What’s the Big Idea? If you want to have a good relationship with your colleagues, managers and leaders at work, the best thing to do is to perform your job well. But there will be times when you need to actively influence someone – to get help or resources, to get buy-in for your ideas, […]
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Managing a team and maintaining – or even upgrading – their performance is a big, time consuming job, however experienced you are. Supervision sessions, coaching, advice, support all take up big chunks of your time – time away from your ‘own’ work. So the question is, how can you maximise the positive impact you have […]
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What’s the Big Idea? Management guru, Peter Drucker, has written extensively on the value of innovation and the need to avoid ‘the temptation to feed yesterday and starve tomorrow’. Third sector, public sector and even social business often have a false sense of ‘playing safe’ by sticking to what has worked in the past. But, […]
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=mc’s new updated version of the systems approach to project management offers you the solution to a range of challenges whether you’re a multi national humanitarian INGO or small art gallery that needs to see every exhibition as a mini-project. Among the organisations who’ve used the =mc Systems Model are: Project working is becoming the […]
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It is a truth universally acknowledged (or very widely, anyway) that good time management and prioritising our activities are key to helping achieve high pay-off results. It’s also true that too often it can be difficult to focus and stay on track – especially when things are really busy. At that point it’s all too […]
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In any senior manager’s career, the transition from manager to leader can be a tricky one. In any manager’s career, the transition to leader can be tricky. How do you lift yourself up from the operational to the strategic? What are the secrets to providing visionary leadership? How can you inspire and lead change in […]
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The Boston Matrix is one of a series of analysis tools that help you decide the effectiveness of your current fundraising portfolio. It is normally used to assess the relative contribution of various fundraising activities or donor clusters at a particular point in time. But the matrix is enormously flexible and can be used to […]
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The Big Idea Defining strategic direction can be a major challenge for any organisation. Igor Ansoff, US strategy guru, developed a matrix which helps to focus your attention and resources. This matrix, commonly used in commercial settings, has been adapted by =mc to make it relevant to a wide range of not-for-profit organisations. For fundraisers […]
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Transforming results by changing beliefs and behaviours “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is a famous quote from legendary management consultant and writer Peter Drucker. To be clear he didn’t mean that strategy was unimportant – rather that a powerful and empowering culture was a surer route to organisational success. One of the key goals in […]
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This article introduces some key elements of emotional intelligence to help you enhance your performance by being more confident, and in control of your emotional responses to situations in the workplace. What is emotional intelligence? The term Emotional Intelligence (EI) is increasingly well known and often cited as the key to effective workplace relationships. It […]
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Synopsis: Organisations need to find a way to express their strategy simply and understandably – but also in a way that reflects the complexity of their relationships and activities. One increasingly popular framework to combine these qualities is the balanced scorecard (BSC), and specifically the more recent incarnation, the strategy map. At its simplest the […]
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What’s the Big Idea? Blue Ocean Strategy is a radical approach to strategy captured in a book written by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne – professors based at INSEAD, the leading European business school. The book summarises the thesis that organisations face two key choices: creating new customer demand in an uncontested market space […]
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