STRATEGY CENTRAL

Like many of us, I am a student of the language of ideas. How to say it in just the right way is the essence of great communication.  Without the right language it can never be more than directional.  For anything to be inspirational…language is an essential element.

Need an example?  Take a moment to read this manifesto.  It was developed by GWP as part of their pitch to secure the ING Direct account as they prepared to launch in the United States.  This kind of pitch must show that the branding company absolutely gets the core idea.  As you read it, listen for how it might apply to your organization:

We are new here.  There has never been a time like this before.  Our name is ING Direct.  Our mission is to help people take care of the wealth they make for themselves in ways that fit this new time.

We will be fair.  We will constantly learn.  We will change and adapt and dwell only in the present and in the future.

We will listen.  We will invent.  We will simplify.  We will never stop asking why, or why not.  We will create wealth for ourselves, too.  But we will do this by creating value.

We will tell the truth.  We will be for everyone, except those who are truly served by the old way (I love that line!)

Because we aren’t conquerors.  We are pioneers.  We are not here to destroy.  We are here to create.

We will never be finished.

We are not a bank.  We will never be a bank.  But we will be what a bank would be if it began tomorrow and asked simply, “What if we started over?” (I really love that line) (p. 77, The Orange Code)

I can’t speak for you.  I don’t know about your organization.  But I do know this…there is an aspirational element in this that’s at the heart of what needs to be rediscovered in many, many organizations.

“We will be what a ________ would be if it began tomorrow and asked simply, “What if we started over?”

By the way, this concept is related to the Andy Grove idea referred to here, here, and here.  And if you’re new to StrategyCentral…you can sign up to get my updates right here.

Think about the programs and products you are currently offering.  Think about the experiences you are currently offering to your customers. 

I know you might struggle to think about what you offer as program or product.  You may even have a little righteous indignation thinking about the word customer.  But if you want your organization to matter to the next generation of customers you need to spend some time thinking this way.

Reading Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience, and Brand Value I tripped across this line:

“The services that product brands provide to their current customers were designed and developed to satisfy the lifestyle and values of their past customers (p. 122, Design Thinking).”

Go back and think again about all that your organization is offering.  Got it clearly in your mind’s eye?  Now ask yourself…how much of what you’re offering is designed to appeal to the people who aren’t your customers yet?

Craig Groeschel’s insightful comment that “If you want to reach people that no one else is reaching, you’re going to have to do things that no one else is doing” is born out of this understanding.

Perpetuating the programs and products…the experiences…that were designed to appeal to today’s customers, will eventually result in a disconnect.  To the extent that you’re offering programs, products and experiences that were designed to appeal to yesterday’s customers…the disconnect has already happened.

You can pick up your copy of Design Thinking right here.

Sometimes you can tell from the name of something what it’s all about.  I think you can tell from the name of StrategyCentral that I think having a strategy, thinking strategically, and action strategically are all pretty central to effectiveness.

And yet, it’s not enough to have a strategy…even a beautifully worked out one.  Acting on it…that is the key.  So I love this Tom Peters quote:

I … do not denigrate the usefulness of a thoughtful strategy. It’s just that it is … Crystal Clear (to me!) that strategy is in fact unequivocally subordinate to Execution Excellence/Execution Mania/Bias for Action.

Yep.  That pretty well sums it up.  You can have the best strategy, you can even frame it and put it up on the wall, but if you’re not executing…it’s just artwork.

By the way, I’m subscribed to Tom Peters’ daily quote by email.  You can get it on it right here.

One of the most important ongoing conversations a leader has is the one that keeps the mission on the front burner.  As this critically important conversation becomes less frequent or more muddled the likelihood that the mission is accomplished decreases.  How do you have the conversation?  I say “all the time and in as many ways as possible.”

My default way is to find stories or metaphors that graphically illustrate the mission.  I loved this paragraph from Will Mancini’s Church Unique:

“Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that the church is only the church when it exists for others.  What keeps your church focused externally?  Who do you think the most important person is to the Coca Cola company?  The consumer?  Which one?  The coke drinker?  Nope.  It’s actually the Pepsi drinker (p. 123).”

That is a great way of thinking about mission.  Unless you’re in the business of caring for the already convinced you’ve got to be focusing on the unconvinced.  If success has anything to do with reaching new customers…you better keep that mission in front of your team all the time.

By the way, one of the earliest posts here at StrategyCentral was about carbonation in churches.  Like the line here about the most important person being a Pepsi drinker, the story in this early post is one I’ve told a thousand times.  It’s all about mission.

“To reach people no one else is reaching we must do things no one else is doing.”

That line seems like a no-brainer.  Obvious.  And yet, when I heard Craig Groeschel say that at Willow’s Leadership Summit last year I scrambled to write it down and then had trouble thinking about anything else for the rest of the day.

“To reach people no one else is reaching we must do things no one else is doing.”  Got it.  Definitely.  Makes a lot of sense.  If what you’re doing right now is not reaching the people you’re trying to reach…then you’d probably want to try something different.

I want to figure out how to do that, which is why this diagram from Change by Design by Tim Brown leaped off the page when I saw it.

Here’s the gist.  When you’re preoccupied with the needs of your existing customers…you’ll focus your attention on providing incremental improvements.

If you want to do anything beyond the status quo, you’ll need to begin making evolutionary changes (extending beyond existing offerings or adapting to reach new users).

Really, Groeschel was referring to revolutionary innovation.  Maybe we find it difficult to reach people no one is reaching because we’re unwilling to go to the lengths of creating new venues and new methods that are beyond incremental.

Reacting to Craig Groeschel’s line, Andy Stanley said, “You can change the music, the style, dress different and take out the pews, they still aren’t going to be reached.”  If you want to reach people no one else is reaching, you’re going to have to do things no one else is doing.  You’re going to have to create.  Incremental change will never get it done.

How does arriving where you’ve already been sound?  Depends I guess.  If you like where you’ve been, you might want to go there again.  After all, there are places we’ve been that we love going back to.  At the same time, as a metaphor for vision…most of us are dreaming of arriving somewhere we’ve never been.  And arriving where we’ve already been is the last thing we’d set out to do.

And yet…when it comes to strategic planning, we’re often hung up by the fears of the agents of status quo who prefer consistent, predictable outcomes.  “Will it pay for itself?”  “Will we get buy in from the core?”  “Are you sure this will work?”  Sound familiar?  These are the sound bites of those seeking reliability and “the goal of reliability is consistent, predictable outcomes (p. 37, The Design of Business).”

On the other hand, if you’re dream of arriving somewhere you’ve never been, a desired objective,…then you’ll be looking for a different route than you’ve taken so far.  You’ll be looking for a path that goes to a different place than you’ve been before.  That route or path is found in the search for validity, not reliability.  And the discovery of what is actually valid is the only way to get from where you are to where you want to go.

Keeping an eye on the effectiveness of strategy is essential.  Clarifying what a win is and launching strategic steps designed to produce that win are essential to organizational success.  Evaluating effectiveness is just as important.

Have you ever slowed down long enough to evaluate whether your strategy is actually working?  Most organizations never really get around to it.  Why?  I’m finding Roger Martin’s The Design of Business very helpful in teasing out one of the most basic reasons.

It has to do with the fact that most organizations that have had any amount of success become really good at repeating the steps that led to their previous success.  In a sense, they’ve refined and perfected a set of procedures that successfully produce a certain product.  Martin refers to this as developing an algorithm (an explicit, step-by-step procedure for solving a problem).

The advantage that an algorithm offers is significant.  In the same way McDonald’s produces a quality product with very little variation, developing effective strategies that can be used again and again make it possible to repeat previous success.  The dependability of the algorithm reduces the risk that operator quirks will derail the effectiveness of the organization.  The organization can produce what the customers wants every time.

As long as what the customer wants doesn’t change.

What happens when what the customer wants changes?  You’d better go back to the drawing board and develop a new strategy.  What do most organizations do?  Keep running the same algorithm and hope the outcome was a fluke or that customers will come to their senses and return to seeing the world as it used to be.

“What organizations dedicated to running reliable algorithms often fail to realize is that while they reduce the risk of small variations in their businesses, they increase the risk of cataclysmic events that occur when the future no longer resembles the past and the algorithm is no longer relevant or useful (p. 43, The Design of Business).”

Scary?  Should be.  See yourself?  Hope not.  What do you need to do if you realize that your organization’s future no longer resembles the past?  Don’t hope for a mindset change on the part of the customer.  Go back to the drawing board.  Begin developing a better understanding of your customer.  Tip?  The people you’re currently reaching are not the customer you ought to be trying to reach.

Think you know what actually is?  Last Friday’s 20/20 featured an interesting segment highlighting a conversation with Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, authors of SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. Turns out there’s a lot more to the global warming story and that Al Gore’s effort to reprogram the tendencies of 6 billion people (or at least those of the developed planet) might be better spent another way.  Or at least…if you buy the ideas of Levitt and Dubner.

What caught my attention in the 20/20 segment was a short comment uttered by Steven Levitt.  In response to a global warming question by Elizabeth Vargas, he said, “Forget about what you want to true.  Forget about what you fear may be true.  Let’s just look at what actually is happening.”

If you’ve been along for the ride here at StrategyCentral you can probably guess where my mind went.  Truth is, in your organization and mine, there are some assumptions we hold…many of them unexamined…that are just not true.  End of the day some of us are holding onto ideas that are really not true.  Some never were.  Some were true for a time and then changes in the culture, changes in society, changes in the external environment caused a shift and whether we acknowledge it or not…our current viewpoint just doesn’t hold water.

What is the assumption you desperately need to examine?  There may be several, but if you were to go back to the drawing board and look at one…what would it be?

Every organization has underlying assumptions that need to be examined.  Why?  Because unexamined assumptions are often at the root of issues that come back to haunt organizations everywhere.

If you haven’t heard this portion of Andy Stanley’s talk, “Recent Random Thoughts on Leadership,” this becomes required listening for today.  You can listen in right here.

When was the last time you examined your assumptions?  How about your organization’s assumptions?  An assumption, you remember,  is a fact or statement taken for granted.  Why do assumptions need to be examined?  Looking back at history, it’s easy to see many that turned out to be nowhere near correct.  For example, the earth is not flat and the sun doesn’t orbit the earth.  Hindsight and a more accurate understanding of science has made it easy to spot these invalid assumptions and call them for what they are: old wives’ tales.

What about assumptions that are less scientific in nature?  Say, for example, the underlying assumptions that drive the decisions in your organization?  Have you ever slowed down long enough to carefully examine them to see if they’re still true?

I’ve been reading Stall Points by Matthew S. Olson and Derek Van Bever, a study of Fortune 100-sized companies that looks for the reasons behind growth stalls.  The companies in the study had experienced prolonged healthy growth, reached a point in time, and then suddenly gone into free-fall.  Some recovered and returned to previous strength.  Many have not.  The list is long but many of the names are familiar.  Levi Strauss, Apple, IBM, 3M, Sears, Kmart, etc.

Simply put, a stall point is “a distinct downward inflection in the growth rate that, for the most part, is a one-time event with lasting consequences (p. 32).”

What led to their stall points?  In large part, unexamined assumptions that were no longer correct.  Unlike the prevailing notion that the earth was flat, the assumptions that led to the stall points in many of these organizations had been true at one time…but were no longer true.  Examples would be IBM’s 1968 assumption that personal computers would “never meet the demands of core mainframe customers” or Apple’s 1988 assumption that “higher profit margins justifies ceding market share (p. 40-41).”

So those are examples of unexamined and invalid assumptions at IBM and Apple.  Obviously, both companies have recovered.  I’ve written previously about North Point’s effort to re-examine all of its assumptions.

What might be an assumption you are making in your organization?  For more on this topic you might want to take a look at Ready To Go On An Assumption Hunt?