Big Picture Thinking Views

General Goods

The job of management is to focus on the company ’s business within the marketplace<–thatb’s the big picture. Now your thinking has to include the marketplace, the competition, the trends taking place in your industry, the kinds of new skills needed to increase productivity, new technology breakthroughs and new business or marketing strategies to compete successfully.

As an individual performer, nearly 100% of your time has been tacticals–making a contribution to a short term project. New managers will probably spend 10% of their time on big-picture items. The majority of senior executives focus almost completely upon talent development and strategic thinking. Whate’s frustrating to many lower level managers is that thinking is not a tangible task or concrete activity that can be accomplished quickly. As Carol Walker puts it, making time to think, plan and set goals may seem almost self-indulgent. But the further you go up the ladder the more the tactical and strategic percentages will flip-flopi–to as much as 10% tactical and 90% strategic.

Big picture thinking can help us put the strategy back into our marketing efforts. eMarketing requires a different mindset than manual marketing. I know. Itw's hard. We want action. But in order for it to pay off in ways that help you achieve corporate objectives, marketers need to think about the impact of every activity in relation to all others. That_'s what will make all of your efforts pay off in spades.

Kissinger, of course, had his faults as an advisor, not least of which was an overly-large ego. Interestingly, he was and is a very clever wit, and in fact humor and big-picture thinking have always been linked. A good joke goes right to the heart of an issue, and often gives us an unexpected perspective. Back in the 1970s, for example, a journalist asked Kissinger what he thought about the outbreak of war between Iran and Iraq, two countries that were not (and still are not) on very friendly terms with the US. He paused, and replied, ild"Itors"s too bad only one side can lose.ard" For some, that answer rather succinctly summed up how they secretly felt!