Last week we wrote about the post recession business climate and how it impacts your business. We further identified ways to assess how the marketplace impacts your business specifically. Knowing is the critical first step, because without knowing the facts, taking meaningful and focused action is unlikely. To quote Oliver Wendell Homes “the greatest thing in the world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving.”
Direction is first revealed by understanding the marketplace and how it impacts your business. But knowing is not doing and doing generates business growth! Once you assess the market and find where you are competitively, you need to set a clear direction. As the Cheshire Cat said to Alice in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: if you don’t know where you want to get to it doesn’t matter which path you take. But for your business it matters, and it matters a lot. So identifying the direction you want to move towards is the critical next step.
The standard approach is to do a strategic plan. But we find that doing a strategic plan often turns out to be an exercise only and shortly thereafter the participants go back to their office to do their real job and revert to how they were doing it up until then.
In setting a strategic direction, we recommend the following Eight Steps:
1) Conduct as strategic visioning session to include:
2) Defining or validating the company vision statement (ideal future state)
3) Defining or validating the company mission (purpose) statement
4) Identify or validate the company values (what’s most important to guide
the work and fashion the climate of the organization)
5) Preparing an implementation plan that is actionable, including tasks,
measures and timelines, and those accountable for them
6) Identifying and implementing the best leadership and management
structure to support the operations to achieve the plan
7) Evaluating progress Quarterly and course correcting when needed
Holding leaders accountable for performance, that is the results they
produce
These eight steps are simple and straightforward. We strongly recommend avoiding complexity in the process. If the strategic plan is complex, unwieldy or convoluted; if the Vision and Mission statements are hard to understand and not easy to remember and articulate; if the Value statements do not honestly reflect organizational values; if there is no or ineffective leadership and no actionable plan and no accountability – success and growth will elude you. As the old saying goes ” a stopped watch (analog of course) is right twice a day. In your business don’t be a stopped watch.
In our Quick Tips this week, we will provide examples of Vision, Mission and Value statements and why simple trumps complex.
Copyright 2011 Kubica and LaForest
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