Mark L Thompson

Strategic Thinking: the Pure and Simple power tool for achieving competitive advantage and exponential results
Are you spending your time, day after day, striving to fit old insights to the current marketplace environment? Are you critical of the tactics and execution of last year’s plans without pausing to validate your strategy in the first place? Could your routine Strategic Planning exercises possibly be just a waste of time?

A survey in the Wall Street Journal listed Strategic Thinking as the key to success for corporate executives, while also revealing only 3 of 10 think strategically, resulting in the development of benign strategies that lack effective execution. Can your organization move beyond simple Strategic Planning to generate new insights and develop a Strategic Thinking mindset?

It is possible for your business to begin to benefit from Strategic Thinking right now. B2B Strategist and noted authority on Strategic Thinking, Mark L. Thompson is a self-described “Problem Finder” who inspires audiences with this talk about using Strategic Thinking as a guide to imagine and achieve all that is possible for the future of your business.

Producing uncommon strategic results is Mark’s trademark, and he brings his extensive experience, insight, creativity, and analytical methods to audiences in this talk explaining how to profoundly change the game and tilt the playing field to your advantage by starting to think strategically.

Through one-on-one discussions, Mark finds the unique situation and business environment of the particular audience in attendance, and customizes each talk so it’s tailored to suit. Building relationships first Mark then applies the appropriate strategies for CEOs and SMT teams with a process called Strategic Thinking: The Pure and Simple powerful tool for achieving sustainable competitive advantage and achieve exponential results. Utilizing actual case studies, audiences learn how three completely different companies applied Strategic Thinking and began to achieve greatly improved financial performance by thinking differently about their companies.

“You have to master your strategy to master your business”, and that can begin today!

How Winning Companies Outpace Their Competitors with Strategic Product Innovation
When the greatest competitive advantage comes from introducing new-to-the-market products and services, why do organizations spend the largest share of their innovation budget on enhancements to products and services that already exist? Is your company spending (wasting?) valuable resources on “me-too” offerings instead of investing to deliver truly new innovations?
Effective product innovation is the key to growth - even survival - for any business, and top-performing companies share specific, common characteristics for developing and introducing new products faster and cheaper than their competitors. For any organization, industry, or individual who wants to avoid corporate stagnation and gain insights, this talk highlights the best areas to search for new product ideas, and will inspire with practical, business-changing insights gleaned from the best.

It is possible to exceed innovation objectives and attribute a larger percentage of your company’s revenue from products and services that did not exist four years ago. Develop the strategy for product innovation within every single member of your team and outpace your competitors.

How Mentally Tough is Your Leadership Team?
Is your management team solution-focused and thriving, or are they instead stuck, dwelling on losses, surprises, and being out-maneuvered by the competition? Are they setting the pace for your industry and thinking about how to deliver results or are they merely surviving, making excuses for why corporate performance is lacking? The good news is we are all mentally tough - resilience is expressed in a matter of degrees. Many leadership teams just have not dedicated themselves to developing mental toughness, resulting in decision-making paralysis and poor execution of strategy.
In this series, critical thinker and strategist Mark Thompson explores what it means to develop mental toughness: How to keep centered on what you want to achieve and to not let self-doubt creep in. How to become critical thinkers and operate from a fact-based data-driven state of mind. How to reason and make decisions unclouded by emotion. How thought controls behavior. How the secrets used by the Navy Seals, professional athletes, and recognized entertainers will realign focus, inspire performance, and amplify greatness.

During his extensive work assisting Fortune 500 companies with implementing a strategic thinking approach to their organizations, Mark has worked with leadership teams to develop the skills to manage emotions, revise attitudes, and control behaviors in high-performance situations, all to develop resilience. Cultivating an understanding of the concept of resilience can increase the number of people who use challenging experiences in their lives as catalysts to make improvements. Discipline is the action step of mental toughness, and mental toughness delivers success!