David Holmes Consulting: Education, Leadership, Organizational Management

  Unlock your Strategic Plan: Moving from Strategic Planning to Strategic Actions How many organizations have a strategic plan that is currently serving as a very expensive decoration on a shelf or simply a poster on the wall? It’s a common scene in leadership: A room full of sticky notes, high-level visioning by a leadership team, and the energy of a retreat to retool or reorganize. It often happens at this time of year; sort of like a delayed New Year’s resolution; organization style. We walk away with a thick binder, a poster to hang on the wall, and a sense of accomplishment. But then, Monday morning hits along with all the work you missed while at the retreat. The emails pile up, the fires start, and by mid-summer, that brilliant initiative is buried under the weight of daily operations. The majority of strategic plans fail to produce actual intended results. It’s rarely because the logic was flawed; it’s because the execution failed. Too much energy is often put into ideas or...

  Putting Your Money Where Your Mission Is: The Courage of Financial Alignment If you are in a leadership position, you’ve likely sat through countless strategic planning sessions where leadership teams dream big. We talk about innovation, employee engagement, and transformative growth. But then, the budget season arrives, and those big dreams are often stifled by a document that looks very similar to the same document from ten years ago. If you want to know what an organization truly values, don’t just look at the mission statement on the lobby wall. Look at the checkbook ledger. The Myth of Scarcity The most common phrase I hear in leadership circles when changes are suggested is, "We just don’t have the money." Most of the time, that isn’t true. The reality is, most times we have misaligned money. We fall victim to what is often called "Zombie Budgeting"—taking last year’s spreadsheet and simply adding 3% across the board. This keeps legacy programs alive on life...