical skills for the future that will need to be recruited or developed?
• Learning management: Do your current training and learning

… [ Read more ]

Subject: Human Resources Questions

• What’s our purpose as a company? What’s the promise of our brand?
• What do our customers/consumers feel is the most valuable things that we can do for them? (Consider this as the basis of your brand promise.)
• What is the unique value of our organization…the competitive differentiator in our minds and in the minds of our stakeholders?
• Where is our competition coming from and what are their perceived

… [ Read more ]

Subject: Strategy Questions

Still stuck with bad processes and high-maintenance legacy systems? Here are five questions that will help you determine and sort your priorities.

• Is your company’s infrastructure helping or hindering your company’s …
  M&A options and plans?
  New-product and speed-to-market strategies?
  Efforts to implement new technologies that deliver a more unified, holistic view of your customers?
  Depending on your company’s business strategy in the coming years, a response

… [ Read more ]

Subject: IT Questions