by Stuart Cross | Dec 13, 2019 | Business Rocks
This week’s focus: When I first became the Head of Strategy for Boots the Chemists in 2000, the UK retailer had just found itself in the middle of a supermarket price war. From a position where Boots had slightly higher prices than the Tesco, Asda and the other...
by Stuart Cross | Dec 6, 2019 | Business Rocks
The garden in our new house is quite large and has many mature trees. It looks great most of the time, but has one drawback: falling leaves. From October through to January, the leaves continue to rain down onto the lawn, patios and driveways. In the past couple of...
by Stuart Cross | Nov 29, 2019 | Business Rocks
In recent days I’ve seen videos on social media of colour-blind people putting on glasses that allow them, for the first time, to see and appreciate colour. The effect is profound and their reaction is emotional; it’s clear that these people’s view...
by Stuart Cross | Nov 22, 2019 | Business Rocks
I’m at a funny age – again – it seems. This year has seen a high in the number of people I know that have retired. Brothers, friends, ex-colleagues are all in the process of swapping their daily commute for a life on the golf course or...
by Stuart Cross | Nov 15, 2019 | Business Rocks
I have been playing the guitar for 37 years. And, to be honest, for 35 or more of those years, I haven’t improved. Over that time, I’ve probably had no more than 10 lessons and so it shouldn’t really surprise me that my attempts at...
by Stuart Cross | Nov 8, 2019 | Business Rocks
Why do over 60% of transformation efforts fail? The reasons are many and varied – cost, excessive complication, insufficient in-house capability and trading downturns are all possible causes. But one reason that is never mentioned is, in my experience,...
by Stuart Cross | Oct 25, 2019 | Business Rocks
I once saw a Dilbert cartoon with the following line: “Stretch goals are like stretch pants, they’re a sign you’ve given up hope.” I thought about that cartoon when Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister, first made his commitment to a deadline...
by Stuart Cross | Oct 18, 2019 | Business Rocks
Last week, Sir James Dyson announced that he was scrapping his company’s electric car project. His decision was criticized in the media and described as a ‘humbling U-turn.’ I disagree. Yes, the decision represented a U-turn, but it was far from...
by Stuart Cross | Oct 4, 2019 | Business Rocks
Our eldest son is due to sit his A-Levels next summer. He’s previously crammed for his exams, but that approach is proving less successful over time. As a result, I’m trying to help him to create a daily routine of learning. For example, he’s...
by Stuart Cross | Sep 27, 2019 | Business Rocks
This is the 200th edition of Business Rocks, which I launched five years ago (following 150 editions of a previous newsletter called Friday Focus). We have a little over 1,000 subscribers (plus those who read it through social media) to Business Rocks – up from...
by Stuart Cross | Sep 20, 2019 | Business Rocks
Where do you go to find best practice? Companies can spend £000s on research to benchmark how they stack up against their competitors and other non-competing businesses. And yet the variation in excellence within an organization can vastly exceed the variations...
by Stuart Cross | Sep 13, 2019 | Business Rocks
I led a strategy meeting with a client this week, reviewing the firm’s current strategy and setting a new over-arching direction. At one point, as the executive team were settling on a particular choice of strategy – to broaden its focus from healthcare to...
by Stuart Cross | Sep 6, 2019 | Business Rocks
Many of my coaching clients complain that they don’t have ‘thinking time’. They struggle to set aside – and keep set aside! – time in their diary for developing new ideas. They moan that they’re just too busy with urgent issues to...
by Stuart Cross | Aug 30, 2019 | Business Rocks
The summer recess is ending for all businesses and it’s back to business as usual. At Westminster, however, the temperature continues to rise as Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, prorogues Parliament (a new word for my vocabulary!). As ever, I’m not...
by Stuart Cross | Aug 2, 2019 | Business Rocks
This week’s focus: One of the biggest things I’ve learned as a football coach is the importance of transitions. These are the points when one team wins possession of the ball from the other. For the team who has just lost the ball, this is a dangerous...
by Stuart Cross | Jul 26, 2019 | Business Rocks
I’ve been working with a consumer brands business where the management team are struggling to decide on the best route to growth. They’re not short of ideas, but they cannot find an effective way to choose between their long list of potential initiatives....
by Stuart Cross | Jul 12, 2019 | Business Rocks
This week’s focus: Instant solutions and quick wins get all the attention. We seem to crave silver bullets, magic pills and overnight successes both in business and life. These successes are great when they happen. I remember during my time at Boots, for...
by Stuart Cross | Jun 28, 2019 | Business Rocks
As you read this, I will (hopefully!) be recovering from an operation to remove a rather large kidney stone. The stone has built up over the years and even though the warning signs were there – I occasionally suffered from pain, particularly when I was...
by Stuart Cross | Jun 21, 2019 | Business Rocks
This week’s focus: When you have leaking pipes in your home, there are a couple of things you can do about it. First, you could call out a plumber to fix the leak, or, second, you could simply place a bucket under the leak, collect the water and empty it every...
by Stuart Cross | Jun 14, 2019 | Business Rocks
Are you an accelerator or a brake? A car needs both an accelerator and a brake. Without an accelerator, you will never move forward, but without a brake, you will quickly find yourself out of control. Similarly, organisations need to have access to both accelerators...
