Planning Archives - Succeed Sooner

Personal Goals – My 2020 Strategy

January 14, 2020January 14, 2020 by Tim Empringham, MBANo Comments

The new year is upon us and for those that know me or have read some of my year end posts over the years you know I like to use this time to set some personal goals. I am not a believer in New Years Resolutions, but I do think it is a great time of year to reflect and plan for the year to come. (more…)...

Oh Sh#*! (Or Managing The Unknown Unknowns)

March 22, 2019March 22, 2019 by Tim Empringham, MBANo Comments

If you've ever worked on something even remotely disruptive or innovative, you know about unknown unknowns. They are the unexpected things that happen that it is impossible to predict. Customer feedback that doesn't align with your assumptions. Unexpected alternative uses of your idea for other purposes. The competition reaction to your new offering. None of which you can predict. So then how do you deal with them when they arise? (more…)...

Connecting Strategy and Execution

July 12, 2016August 14, 2017 by Tim Empringham, MBA1 Comment

I will be speaking next week at the Bank-IT Conference on the topic of "Building a Full Stack Strategy: Integrating Strategy from Business Vision to Tech Execution" so I felt that I would share some of my thinking more broadly here. While my discussion next week is focused on the Technology area, connecting strategy to execution is critical across the organization. Integrated strategy drives execution excellence. Too many organizations build their strategy in a silo. The strategy is separate from the business lines and supporting organizations required to execute. In many organizations, you'll find "Strategic Management" offices or "CEO Strategy Board" functions. These teams operate at the highest level of the organization and focus on the macro issue and strategy. They then pass their plans and white papers off to the supporting teams on the assumption that will result in the execution of those plans. (more…)...

Your Meetings Suck – Admit It

March 26, 2014July 6, 2016 by Tim Empringham, MBANo Comments

How many meetings do you go to every week where you walk out feeling frustrated that in the span of 60 minutes nothing got accomplished, nothing moved forward, and the only apparent outcome is the follow-up meeting that will be making its way to you via an email meeting invite during the next 60 minutes? How many times have you been the host of that same meeting? Admit it... your meetings probably suck. (more…)...

Take Time to Preflect

September 16, 2013July 6, 2016 by Tim Empringham, MBANo Comments

At the end of every day or experience we know the power of taking time to reflect on what happened, how we behaved, what decisions we made, and how everything turned out so we can learn and grow from our experiences, but there is an equally powerful exercise that can help you start your day with a new power - preflection. Many people give me quizzical looks when I tell them that I rise regularly at 5am to start my day, partly because I am also not the first one to bed every day, but partly because they haven't discovered the power of preflection so the thought of rising an hour or more before you need to seems like a waste of sleep. I've also had more than one person tell me they couldn't do it because "they aren't a morning person". I have an easy response to that one... Neither am I! (more…)...

The Importance of a Plan

April 20, 2013 by Tim Empringham, MBANo Comments

I think I've always just naturally broken my professional work down into planning steps and then executed according to that plan, even if it wasn't done in a formal project plan format. Whether it was a small initiative or set of to do's that just needed some framework or a major program that needed a full detailed project plan, the need to structure the work was always just a given to me at work. Recently I've been dealing with unexpected personal challenges that have proven to be as complex as any of the projects I've been called in to save from a professional perspective. I've had several people comment on how quickly I've been able to move things forward and how little these challenges seem to have overwhelmed me when they felt that if put in a similar situation they would have found things spinning around them. I realized when I heard those comments the secret to my ability to dealing with...

Sometimes The Unexpected Should Have Been Expected

March 31, 2013 by Tim Empringham, MBANo Comments

Many times in our career, business, or life we experience unexpected events or twists in the road that catch us off guard. A big client pulls their business at a critical time, we find ourselves displaced from our job due to restructuring or cost savings, or we have a personal event that shakes the foundation of our comfortable lives. Most of the time when these events happen we shake our heads and wonder at the incredible surprise and chalk it up to "one of those things you just can't predict". The reality though is though that in many of those cases the road signs have been there all along warning us of the coming event, but we've been ignoring them either hoping they would be wrong or believing through our confirmation bias that things were actually going to turn the corner and the inevitable wouldn't happen. If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning...

New Year Goal Setting

January 14, 2013 by Tim Empringham, MBA1 Comment

While I don't necessarily subscribe to the concept of New Years resolutions, I do believe that the New Year provides us with a good annual marker to check in on how we are doing against our personal roadmap and validate that our goals are still relevant and aligned to where we want to go. It's an exercise that actually should be done more frequently (quarterly for example), but as we get into the year and the business of life takes hold again I recognize that many of us forget to check back in with our goals as regularly as we should. Maybe that should be goal #1 on all of our lists this year. So what should our annual goal setting and check in session look like? First, if you have done this exercise before you should pull out the previous version of your personal plan and spend some time reviewing it. Reflect on your 5, 10, and 20 year targets to validate...

Are You Running in Circles?

August 24, 2012 by Tim Empringham, MBANo Comments

Over the past few weeks I've been involved in a number of situations where urgent requests have been made of people and teams, and they have diligently run off at pace to deliver an appropriate response only to discover (days and weeks later) that their interpretation of the request wasn't correct, or worse yet to come back together as a team to discover that big pieces of the request have been missed completely. Time and effort were lost because: People failed to clarify the request and ensure that everyone (requestor and requestee) were on the same page in terms of what needed to be delivered; and Teams failed to review the request, identify the deliverables clearly, and assign clear ownership and timelines to each piece of the puzzle to ensure that things got done. A colleague likened it to a firework - a senior executive makes a high level request and expresses urgency but may not provide the level of clarity the team needs...

The Importance of Book Ends

June 5, 2012 by Tim Empringham, MBANo Comments

Take a look at your book shelf. You might have a nice built-in bookcase, an IKEA Billy case, or perhaps an open shelf on the wall, but any of them will do. Now imagine that your book shelf didn't have any sides or book ends... how easy do you think it would be to keep your library of business and professional development books upright and organized on your shelf? So if the book ends are so critical to maintaining order and keeping your books contained why do so many of us not recognize the same importance of book ends in our own lives? Think about a typical day in your life. If you're like most people I know it goes something like this: 06:00 Wake up 06:15 Eat breakfast 06:30 Shower and dress 07:00 Get kids dressed and ready for school 07:15 Walk the dog 07:30 Take the kids to school 08:00 Arrive at work (with coffee) 08:15 Start processing Inbox 08:30 Start of meeting schedule 10:15 Check in on your Inbox 10:30 More meetings 12:30 Grab a soup...