Elephants in the room are out, going forward

FROM the Desk of Fred Sproggs, Director, Strategic Planning Solutions: "Welcome to 2010, co-colleagues!

New Year resolutions start yesterday with a crackdown on meaningless management jargon. I'm making a personal start with 'elephant in the room'. In leading newspapers and journals last year, 3,700 elephants were reported as being in rooms, up from 175 in 2000. As there cannot be that many elephants to go round in this company, I'm calling for a paradigm shift going forward. Elephants in rooms are no longer low hanging fruit at our executive meetings. Now's the time for managers to break out of their department-speak silos and go for holistic, out-of-the-box thinking. We don't need to boil the ocean. But if we're to be best of breed, we need to gain traction on our strategic delivery solutions. In short, we need a quantum leap from the bottom up, going forward.

Mission critical to the company this year will be pushing the envelope in our core competencies. Let's draw inspiration from the weather and 'Think Grit': go granular and get traction on our step change programme. 'Think Grit' is getting our torches pointing in the same direction and being first off the taxi rank in chasing sustainable stakeholder targets. When the rubber hits the highway we've all got bandwidth to spare. So, please, no more elephants in rooms, or there'll be a flea in the ear from me, going forward.