What does the strategy professional want and need in their career development?
Based on my thirty years as a strategy professional, tenured associate professor of strategy and thirty years of involvement with several professional strategy associations, my answer is:
Thought Leadership
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Rich Networking
Please let me elaborate.
We view thought leadership as:
1.”Tried and true” strategy knowledge with lessons learned to train the novice and a refresher for the senior strategy professional that are known to produce desired results
2. Creative extensions of the “tried and true”
3. Description of best practice and its causes of desired results
4. Chronicling emerging “next practice” and its hypothesized links to results
Furthermore, to provide real value, these four aspects should be cast in the context of a holistic strategy framework that has causal laws allowing predictions about results to be made. Our Secret Sauce and Knowledge Taxonomy depict the elements of this holistic framework. This can help get over the endless loops caused by elitist notions that “my opinions” and “my training” and “my experience” are better than yours.
To think and execute strategic initiatives that cannot align with strategy laws via a holistic framework could be wasted effort and even ruinous of organizational effectiveness and performance.
We have provided one such holistic framework that has been useful for thirty years. You will be the judge of its efficacy and power to help you produce results and performance.
Rich Networking:
From our experience this is not even the modern form of “exchanging business cards at monthly meetings” that is made possible by social media like Linked In. Face-to-face introductions at professional meetings and social media like Linked In are of course useful and valuable.
But for us rich networking is creating a forum for like-minded strategy professionals, grouped by similar levels of expertise and experience, to engage each other in what it is really like to be and behave as a valuable strategy professional who delivers results. It answers these questions to the network: what are your experiences in dealing with the dilemmas and opportunities I face everyday? What have you learned from them that I can learn? Rich networking provides learning and community on a very personal basis.
The networking offering will be added at a later date after we have proved ourselves and there is demand for it.