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Few of you would choose to do things you are not proud of – personally or in the business environment. However, recent years have seen a period of collective corporate madness, which seems to have started in the mid 1980s and appears to be ending now.

Risk management isn’t the most exciting part of running a business, but it’s crucial to realise just how important it is to get the balance of risk right. Too little risk and you can run a significant risk in itself – that your business does not grow or develop its full potential. Too much of it and you run the risk of losing everything, or at least, more than you’d like!

From the myriad models of leadership, we offer our own three-dimensional approach as a valuable perspective from which to think about, reflect on, and implement leadership. Leadership, we believe, can be explored usefully through three aspects: strategy, performance and culture.

What does it take to get the best clients? We think you’ll be surprised at how simple the list can be. And how straightforward the actions are, as long as you commit to them and work at them.

What, you might think, does ‘Zero Tolerance’ – policing that allows no crime or anti-social behaviour to be overlooked – have to do with my business? There are a number of ways in which the principle can be helpful when you’re managing change. As your company develops, you will face a moment when you choose between what you’ve done before and what you might achieve in the future. The easy route is to ‘stay the same’ – but in fact no business ever stays the same, and if you don’t make positive changes at the right moment, the prognosis for your business won’t be good.

Most of us when we are young find it difficult to think more than a short time ahead. As we mature we may begin to think a bit further ahead. Many organisations seem to struggle to think much beyond the next quarter. A few, often the more successful ones, might be looking five, ten or even more years ahead. Governments rarely get the chance to think more than one electoral cycle ahead.

Your organisation’s culture needs to change along with any strategic changes – but often it gets left behind, resulting in a ‘disconnect’ between the two. The purpose of your business culture should be to support the delivery of the strategic objectives, but it can’t do that if it’s not in line.

Creating a Strategy is a lot easier than you might think. People make strategy much harder than it needs to be. Some focus too much on the tools: environmental scans, SWOT analyses, customer analyses, competitor analyses, financial modelling, and so on. Others think it’s all about broad, conceptual, future-oriented, big picture stuff. Others think that strategy is what happens when they think about changing direction.