The Personal Diamond Analysis provides you the opportunity to consider the role of strategy in your
own career and life. The most critical element of a company’s strategy is its ability to develop and
deploy its resources and capabilities in ways that create unique value for its stakeholders. The greater
the value and the more unique it is, the greater and more sustainable the competitive advantage the
company has. The Company Diamond provides a tool for auditing and identifying a company’s source
of unique value.
The most important company that you will direct is a firm I like to call Me, Inc., your professional
career and personal life. The Diamond Analysis gives you a tool to audit and identify your current sources of unique value as well as provide a template for thinking about how you might develop a set of
resources, capabilities, and resulting activities that will create and sustain a personal competitive
advantage.
Phase 1 of the Personal Diamond Analysis invites you to use the diamond model to do an audit of your current diamond profile. What are your driving values (moral, personal, professional)? What resources (assets) and capabilities (processes or skills) do you possess? What unique and value creating activities
result from those resources and capabilities? Reading materials will be provided that give you a list of different types of resources that a company might have, and you can examine those same categories for Me, Inc. The goal of this analysis is for you to create a rich, clear, and documented assessment of your
own strategic position, as it currently exists.
Phase 2 of the Personal Diamond Analysis requires that you think about your future. In what ways do you believe your diamond needs to change in order for you to build, deepen, and sustain your personal competitive advantage? What needs to change for you to more fully articulate and implement your strategy? The goal of this analysis is to develop a clear action plan to help you attain and sustain the strategic goals that matter most to you.
I have deliberately avoided creating a template or set of instructions for doing a Personal Diamond Analysis; the format of this assignment is up to you. You may use the Diamond Template suggested, or you may choose another medium: papers, poems, collages, paintings, photography, videos, short
films, internet websites, music, mission statements, sculpture, tape-recorded speeches, conversations, and even food. Because this type of project invites you to share some deep things about yourself, all materials submitted will be held in strict confidence.
The purpose of this assignment is to allow you space and the opportunity to deeply examine your own personal strategy and you’re unique competitive advantage. 3/4 (75%) of the grade comes from my subjective evaluation of your work, based on a single question: Is there evidence of deep thinking and
reflection (i.e., serious effort) in this project? I am not grading your strategy, but I can evaluate the processes you used to develop and clarify your strategy. The other 1/4 (25%) of the grade depends on presentation and includes elements such as creativity, clarity, succinctness, focus, and professionalism.