Noun The general, overall, or long-term scheme of something, as opposed to the specific details or present preoccupations. I know that one parking ticket isn't important in the big picture, but I'm really annoyed about it right now. You need to focus on the big picture here, and stop getting bogged down in the day-to-day operations. As we continue to hurtle through the Covid-19 pandemic, vaccines are on everyone’s minds. Millions of UK people have now received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine and Christians are asking more questions than ever about the safety and ethics of these vaccines. These are difficult and contentious issues, particularly for the vast.
Every leader knows that they shouldn’t micromanage — even if some of us still do. But while we understand the downsides of micromanaging and taken action to avoid it, we still haven’t sufficiently embraced the upsides of not micromanaging.
The main upside is that leaders have more time to spend on what we call macromanagement. Although there are different definitions of this term floating around, when I talk with executives, I use it to mean managing the big issues rather than the small ones. Time and effort spent on macromanagement enables leaders to be as clear, decisive, and disciplined at the macro level — on the big strategic questions the organization is facing — as their managers are at the micro level, i.e., about how these decisions might be implemented.
So, what are these big strategic questions that leaders aren’t spending enough time on or aren’t answering in a sufficiently clear or disciplined way? They are questions about:
- why the organization exists and what its purpose is
- what it offers (and does not offer) its customers, and how and why this offer delivers value to these customers
- what this produces for the business and for shareholders — the critical outcome metrics by which the organization will be judged
- how the people within the organization will behave — toward customers, other stakeholders, and each other
I don’t know many leaders who would say they don’t think these questions are important. But I know lots of leaders who don’t spend enough time answering them, and even more who don’t answer them with sufficient clarity so their people can then get on with delivering the answers.
Lack of Time Isn’t the Only Reason Leaders Ignore These Questions
A lack of time, too many so-called “priorities,” and the gnawing presence of the urgent masquerading as the important are usually quoted as the main reasons why leaders’ answers to these macro questions aren’t clear enough.
But I suspect an even more fundamental reason is at play here. For the past 30 years, the literature on leadership and empowerment has advised leaders not to be too prescriptive about these questions, lest they undermine employee empowerment. We have been told that participative leadership, rather than prescriptive leadership, is what we should aim for; that organizations should be agile, with “change the only constant”; and that empowerment is critical for employee satisfaction and long-term value.
I agree with the third point: Empowerment is critical. But, as my own research shows, in order to be meaningful, empowerment requires some boundaries, some rules that have been decided on within which empowerment can be exercised. Ironically, in order to truly empower employees, leaders need to be prescriptive, at least about certain things. And these things are precisely the macro questions of why the organization exists, what it will deliver, and how it will behave.
If leaders aren’t providing clarity and certainty about these critical macro questions, then the best, most motivated employees flail in their so-called freedom because they can’t be sure they are doing what leaders want or are using their time and resources in the best way possible. And because they want to do that, they find this lack of prescription stressful — and a huge constraint on them acting in an empowered way. Equally, the less keen and the less motivated on the payroll take this lack of prescription by leaders as license to do what they want (and perhaps what they were already doing), which, of course, may be diametrically opposed to what the leaders had in mind.
You and Your Team Series
Thinking Strategically
4 Ways to Improve Your Strategic Thinking Skills
- Nina A. Bowman
Make Strategic Thinking Part of Your Job
- Ron Carucci
6 Ways to Screen Job Candidates for Strategic Thinking
Making time for such macro questions is not a luxury — it is a necessity. And is it not something that can be delegated or outsourced. Nor is it something that leaders should do only once a year, at the strategy offsite or at the start of the strategic planning round. It needs to become part of their weekly routine.
OK, I Made the Time. Now What?
Once you’ve set aside time on a regular basis to wrestle with these questions, how can you come up with the best possible answers — and refine those answers? Here are some tips from those I’ve seen do it well:
- Make choices in the negative. For everything you decide you want (a particular market positioning, an investment in a new product, a new capability or function), articulate what that means you can’t do. This forces you to think through the consequences of choosing these options by thinking about what the trade-offs are for each choice you are making.
- Pretend you have no money. When organizations are strapped for cash, they have to make hard choices about what to spend money on because they don’t have enough. It’s often during such times that leaders describe themselves as at their most strategic. But it’s easy to diet if someone’s padlocked the fridge — what happens when you get the key back? All too frequently, when the cash starts to flow again, leaders start “choosing everything” again, and it’s this oxymoron that sows the seeds of the next bout of underperformance. Having too many priorities means you don’t really have any, which puts your organization’s implementation capability under strain. It also compromises your own leadership bandwidth, reducing your ability to macromanage. So pretend you’re cash-strapped — it will act as the ultimate constraint on your desire to choose everything.
- Talk to the unusual suspects. These could be inside or outside your organization, but whoever they are, choose them because they are likely to disagree with you, challenge you, or tell you something you don’t know. To ensure you have a ready supply of such people, you may need to look again at your strategic network — it may have gotten too stale to offer you such connections. If that’s the case, weed out the deadwood and actively recruit people from different sectors, skill sets, and backgrounds who can help you test the quality of your macro answers. Questions to ask them include: “Why will this not work?” and “What do I have to believe for this not to turn out that way?” Being challenged and having new information may well change your answers; even if it does not, it will make your existing answers more robust.
- Exist at the macro and micro-levels simultaneously. One of the CEOs I most admire can do this — she goes from 10,000 feet to ground level in 30 seconds, linking her answers to the macro questions (this purpose, this brand positioning, this customer offer) to the micro operational implications for the business. But what she does really well is come back up. Because it is all too tempting, once you have gone micro, to stay there. But the main point of going micro is to test the validity of the macromanagement views you are coming to.
Of course, the prize for middle managers here is huge — once leaders are sufficiently clear and prescriptive about these macro questions, middle managers can get on with implementing them. But the prize for leaders is arguably greater still: They might no longer be needed for the daily grind of managing the business and can instead use their time and effort for the true work of leadership. That is, they can think about the strategic rather than the tactical, focus on the future rather than the present. After all, isn’t that why they wanted to become leaders in the first place?
There are a whole handful of reasons why you may wish to make pictures bigger, including upload requirements for a website or because you’re preparing to print. If you’ve never done it, we’re here to help! If you’re looking to go in the opposite direction, here’s a helpful article on how to make a picture smaller. Luminar is a program that can help with making a picture bigger or smaller, as well as cropping, editing, and organizing your photo library. Sounds like a lot of useful features, doesn’t it? You can give Luminar a try right now by clicking the button below.
Luminar 3 - Time Does Matter
The fastest way to make your photos stand out Complex photo editing made easy with
AI powered tools
- Accent AI 2.0
- AI Sky Enhancer
- More than 70 Instant Looks
- Quickly erase unwanted objects
- Denoise
- Sharpening
- And - More
Basics of making pictures bigger
Why do people want to resize pictures?
Here are some reasons for shrinking a picture:
- It takes up too much space
- It’s not an ideal size for your blog post
- It takes too long to load
Here are some reasons for making a picture bigger:
- To optimize it for printing
- To increase the quality
- To make it look better on the web
- You need a specific image size
Before you enlarge an image, check the properties of the file to see its size. Another tip is to always experiment with resizing using a copy of the original image, especially if you don’t know what the results are going to be like.
Preserving quality
Sometimes when making photos bigger, you may notice some loss of quality. What can you do to prevent it?
Loss of quality usually happens when an image is in the bitmap format. Most JPEG and PNG images are in bitmap format. This means they’re made up of thousands of pixels. Zooming in, you’ll see that those pixels are actually tiny squares. The image is composed of these squares, which are each mapped to a fixed location on the image. This is where the name “bitmap” comes from.
When you resize an image, the software adjusts the size of the pixels according to your needs. When you shrink an image, there’s no visible quality loss because the number of pixels is reduced. However, when you make an image bigger, the number of pixels increases, but the nearest pixels all take up the same color, making the image look blurry and pixelated. That’s why the ideal way to enlarge the photo would be to increase the number of pixels, but detalize them well.
How to make an image bigger in Luminar
Skylum’s Luminar is great editing software that can help you tackle different tasks from adjusting saturation to adding a special look to resizing your photos. Here’s how to enlarge a photo in Luminar.
- First, find the picture you want to resize in your Luminar 3 library. Thanks to the handy organization system, you can find an image by the date you took it or the color tags you assigned with it previously.
- Next, press the keyboard shortcut Shift-Cmd-E for Mac or Shift-Ctrl-E for PC. This will bring up the export menu. There will be options to sharpen or resize the image.
- Click on resize. You'll see options to keep the original size or set the number of pixels for the long edge or short edge. You may also define the size freely by entering pixels for the height and width.
That’s all you have to do. Luminar allows you to store, organize, and edit your photos quickly and intuitively.
Luminar 3 - Time Does Matter
The fastest way to make your photos stand out Complex photo editing made easy with
AI powered tools
- Accent AI 2.0
- AI Sky Enhancer
- More than 70 Instant Looks
- Quickly erase unwanted objects
- Denoise
- Sharpening
- And - More
Enlarge a picture in Lightroom
Here’s how to make pictures bigger in Lightroom.
1. Select your image in Lightroom.
2. Navigate to File –> Export or press Shift-Cmd-E for Mac or Shift-Ctrl-E for PC on your keyboard. The export window will come up.
3. Select the ExportLocation by choosing Specific folder from the drop-down. Next, click the Choose button and select the folder on your computer where you want your enlarged image to go.
4. In File Settings, select the desired format and quality. Note that the higher quality you choose, the larger the file size will be.
5. Under Image Sizing, make sure to check Resize to Fit.
6. In the sections Metadata, Watermarking, and Post-Processing, select the changes that you want to apply.
7. Click Export to finish the process and enlarge your image.
Increase the size of a picture in Photoshop
Here’s how to resize a photo in Photoshop.
1. Open the photo in Photoshop.
2. Click on the Image menu and then click on Image Size.
3. In the Image Size dialog box, make sure the Constrain Proportions box is checked.
4. Adjust the photo size by width or height, entering a larger number.
5. After you’ve entered a new size, press OK.
6. The changes will be applied, and now you need to export your photo if you want to use it for printing or for the web.
Photoshop also gives you the option to adjust the size by adjusting the pixels or the resolution, instead of inches, making an image bigger without loss of quality.
Perfect Resize Photoshop plugin
Perfect Resize is a standalone piece of software as well as a Photoshop plugin that allows you to resize an image smartly. It will cost you money, but if you resize pictures on a regular basis, it’s worth the investment. If you’re using Perfect Resize as a plugin, here’s how to resize a photo:
1. Go to File –> Automate and select Perfect Resize.
2. After Perfect Resize opens, you can choose a preset from the left-hand menu or enter your own size in Document Size.
3. After entering the size, go to File –> Apply and save your image in Photoshop.
4. Export your image.
We recommend using this software if you need to resize pictures frequently and are an expert Photoshop user who uses Photoshop on a daily basis.
How to make a picture bigger in MS Paint
If you use Windows, MS Paint is a program that has probably been in your life since forever. It’s a simple Windows-only program for modifying, resizing, cropping, and performing basic editing.
You can easily use it to make a picture bigger:
1. Right-click on an image file in File Explorer and select Open With –> Paint.
2. Select Image –> Resize/Skew in the main menu.
3. Change the Horizontal and Vertical percentages to something more than 100. Keep the percentages equal to preserve the aspect ratio.
4. Select File –> Save As to save the bigger image.
The perk of this program is that it’s free and comes with Windows, so you don’t have to look for another program elsewhere if you want to learn how to make an image bigger.
How to make a picture larger in Preview
If you have a Mac, Preview is a built-in program that can help you make a picture bigger.
Bigger Picture Bpm
Here’s a quick way to do it:
1. Navigate to the image you wish to resize.
2. Drag the image to the Preview icon in the Dock or Finder.
3. Click the edit button (a square with a pencil) to switch to Edit Mode.
4. Click the Tools menu and select Adjust Size.
5. Change the resolution.
6. Type your desired width and height in the boxes, making the image bigger.
7. Check Scale proportionally to avoid warping the image.
8. Click OK to view the image at its new size.
9. Press Cmd + S to save your changes.
Enlarge a photo in Gimp
Gimp is another piece of editing software that has the ability to make a picture bigger without degrading the quality.
1. Open the image you want to resize in Gimp.
Bigger Picture Quotes
2. Go to Image –> Scale Image. Enter your desired dimensions.
3. Under the Quality section, choose Sinc (Lanczos3) as the Interpolation method and click on the Scale Image button.
4. Export your image for the web.
The perks of Gimp are that it’s simple, easy to use, and free. It’s the perfect software if you want to learn how to make an image bigger. However, it lacks a lot of professional features that you might need if you’re serious about photo editing.
To sum up
This article covered many types of editing software that can help with making photos bigger. There are many plugins and standalone pieces of software that can aid you in this task.
We recommend Luminar because it’s fast, intuitive, and lets you do a quick and efficient job. If you’re hesitant about whether this software is for you, simply download a trial by clicking the button below.
Luminar 3 - Time Does Matter
The fastest way to make your photos stand out Complex photo editing made easy with
AI powered tools
- Accent AI 2.0
- AI Sky Enhancer
- More than 70 Instant Looks
- Quickly erase unwanted objects
- Denoise
- Sharpening
- And - More
Make A Picture Bigger