Ursina Teuscher, PhD
Posted in Strategic Planning, Business Decisions, Organizational Development
Do you know how to create a powerful statement of your organization’s mission, vision and values?
These few pages (downloadable pdf) describe a framework that I’ve found helpful in my strategic planning work. While it is geared mainly toward non-profit organizations, I find the approach just as useful for businesses.
by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR
Ursina Teuscher, PhD
Posted in Creative Thinking, Strategic Planning, Business Decisions, Organizational Development
by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR
Ursina Teuscher, PhD
Posted in Achieving Goals, Book Recommendations, Career Development, Strategic Planning, Business Decisions, Organizational Development
“Follow your passion” is a very commonly heard career advice, but Cal Newport argues it’s actually quite terrible as a guiding principle.
In his quest to figure out how people find great careers, he found not only that preexisting passions are very rare, but that they have little to do with how most people end up loving their work. The pressure to “find our passion” can therefore unnecessarily lead to anxiety, dissatisfaction and unproductive career changes.
Instead, passion for a career seems to come after you put in the hard work of becoming excellent at something that adds value to other people’s lives, not before.
This is the book that resulted from his research, and where he includes more advice on how to go about building a career based on skills:
Cal Newport (2012). So Good They Can’t Ignore You – Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love.
If you prefer to listen, here’s a video of him giving a talk about it to Google employees (the actual talk is only 25min):
by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR
Ursina Teuscher, PhD
Posted in Resources, tools, Strategic Planning, Business Decisions, Organizational Development
Do you like treasure maps?
I do. So I’ve created one on how to make smart decisions. You can download it directly as a two-page pfd:
Or, find it here among other free resources.
The infographic provides a roadmap and ultra-brief guideline on how to make smart decisions.
It is also available as a large colored post-card, with the map on the front and the step-by-step summary on the back side. I’m happy to give those away, let me know if you’d like one (or more).
by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR
Ursina Teuscher, PhD
Posted in Book Recommendations, Financial Decisions, Strategic Planning, Business Decisions, Organizational Development
Craig W. Kirkwood (1997). Strategic Decision Making: Multiobjective Decision Analysis with Spreadsheets.
*** Geek Alert! ***
Skip this month’s book recommendation if you don’t like spreadsheets. This book by Craig Kirkwood is all about spreadsheets, and how to use them to make smart decisions.
It goes way beyond anything I’ve ever taught in my own classes, and beyond anything I will probably ever use, even in my consulting work. But it’s great stuff! So yes, this is a book for geeks.
If that’s you: I have a copy that you’re welcome to borrow (it’s out of print and very expensive to buy at this point). AND: when you pick it up in my office in Portland, I’ll treat you to an excellent Affogato at Spella Caffe. Just because I like to talk to geeks, and I assume you like ice cream too.
Ursina Teuscher, PhD
Posted in Achieving Goals, Career Development, Self-Assessments, Strategic Planning, Business Decisions, Organizational Development
Continuing my series about self-assessments, the one I’m reviewing here is for academics:
the myIDP.
The myIDP is an Individual Development Plan for science careers, and is mainly targeted to grad students and postdocs, with the goal of helping them define and pursue their career goals.
It includes a self-assessment part covering skills, interests, and values. Aside from the online questionnaires that show your scores right away, can also download blank skills assessment forms to share with a mentor or colleague. Based on the assessment, it offers a long list of career paths and shows you how well each matches with your interests and skills. As you explore those options, you get suggestions of how to consider your values in those contexts.
After this assessment and exploration part, the website includes a personal planning system for setting your own goals and implementing next steps. For example, you can set skill improvement goals and plan specific activities to reach those. To help define your own skill improvement goals, you get all the information from the skills assessment, but you choose where you want to improve. In my own case, my lowest skill score was in animal research – not an area in which I need to improve given that I have no plans of working with animals in the foreseeable future. However my semi-low scores in “how to negotiate” might be relevant for my life and worth improving.
As is fitting for a target audience of scientists, this tool does not give you easy answers, let alone ONE easy answer. It asks a lot of questions, gives you many answers and a lot of homework, including suggestions of further research to do (not in those exact words…). All the assessments are very transparent, no hidden magic.
The website can be used free of charge. You just need to set up an account, so that your data can be saved, but you don’t need to provide any information other than an email address. It looks like this is really just a service (funded by several educational institutions), not part of a research project or a business.
If you try it, let me know what you think!
by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR
Ursina Teuscher, PhD
Posted in Achieving Goals, Book Recommendations, Career Development, Financial Decisions, Strategic Planning, Business Decisions, Organizational Development
If you’re a decision-maker in an organization and you’re serious about strategic planning, I highly recommend this book by Erica Olson as a very thorough but practical reference. It will give you more than you need, but it is very clearly structured so that you easily focus on whatever aspects are relevant to you. It also includes a DVD with worksheets, templates, and videos.
Strategic planning offers a systematic process to figure out where you’re going – as a business or as any kind of organization.
Erica Olsen reports that CEOs of the Inc. 500 spend 50-90 percent of their time on strategy and business development. Why? Probably because they realize how much it pays off. According to her research, the firms with a high commitment to strategic planning had higher sales volumes as well as net incomes than those with lower commitment.
A good strategic plan informs not only your current obvious decisions, but will help you look for decision opportunities that you might otherwise miss. In other words, it helps the decision-makers be proactive, rather than reacting to problems.
Where a team is involved, the process of developing a strategic plan, and more importantly the culture of continued strategic planning, builds commitment and empowers group members to make their own decisions on a daily basis.
If you’re interested in a brief overview of the process, I’ve written an outline that will walk you through the classic steps of a strategic planning session. You can access it here (link at the bottom of the page). You can use it as a very simple cheat sheet in preparation for a team session, or, if you don’t have a team, you can go through the questions by yourself.
by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR
Ursina Teuscher, PhD
Posted in Achieving Goals, Book Recommendations, Career Development, Creative Thinking, Financial Decisions, Health Decisions, Strategic Planning, Business Decisions, Organizational Development
I was impressed with this new book by the Heath brothers, a very helpful guide to decision making. It does not offer any formal tools to evaluate options, but a process with powerful ideas that are easy to apply to any personal or business decision.
They call their approach the WRAP process, an acronym standing for (1) Widen your options, (2) Reality test your assumptions, (3) Attain some distance, and (4) Prepare to be wrong.
Here’s a sample of some ideas that I’m finding very effective with clients as well as for my own decisions:
For widening your options, they propose the “Vanishing Options Test”: what would you do if the current alternatives disappeared? This question forces us to think creatively, oftentimes bringing better solutions to mind than the ones that seemed most obvious at first.
Also, consider opportunity costs: if I didn’t do this, what else could I do with the same resources?
Always think AND, not OR. Can you follow multiple paths at once?
For attaining some distance, they suggest the simple but powerful question: “What would I tell my best friend to do in this situation?”
For preparing to be wrong, they introduce the idea of a “tripwire”: set a date or trigger for revisiting the decision. This will not only prevent you from getting stuck on a bad track, but it will give you a certain period where you will have the permission and peace of mind to fully commit to your current action plan, without tormenting yourself about whether this was a good decision or not.
Chip and Dan Heath also offer a great resources page on their website, with free cheat sheets and worksheets summarizing their process.
by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR
Ursina Teuscher, PhD
Posted in Book Recommendations, Career Development, Strategic Planning, Business Decisions, Organizational Development
Eisenfuehr, Weber & Langer. Rational Decision Making.
This month’s pick is a classic textbook, presenting theory as well as practical methods on how to improve decision making. It is admittedly not the easiest read, but those who are truly interested in the formal methods of how to approach difficult decisions will find this book very rich and thorough.
Ursina Teuscher, PhD
Posted in Achieving Goals, Creative Thinking, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management, Strategic Planning, Business Decisions, Organizational Development
Innovation and creative thinking in organizations is not only difficult to achieve, but also potentially risky, time consuming, and expensive. Is it worth the effort? Several studies suggest that indeed, higher organizational innovation affects overall performance quite strongly and is worth pursuing.
How, then, can innovation and creative thinking be increased in an organization? One important factor seems to be a strong learning orientation within the company.
Learning orientation (as defined in this body of research) consists of the following four components:
Studies have shown that learning orientation not only influences firm innovativeness directly, but that it also moderates the impacts of risk-taking, creativity, competitor benchmarking orientation, and environmental opportunities on innovativeness.
There is also a direct positive relationship between learning orientation and firm performance (as measured with market share, new product success, and overall performance).
To sum it all up, learning orientation seems to be critical for innovation and performance.
For leaders who want to foster that kind of learning culture, the four components above offer a good starting point. For example, as a “commitment to learning”, managers could encourage employees to use company time to pursue knowledge that may lie outside the immediate scope of their work.
There are many other possibilities of how each of those aspects of learning orientation could be implemented and assessed. In general, a company might want to treat “learning orientation” just like they would treat any other core strategic goal.
by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR
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