Videos

5i Strategic Affairs believes in maximizing the value of the knowledge it generates. It invites people everywhere to view and share the following videos that have been created over the past few years.

1) Why is 5i Strategic Affairs called 5i Strategic Affairs? What are the 5is? Click here!

2) How do you really create value at work? Whether you are an engineer, accountant, or in sales and marketing, there is one activity that you spend most of your time doing at work. Guess what it is….Click here!

3) Employees are our Most Important Assets. Many company websites and annual reports state that their “employees are their most important assets”. Yet, few people feel like they are treated as such. By explaining the new organizational value chain, this short video explains the process of value creation and provides a justification for why organizations really should treat their employees as VIPs. Click here!

4) Do you have a reputation as being Strong, Shallow or Criminal ? In different social or organizational circumstances, we may all choose to strong, shallow or criminal. But, be careful! You are building your reputation/brand. What would your colleagues say you are? Click here!

5) Powerful Conversations: If we do have to spend so much time in meetings and other conversations, how can we make sure that we hold the “powerful conversations” that need to be held? Click here!

6) The “Best” Generic Strategic Decision-Making Process there is! This process is named after Michael Mankins, now a partner at Bain & Company, and someone who has invested a lot of time and energy in exploring decision-taking. This model/video condenses his (early) ideas into a single decision-making process, one that we can count on in any circumstance. Here it is…Click here!

7) Why do we take decisions together? After many decades leading strategic planning processes, I can analyze an organization’s competitive situation all on my own and arrive with a pretty good answer as “what should they do to win in the future”. There is only one problem with doing this: It does not work! Click here!

8) Learning from the Future (1) : Strategic decisions play out in the future. They cannot affect what we did yesterday or what we are doing today. The outcomes of a strategic decision taken today might only be seen and felt 1-5 years in the future. So, although it might be useful and increase our comfort if we invest in a lot of market/customer or internal analysis today, what would be really useful is to learn from the future. How can we do that? Click here!

9) Learning from the Future (2): One of the ways to “learn from the future” is to undertake a scenario planning exercise. The entire exercise is designed to lead a management team through a conversation that ends up posing the question: What would we do if?.....Click here!

10) Strategic Planning as a Science/Art: In the past, strategic planning quite rightly earned itself a poor reputation because the process rarely produced the desired outcomes nor real change. The entire process seemed to be obsolete. Senior management who continue to prepare strategic plans in isolation, based upon what they believe will happen in their industry, and who produce documents 50-100 pages thick, get the results their efforts deserve: Almost zero. How can we ensure a strategic planning process is something richly anticipated by staff, that it deals with the real strategic issues faced by the organization and one where maximum value (i.e. change) is generated? Click here!

11) This video presentation, created as part of a series by McGill University's Continuing Studies, explores the idea of "Building 360 Organizational Sustainability" as defined in the article of the same name published in the Ivey Business Journal in Nov/Dec 2009.

12) What are the Three Levels of Consciousness required by leadership in the 2020s? Watch this one-hour webinar recorded for Setym International in May 2020 or this slightly more adventurous and challenging video recorded in August 2020 at Concordia University

13) This February 2022 interactive webinar was created as part of the McGill-McCord Dialogues Series as part of the Bicentential celebrations of McGill University. It explores leadership lessons that were inspired by the McCord's exhibit "Parachute: Subversive Fashion of the '80s" and the efforts of the founders of the iconic Montreal-based company. It explores how other parts of the body, other than the brain, can be sources of knowledge, wisdom and innovation.

14) This is a video of the TV report featured on Azerbaijan Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in January 2023 during my visit to Baku where I gave a training on Strategic Planning to 20 CSOs as part of a UNDP project entitled "Developing an innovation-driven and sustainable civil society in Azerbaijan"

15) There is a crying need for all types of innovation in the public sector around the world. This is a recording of a webinar entitled "Innovating in the Public Sector" presented in collaboration with PAI, London, UK. in April 2023. It shows the 4 different types of public sector innovation and introduces some models and tools which all innovators can use.

* 5i has many short (10-20 minutes) educational videos explaining different strategic management and leadership concepts. At any time, some of these are public and some are private. Some are available upon request. Visit the 5i YouTube channel by clicking here:  5i YouTube