STRATEGY CENTRAL

Right after the honest evaluation of who your customer is, figuring out their root needs is an essential step.  My assessment, lots of organizations don’t have a clue about connecting with the customer they claim to be interested in reaching.  How to fix that issue?  Well, you could just go on with business as usual.  Or you could follow these six steps (from
The Power of Alignment, p. 121):

1. Ask customers what they care about most in terms of your products and services and the way you provide them.
2. Ask customers to prioritize those "care-abouts."
3. Ask customers to be define those care-abouts as specifically as possible.
4. Continue these questions until the root needs are reached.
5. Ask customers to rank each root need.
6. Identify opportunities for improvement.

A few days ago I wrote about the Main Thing, the term used in
The Power of Alignment to describe the organization’s central purpose.  For most of us there is a two-fold challenge.  Arriving at absolute clarity on the essence of what we’re trying to do is the first challenge.  The second challenge is to maintain a ruthless willingness to eliminate distractions that pull us away from the main thing.  Getting to the main thing requires both.

How can you stay on course?  It won’t be easy!  In fact, the reason that most organizations stray from the path is that it is HARD!  It will take a real discipline.  Here are three fantastic questions from
The Power of Alignment that can be used to sharpen daily focus in the pursuit of the main thing:

• Is our strategy the best it could be for optimizing the main thing?
• Do our people understand the strategy and have the proper training and incentives to work for the main thing?
• Are our processes and the ways in which we deal with customers linked to the main thing?

We’ve all heard the great quote, "The main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing!" 
The Power of Alignment uses the idea of the main thing to give definition to the very core idea that you are pursuing.  And in the alignment effort you’ve got to know the business you’re in…and it needs to be crystal clear.  Fuzziness on this issue will make it impossible to align and without alignment your team can’t win.

So the question is, "Do you know what the main thing is for your whole operation?"  I don’t mean your part of the operation.  I mean the whole enchilada.

I think the challenge for most of us is that we’re only seeing our part.  If we’re leading a subset of the whole we may be frustrated at the overall confusion and lack of impact in the mother ship.  If we’re leading the mother ship we may not understand the significance of subset determination to go their own way.  Either way, without alignment it will be impossible to keep the main thing the main thing.

How can you get alignment on the whole thing?  I’ve got to tell you, chapter four of
The Power of Alignment is worth the price of the book.  I’ll be back tomorrow with the breakdown on the basic prescription.

How connected are the people on your team with your strategy?  Is there a legitimate connection between the actions of the people on your team and your strategy?  I picked up a copy of what looks like a book that’s going to help explain some important things. 
The Power of Alignment: How Great Companies Stay Centered and Accomplish Extraordinary Things looks like it’s going to have a lot to say about things like thinking steps not programs.

Alignment is about the junction between vertical and horizontal alignment.  How do you understand vertical?  Vertical is about the connection between your strategy and your team members.  Vertical alignment “energizes people, provides direction, and offers opportunity for involvement (p. 27).”

“Vertical alignment is about the rapid deployment of business strategy that is manifested in the actions of people at work.”

This won’t hit everyone the same but Kent has an interesting take on the top 25 multiplying churches in America.  He’s done a cool thing.  He’s taken the list, produced by Outreach Magazine and aggregated the results with the earlier lists that included the largest, fastest growing, most innovative, or most influential.  This is a fascinating data set.  I love the fact that 17 of the 25 are not found on any of the previous lists!  There is something there.

What’s important about the top multiplying churches?  It’s about propagation.  It’s not just addition.  It’s multiplication, but it’s even more than that.  It’s clearly about influence, but the 17 out of 25 indicates that they’re flying under the radar doing their own thing. 

Be sure and stop over at churchrelevance and check out Kent’s take.

I have a theory.  My theory is that there are basically two groups of people in the world.  Some have a strategic bent and others don’t.  Obviously, there are degrees in between.  But generally, there are two groups.  Given any situation that calls for planning or laying out the steps to a successful launch or roll-out there are some people that just go there intuitively, in some ways coldly examining the possibilities and looking for ways to game the situation.  And the other group looks blankly at the whiteboard like a calf looks at a new gate (how’s that for a little Texas lingo?).

That’s how the theory goes.  You buy it?  Oh…and one more important detail…there’s no right or wrong in this.  It’s a wiring thing.  Like some people can balance a checkbook and others just open a new account and wait for the old one to zero out.  Or some people like everything neatly put away and others are totally ok with a little mess (or a big mess).

So here are the questions of the day:

1. If there were a continuum…and on one end was the word "strategic"…and on the other end was the diet coke of strategy…which end would you be on?
2. Why do you read StrategyCentral?  Do you read it because you resonate with the strategic bent?  Or maybe you like to prime your strategic pump?  Or maybe you’re just an anarchist?  What makes you stop by?

Would you tell me?

Run into the masked man of "that’s not something we do here" in your organization?  Sometimes Seth says it better than anyone else could…makes you realize that our issues are a lot more about how it is EVERYWHERE than we think.  If you’ve ever heard, "that’s not how we do it here" or "we’ve never done it that way before" or "that’ll never work here" you’ve experienced this particular masked man.

In a very short but powerful post today Seth said:

• Most organizations need a good reason to do something new.
• All they need is a flimsy excuse to not do something for the first time.
• And they often need a lawsuit to stop doing something they’re used to.

Oh my…ever feel like what you’re facing is all your own deal?  Well…apparently it’s not the case.  What he’s got to say is worth remembering.  What are you going to do about it?   For starters I think I’ll make a little card and just hand it to the next person that says "we don’t do it that way here."  Thankfully I’m in the kind of place that doesn’t live in that world very often.  But believe me…it seems to be pretty common.

There’s been a lot written lately about Seth’s new book, The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick).  Haven’t seen it yet…but it’s an important idea.

Tripped across a great post today over on Businesspundit about how Sun Microsystems walked away from a huge investment in order to take advantage of a better idea…a better chance of winning, of succeeding in their business.  You probably already see where I’m going.

Think about how many of us are seemingly trapped in doing things a certain way because we’ve already committed to that certain way.  Financially.  Volunteer involvement.  Tradition.

Can you imagine walking away?  Just leaving on the table all of the previous commitments to the old way of operating.  Wow!

The whole story of Sun Microsystem’s walk away decision is in June’s Fast Company.  I love this paragraph:

"For a month, I took a lot of drugs to sleep," says Greg Papadopoulos.
Sun’s chief technology officer is recalling the days after he convinced
his colleagues to scrap a half-billion-dollar investment Sun had made
on a new silicon chip. At a 2002 strategy meeting in McNealy’s office,
as obits were being written for the dotcom era and the company’s stock
price continued to tumble, Papadopoulos argued that the hundreds of
millions of dollars spent developing the chip should be chalked up as
yesterday’s mistake and instead Sun should pony up new money for a
radical new chip design. It was a gamble. "But you can’t find out if you’re right
until you take the risk," Papadopoulos says. He got the green light
(and the sleepless nights), and over the next three years, Sun invested
millions in his bold idea."

Can you imagine?  What is keeping you tied to yesterday’s mistakes?  Even to yesterday’s solutions?  This is where what Peter Drucker called the practice of systematic abandonment comes in.  Want more on the idea?  Check out Abandon Yesterday to Create Tomorrow.

We’ve talked at length about the importance of clarifying the win—shorthand for being clear on what you are going to call success (one of Peter Drucker’s most important questions).  For anything to really succeed you must first reach a kind of clarity on what will be seen as a win.  You really do need to do that first, before you get started.  Why?  Because without clarity, even to do it in print, you will have difficult time remembering what you originally set out to do.  You won’t be as hard on yourself down the road.  And that leads to a kind of settling or compromise that ultimately kills or maims vision.

Great allusion to this idea in Drucker’s recounting of General George C. Marshall’s legendary record of putting the right people in the right places.  To make people decisions Marshall followed a set of five guidelines.  Check out the fifth principle: Make sure the appointee understands the assignment.  Sound familiar?  It’s another way of saying, “clarify the win”.  Drucker takes it to a little more specific place when he writes, “Perhaps the best way to do this [make sure the appointee understands the assignment] is to ask the new person to carefully think over what they have to do to be a success, and then, ninety days into the job, have the person commit to it in writing (April 18, The Daily Drucker).”

What if we did that?  Think it would make a difference?

One of the great distinguishing characteristics in life is the ability to ask good questions.  Some people may have it from the gate.  Most of us have to learn to do it.  Most of us are much more inclined to make statements.  Talk about what we think or believe.  Instead, we need to learn to be great askers of questions. 

One of the great question-askers was Peter Drucker.  Amazing in his ability to formulate the questions that open up a new understanding or clarify the truth.

His questions have driven business effectiveness for several decades.  Think about the significance of these questions for all that you’re trying to do.

• What business are you in?
• Who is your customer?
• What are you going to call success?

If you take the time to really answer these questions…with a genuinely thoughtful attitude…you will find yourself looking at what you do from a new angle.  Be careful to reject pat answers.  Use a whiteboard or a flip chart and really drill down on each one.  Out of that discussion will come some amazing insights.

Insight is the key to impact and differentiation.