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Paul Sparrow
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Recent Posts
5 AI Trends Every CEO Must Act On
Earlier this year, I shared takeaways from Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report, which showed how AI is reshaping business at a macro level. Building on that, Google Cloud’s 2025 AI Trends highlights five forces that will directly impact companies in the year ahead.
AI is no longer experimental. It is restructuring markets, reshaping customer expectations, and redrawing competitive boundaries. Here are five AI trends CEOs are preparing for now:
Supercharging Your SWOT, Step Two: Activating Your SWOT
Tue, Oct 3, 2017 — Congratulations! If you’re reading this blog, you’ve mastered the art of collecting the data for your SWOT (strengths/weaknesses/opportunities/threats) analysis, and have grouped similar concepts into manageable chunks of information. At many enterprises, this is where the SWOT work dies — leaving company executives with a keen understanding of the state of their business, but lacking a clear path to rendering the findings actionable in an effort to foster real change. Think of the Starship Enterprise never returning from years of space exploration — all that knowledge and data stored in the ship’s memory banks and officer logs, yet nobody ever does anything with it.
Supercharging Your SWOT: Three Steps to Turning Yours into Actionable Business Impact
Mon, Sep 25, 2017 — I’d like to start this blog by offering my hearty congratulations. Having recently completed your SWOT Analysis — that fundamental exploration of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats related to your business — and declared it a masterpiece, you now have entered a warm and fuzzy zone known as “After the SWOT.”
Keeping it Real: The Next Four of 10 Reasons Why Your SWOT is Really a SWAG
Mon, Oct 17, 2016 — Let’s keep it real: While myriad technology-driven changes have garnered much of our strategy-related attention and interest over the last several years, the need to evaluate an organization’s fundamental strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats is more important than ever.
Let’s Get Real! Three of 10 Reasons Why Your SWOT is Really a SWAG
Mon, Oct 10, 2016 — I once experienced a recurring dream where I stood at the front of Mrs. Streebeck’s fifth grade class, completely unable to speak. “Where is your homework, Mr. Sparrow?” the teacher asked. The shame and guilt of being unprepared caused my throat to tighten and my vocal chords to freeze. It was horrifying. Never mind that in the nightmare I was also fully exposed—buck naked, as we say in the South—but that’s not the point. Even if tucked away in my subconscious, I’ve always been mortified of being unprepared. Most of you reading this post feel the same way – and that’s why you’re here.
Blending, the “Brady” Way: Six Steps to Post-Merger Harmony
Mon, Mar 28, 2016 — If you grew up in the same era as me, your mission-critical Friday night objective included tuning into “The Brady Bunch,” one of my favorite childhood television shows. Greg and Marsha Brady’s predicaments paled compared to the pickles my siblings and I often found ourselves in -- yet the Brady kids – forced into sibling union by the wedding of Mike and Carol, seemed to navigate American life of the 1960s and 70s with relative ease (despite losing Bobby and Cindy briefly on a Hawaiian island and surviving an ill-fated attempt to form a family band).
Closing the Small to Mid-Sized Company Merger – Is It Too Risky to Ink the Deal?
Thu, Mar 17, 2016 — In our previous post, we lit the fuse on the concept of how a merger or acquisition may be beneficial when swashbuckling one’s way through the uber-competitive marketing landscape of the present. By making it this far, you may have decided that this strategy may be prudent -- especially now that you know when and why you might consider M&A for your company. So let’s now take a look at the downside of such an initiative—the “glass-half-empty scenario.”