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Apr 12, 2024 · I'm a humane designer & technologist who’s passionate about building products to improve people’s lives. This is my nook of the internet, where I write about design, books, technology, creativity, and any other topics that interest me.
- Books
Jeff Zych. About Me; Archives; #books. 2023 Reading List. I...
- Writing Page
I'm a humane designer & technologist who’s passionate about...
- Reading List
Jeff Zych. About Me; Archives; #reading list. 2023 Reading...
- Books
Jeff is a Partner in the Denver office. As an advisor, he specializes in investment management, insurance, tax, and financial planning. Prior to joining Cerity Partners, he was a Partner with Karsten Advisors and an investment consultant at TD Ameritrade where he worked with high-net-worth individuals.
Aug 2001 - Present 22 years 9 months. Education. Former member of the National Board of Directors & current advisor and donor. Licenses & Certifications. IBM Generative AI Sales. Issued Mar 2024....
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- The Kernel of Strategy
- Good Strategy vs. Bad Strategy
- How to Identify Bad Strategy
- Sources of Power
- Closing Thoughts
Strategy is designing a way to deal with a challenge. A good strategy, therefore, must identify the challenge to be overcome, and design a way to overcome it. To do that, the kernel of a good strategy contains three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action. 1. A diagnosisdefines the challenge. What’s holding you back from reachi...
Good strategy is simple and obvious.Good strategy identifies the key challenge to overcome. Bad strategy fails to identify the nature of the challenge. If you don’t know what the problem is, you can’t evaluate alternative guiding pol...Good strategy includes actions to take to overcome the challenge. Actions are not “implementation” details; they are the punch in the strategy. Strategy is about how an organization will move forwa...Good strategy is designed to be coherent – all the actions an organization takes should reinforce and support each other. Leaders must do this deliberately and coordinate action across departments....Four Major Hallmarks of Bad Strategy
1. Fluff: A strategy written in gibberish masking as strategic concepts is classic bad strategy. It uses abstruse and inflated words to create the illusion of high-level thinking. 2. Failure to face the challenge: A strategy that does not define the challenge to overcome makes it impossible to evaluate, and impossible to improve. 3. Mistaking goals for strategy: Many bad strategies are just statements of desire rather than plans for overcoming obstacles. 4. Bad strategic objectives: A strateg...
Some Forms of Bad Strategy
1. Dog’s Dinner Objectives: A long list of “things to do,” often mislabeled as “strategies” or “objectives.” These lists usually grow out of planning meetings in which stakeholders state what they would like to accomplish, then they throw these initiatives onto a long list called the “strategic plan” so that no one’s feelings get hurt, and they apply the label “long-term” so that none of them need be done today. 1.1. In tech-land, I see a lot of companies conflate OKRs (Objectives and Key Res...
Good strategy will leverage one or more sources of power to overcome the key obstacles. Rumelt describes 7 sources of power, but the list is not exhaustive: 1. Leverage: Leverage is finding an imbalance in a situation, and exploiting it to produce a disproportionately large payoff. Or, in resource constrained situations (e.g. a startup), it’s using...
One of the things that surprised me as I read the book is how much overlap there is between doing strategy work and design work – diagnosing the problem, creating multiple potential solutions (i.e. the double diamond), looking at situations from multiple perspectives, weighing tradeoffs in potential solutions, and more. The core of strategy, as he ...
View Jeff Zych’s profile on LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional community. Jeff has 4 jobs listed on their profile. See the complete profile on LinkedIn and discover Jeff’s ...
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Aug 18, 2015 · Jeff Zych. ·. Follow. Published in. Design @ Optimizely. ·. 4 min read. ·. Aug 18, 2015. -- 3. Optimizely’s Design team is on a mission to design great products that enable our customers to...
