Impact

Not working much I focus on impact and today was one of those days.  It started as usual waking up early so that I had time for 30 minutes meditation before heading to Caffe Nero for an hours reading.  Then heading to the doctors for my normal monthly blood tests (excellent results) before heading to Chorley.

The primary focus for today was working on Workplace Strategy with @sdownes1972 and whilst the discussion was wide ranging there were a few key action points that I took away.

• Most important was the need for a robust view the key business drivers for different business segments, that will allow us to identify the future service sets that will appeal to our target markets
• Second we need to segment our target user base in a slightly more granular fashion than we do today, in order to identify particular high value user segments who have under-served needs that will be met soon by future products and services

Of course there are many other things that we need to do that I’m not going to go into.  However for the two areas I have mentioned there are two great books that provide excellent frameworks and tools to help.

The first is the general strategy book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters and the excellent What Customers Want : Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services I’m hoping to have a lot of fun and hopefully make a lot of impact working on this a few hours a week this year.

Once finished on strategy I then made a couple of calls from my sunny balcony office to plan the agenda for an series of workshops spanning all day Thursday, by which time the sun was tempting me away to Rivington.

Now that I’ve got my Brompton in the boot of my car I got to spend the first 30 minutes of the afternoon cycling around the main Resevoir, I certainly need to get a bit fitter though as even with 6 gears some of the minor hills had me almost ready to give up.  Then after lunch and reading in the excellent cafe I spent another couple of hours hiking and catching up on the backlog of podcasts that accumulated last week before driving home.  You can track my listening and reading at @steveisreading.

Debbie is away studying for a teaching Diploma on Tuesday nights so I got to write some blog posts and catch up on escapism TV, tonight was Helix, which I can’t really recommend but as I’m 6 episodes in I feel obligated to watch to the end.