Spotlight on Strategy: Get to Know Craig Catley

 

At StrategyBlocks we closely follow top business leaders, watching for their leadership styles, best practices and how they lead/steer their companies to success. Until now, however, we have not profiled one of our most inspiring leaders, our very own Managing Director, Craig Catley.

Craig has recently been cited in Global Banking & Finance, M&M Global and SpareMin for his expertise in business strategy principles and execution, and we think Craig has even more expert advice in leadership. After all, Craig heads up our growth strategy for the Asia-Pacific strategy management market and this year we were honored to receive the Asia Pacific Stevie® award for Product Design and Development for B2B products, demonstrating a flavor of his leadership prowess.

Craig is the kind of leader whose office door is always open. His leadership approach – lead from the front – emphasizes the way he values the whole team and makes himself available to enable their success and build mutual trust. This week we sat down with Craig to ask him some of our favorite leadership-related questions, so we could bring you an inside look at the man helping to direct our company success.

For Craig, a keyword is agility. StrategyBlocks targets the ever-changing process of strategic planning. Thus the software is designed to respond with agility to those changes. Responses include graphical shifts for ease of use and ongoing changes to strategy execution paths, something that conventional strategic plans often fall short on.

Craig lives the same strategy. He emphasizes the importance he places on balance, something we see everyday reflected in the time he spends with his family and the availability and assistance he offers our team. When faced with pivots and challenges to the StrategyBlocks platform, Craig responds with excitement and an open mindset. He finds inspiration in the challenges of these types of business opportunities.

For example, Craig mentioned one of his favorite unexpected uses of the StrategyBlocks platform for client, Sport Canterbury. Sport Canterbury is a regional trust charged with developing and delivering sport and physical activity initiatives and events to “get people more active more often.” As you can imagine, they have quite a full plate and were looking to develop and execute on a unified strategy across the region.

When Sport Canterbury wanted to execute a “mud run” across all the schools in the region, StrategyBlocks was there to help them make sense of their results. Though it had never been used to track metrics of a sporting event, the software is agile and sophisticated enough to treat each variable as a KPI and roll up numbers – in this case, number of students and number of participants to instantly measure Sport Canterbury’s success in meeting their goal of getting people active.

Craig’s overall strategy to achieve balance and agility is a simple one: “find balance in what is urgent versus important.”  He sums up how he lives his mantra this way, “Find the right allocation of time to work on things so that most of your time is spent in response, not in reaction, and remain open to what is possible, especially in such an exciting new industry!”