The Manager's View

Earlier this year I accepted the challenge of creating an executive education program at the Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston. Up until this point, Bauer had no formal strategy for executive education. It did, however, have an outstanding faculty and was engaged with a number of high profile companies in developing custom curricula for developing managers and executives. My job would be to continue with the custom programs already in place and to add classes that could be used by individuals or companies that had a need for only one or two classes. This would require engaging the faculty and community experts in developing classes for the program, creating a format to for communicating the class topics and qualifications of the faculty and designing a website that would be user friendly. That’s just the beginning. The next steps include developing a winning marketing campaign and developing enough demand to fill the classes at a rate that covers the cost ...

In August of 2013 I wrote a blog on how to save newspapers ( http://gwrresearch.blogspot.com/2013/08/how-to-save-newspapers.html ) . This blog described the differences between print and digital editions of a newspaper and their websites. The article focused on creating a symbiotic relationship between the newspaper and the website. I see that newspapers are trying to create a business model that relies on inputs from electronic and print components but I don’t see much symbiosis.   Most of newspaper efforts still seem to be driven by the old model and its strengths.   News stories are printed in the paper and digital editions with reference to those stories being repeated in a different format and different timing on the website.   I saw, in one newspaper, a large photo (half page) of an event with a caption telling the readers they could learn more about the event on the newspaper’s website. Now there is a synergistic effort gone bad. The folks getting the ...

I have used a framework to guide my consulting projects and internal corporate projects for years. The approach has kept me focused on project completion and has helped in providing data driven solutions for complex problems. The approach to designing a consulting project framework is based on starting with the mission and vision of the organization I am working with and understanding how the objective of the project fits with the mission and vision. Before next steps are taken there needs to be an assessment of the organization’s current position vis-à-vis the universe in which it exists. Only then can you move forward to developing a strategy, its tactics and an execution plan. An exercise that should help in gaining clarity for your project relates to the acronym: M ission – How does the organization service a universal need? This is why the organization exists. As you consider your next consulting project it is always good to consider how the client’s organization...