STRATEGY + DESIGN + PEOPLE
Are you trying to accelerate innovation or get more out of your people?
I have a wide range of experience in corporate and small businesses, both public and private, as well as a ton of startup experience. There’s not much I haven’t seen!
I am a big fan of consultants who enable their clients. I believe it’s better to teach a person to catch fish than to give them one. My usual approach is highly collaborative. Having a wide variety of experience gives me a huge toolbox and while I take on projects under the Design Thinking, People Strategy, Strategic Planning and other banners, it’s the ability to simultaneously understand, integrate and leverage many disciplines and industries that makes me truly unique.
Global Best Practices
You’ll only get practical, no-nonsense, advice based on decades of diverse experience mixed with a part-time career in academia at the world-renowned Entrepreneurship at Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management.
For Startups
- Lean startup and customer development
- Design Thinking
- Financial strategy and management
- Effectual Thinking – making do with what you have
For CEO's
- People Strategy – identifying, optimally placing and developing executives and next-gen executives – innovation through Design Thinking
- Strategic planning – operational and performance improvement and new market development
- Financial strategy and management
- Effectual thinking
For Owners Only
- Business Owner Coaching
- Family Business Issues
- Planning Your Exit or Readying For Sale
- Succession Planning
I can help with almost any management challenge from designing a new compensation system, to helping create a sales management program, to helping get you out of trouble with your bank (I have already done all of these before).
Design Thinking
You can’t outsource innovation. No one can “do innovation for you”.
What is Design Thinking?
- Design Thinking is a disciplined high-speed, high-touch process for innovation. It should be focused on a single “design challenge” that is best used for “wicked problems” that can’t be easily solved by a group of smart individuals sitting in a room. You get more good ideas faster and eliminate bad ones earlier.
- While we get results, we focus on skill tranfer. Our goal is to get your people thinking differently. With the user or customer at the forefront, and not just in the abstract. But by learning to empathize and understand their journey. Lean guru Steve Blank says “good consultants make their clients smarter”. I subscribe to that notion.
Who Should Use Design Thinking?
- A typical design challenge involves customers on some level, but it’s not absolutely necessary.
- You might have a project going off the rails that we can help increase creative spark.
- Companies who are interested in increasing the quality of customer and other human factor experience.
How we do it.
- We take your team through either a design sprint, a one or two-day exercise that will give your team a new perspective on solving problems, or a more complex multi-week or multi-month design challenge that tackles a much larger issue. Your team will be the one who delivers innovation. We’re just the coaches.
- Your team will grow new practical skills that they can apply to simpler everyday problems. The organizational mindset just gets more innovative driven. A design culture is an exciting place to work.
Hire Brad for a Design Sprint or Design Thinking Project
Every organization can use Design Thinking to address big organizational challenges with the right tools, method and mindset. We will help your people think in new ways to improve customer experience, products, processes and the bottom line.
People Strategy
To misquote a famous business book author, it’s really all about “getting the right people in the right seats on the bus”.
What is People Strategy?
Different jobs, roles and work have varying levels of complexity that increase along with the time horizon relevant to that particular role or job. The level of any work can be measured logically, any organization should have higher complexity positions managing lower complexity ones regardlesss of position on the org chart.
The distinct levels of complexity of roles match up with with highly-predicatable stages of development that people grow thorugh. By assessing how someone handles complexity today we can:
- Ensure that employees’ potential is optimized by placing them in the right job today;
- Gain an understanding of their ultimate capability a few decades in the future, so that their career path can be optimized.
Matching Souls to Roles
The goal in an organization designed around matching individuals’ capability to handle complexity with their roles at any moment in time, and development systems that ensure you continue to optimize the two as the company and it’s staff grow and change.
Hire Brad to help you re-organize for growth, or to make sure you select the ideal new-hire candidate.
A combination of psychological tests accompanies a bespoke personal assessment. Together this makes sure you get the right people in the right seats on the bus to drive your organization forward.