When Good Strategies Go Bad: Tools to Improve Strategically Critical Relationships September 18, 2008

Behind many a failed strategy lurks the same culprit: toxic business relationships. These relationships prevent leaders from making decisions in the best interest of their companies or from acting on good decisions fast enough to ensure superior performance. When leaders spend more time quarreling than getting things done, even the best firms eventually fail. Still, anytime you put a group of leaders together to determine the future direction of a company, you’re bound to confront conflicts that go beyond facts to call into play people’s values, beliefs, and interests. Before long these conflicts trigger tensions among leaders that slow decision-making down and unravel even the best laid plans. Yet without the proper tools for analyzing and altering problematic relationships, all you can do is throw your hands up and hope for the best. This session will introduce a set of tools you can use for targeting and addressing relationships that will make or break the success of a firm.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN AND TAKE AWAY FROM THIS SESSION
- How to identify and assess strategically critical relationships.
- How to systematically analyze and alter relationship patterns.