I’ve noticed something lately with my three-year old son Blake. It’s about his outlook on life. When one of us asks Blake how he is doing, he always yells “GREAT!” We didn’t teach him that. He is just kind of wired that way and it puts a smile on my face every time I ask […]
With my forty-odd years of sitting in on business meetings, I have found one thing to be true: people like to talk. They like to share. And they have lots of ideas when you get them going. Now this inherent capacity of human beings for expressing their thoughts can be viewed as a strength. But […]
To fully understand the power of the Compression Planning® model, we have to go back to its origins. I was recruited to design and lead one “last-ditch effort” to save a parochial high school in Austin, Minnesota (population 23,000). The previous year’s fund-raising efforts brought in $60,000 and spent $40,000 to do it over a […]
I recently read that one-minute spent planning a business meeting will save 10 minutes of the same meeting. To me, it seems more like 1 to 50, or 1 to 100, in many cases. For more than 36 years, I’ve been dumbfounded by how executives and board meeting members can sit through endless, unproductive, and […]
Strategic planning is answering core questions. I was coaching a friend about a CP session she was leading with a cattleman’s association. We got into a subject I wish I’d recorded and had transcribed, because it would make an interesting special report or e-book. The subject of the conversation was about vision and mission statements, […]
Dr. Mary Brumbach, CFRE, Associate Vice Chancellor, Strategic Initiatives, Dallas County Community College District (DCCCD) did the best job of Background for a Trustees’ retreat I’ve seen. Without exception. Best job for any CP session ever. Here are the infographics Mary used with the DCCCD Board of Trustees: Demographic Issues Economic and Workforce Issues Poverty […]
What do you do when you have too many pre-identified items competing against each other? My friend Don Moyer (ThoughtForm Design, Pittsburgh) invented a way to do Compression Planning® which saves him immense time. Don’s method is for times when you have a finite number of ideas, solutions, options already defined that need to be […]
Is there anyone out there who doesn’t love a magic trick? Young or old, innocent or cynic, there’s something just plain fun about the ridiculous joy of being deluded into believing that rabbits really DO come out of the hat, or the coin really DOES come out of an ear, or the girl in the […]
Helen McNellis My Mother passed away Sunday morning, December 22, 2013. She was 2 months shy of 99 years of age. She led a life full of curiosity, wonder, spontaneity, awe and joy over the simplest of things. If I were to present Mother with a trophy, it would be “World’s Best Listener.” She would […]
Don’t call it Compression Planning® unless you plan to take Action! One of the struggles we hear from some graduates of the Compression Planning® Institute is We never seem to get past the FOCUS stage in the Master Planning Model. What can we do differently to make it through the entire model?” Here are my […]
