Category: Strategy

In these distressed times, should your company be focused on more than its survival? While this approach may get you through months of struggle , it could be the recipe for your eventual demise.

Many executives are exhausted. All they can do each night is drag themselves from their laptops to their beds. The demand to keep their organizations afloat is at its peak and they give it their all: energized by the immediate challenge.

But lurking in the background is a future they believe they just don’t have time to consider. In fact, they see energy spent focused on the long term as a competitor to the job of saving their organization from destruction. It’s something to put off for later, when more hours become available.

However, if articles like the Board of Innovation’s “Low Touch Economy Report” are to be believed, there are permanent changes underway. Economic, health and behavioral trends are overtaking Jamaican economies. Some just won’t make it.

The fact is, there is a long term, low touch reality that COVID-19 has imposed on us. Consequently, companies which are too busy, distracted or weak to re-define themselves are going to lose. In effect, they have focused on an old habit: developing coping tactics rather than breakthrough strategies. This is a favorite excuse of local executives who scoff at looking at anything other than short-term tactics because “things change so fast.”

Their need to be right about their predictions clouds their judgement. They don’t understand that envisioning a preferred future is all about choosing a specific long-term outcome, rather than allowing circumstances to dictate it.

Case in point: GraceKennedy’s 2020 vision, created back in 1995/96. While there have been numerous devaluations, recessions, hurricanes and pestilences in the last 25 years the company is currently celebrating the successful completion of the two+ decade effort. Significantly, the competitors who failed to engage in the same exercise have either shrunk, collapsed or disappeared into other industries. The company’s P/E Ratio, profits and shareholder value have made quantum gains.

As Douglas Orane, former CEO, shared in a recent webinar, the vision led the company to stay focused even in turbulent times. Having a pre-defined, 25 year outcome helped allay fears when a number of rude surprises popped up.

However, the act of creating a credible 20-30 year vision is just one (necessary) element of a breakthrough strategy. Here are two others you could use.

Crossing Functions

While it’s possible for your CEO/MD to create a breakthrough strategy on his/her own, or hire consultants to do the same, there’s a pitfall. No single person (or outside outfit) is able to understand the limits of what can be implemented in your company.

The number of potential bottlenecks which exist are numerous. In an organization of 50 people or more, there are facts which cannot be known by those at the top which must be included in the deliberations.

Furthermore, excluding your leaders from the process means that they will have to be sold (or told) at a later date. They would need to understand the underlying rational for the strategy, then convinced to play their part.

Unfortunately, even if they do their best, their second-hand knowledge is likely to become an impediment. In other words, you would not produce a breakthrough strategy.

Crossing Levels

Now more than ever, it’s important for your organization to include employees at multiple levels.

Without their inclusion, your company would probably just take the lazy approach: use what has worked in the past, then project it into the future. For most companies, these coping tactics offer little more than a continuation of business-as-usual.

COVID-19 offers you a significant opportunity. This is a global pandemic: a once in a lifetime chance to engage workers in a grand reset. The fact is, staff is already concerned about the future of their organization and your leaders should leverage this attention.

But how can this be done at scale?

Use focus groups and surveys to poll employees regarding their view of the future, and the role the organisation should play. While every staff member may not have an insightful opinion, my experience shows that the act of asking for input is, by itself, empowering. Furthermore, it grants each of your people a certain level of respect.

Ultimately you’ll demonstrate that the organization isn’t relying on a few (older) leaders to produce a breakthrough. Instead, it’s everyone’s job: a way for each person to arrive at the future destination (like GraceKennedy 2020) and say “We have done it ourselves.” If those who achieved such results are to be believed, this is the kind of inspiring outcome that people long to experience.

What’s an easy step to begin your company’s digital transformation? This may sound simplistic: Start by collecting your customers’ contact information.

Why is this a powerful place to begin?

Think of what it’s like to meet someone for the first time and quickly develop a romantic interest. In order to develop a multi-faceted relationship in which you could get to know each other, you need contact information. It’s a signal that you want to go further than the immediate moment, in order to learn more about his/her life and vice versa.

After all, who wants to date someone who is one-dimensional? And who wants to do business with companies that can only do one thing?

The best organizations understand the need to go much further: instead, they re-invent themselves using the idea that companies offer several categories or dimensions of offerings.

Four Dimensions

1. a product – a tangible or digital object.

2. a service – an act performed on the customer’s behalf.

3. a relationship – a partnership for mutual gain.

4. a transformation – a learning experience which improves the customers’ intrinsic capabilities.

For example, a company that sells exercise equipment (a kind of product) could add offerings such as:

– assistance in helping customers set up their home gyms safely and efficiently (a service)

– two months of participation in a weight-loss boot camp with a group of similar people (a relationship)

– a training programme that teaches them how to vary their exercise regime with age (a transformation)

These three additional dimensions can be used to convert a single, momentary transaction into an ongoing source of revenue. It may seem paradoxical, but a company which thinks about these dimensions is more likely to ask for contact information. Why is that? Like serious dating, knowing how to reach the customer is the way for them to build a mutually beneficial, multi-faceted relationship.

However, here’s the baffling reality: most companies don’t even ask for this information. Instead, they focus on whoever happens to walk in next,

If your organization isn’t executing this important function, perhaps one of the reasons below might apply.

1. The Overall Mission is Lacking

Asking for contact information from a stranger is a delicate matter. It’s somewhat intrusive, and a customer service representative (CSR) in your company who can foresee a possible rejection is likely to skip this step. Why?

More often than not, they simply don’t appreciate the importance. After all, the person who wants the data is far away in your marketing department. The CSR doesn’t report to them and has probably never been given the big-picture point of view.

Consequently, when the customer asks, “What do you want my contact information for?” they are met with a blank look. Your CSR’s have not been prepared with an answer.

2. The Means Aren’t Provided

A company that provides its staff with only a clipboard, paper and pencil to collect contact information has done the bare minimum. However, it creates a problem for someone who must enter the data at a later date. Furthermore, they send a signal to the customer that the effort isn’t a serious one.

Instead, your organization should set up a landing page on its website, and supply its staff with a tablet or smartphone to be used on the spot. This solves many problems at once and allows the customer to receive a response in real-time.

3. A Focus on Mass Marketing

In most companies, the marketing department hasn’t made the transition to thinking about its customers as the single best source of future business. Instead, your company may still see advertising to the public as the primary channel. However, if it were to make the switch, then finding more about customers’ specific, future needs would be a critical objective.

Reconsider the case of the gym equipment store. If the managers have a hard time imagining services, relationships and transformations to offer, then it could simply ask its past customers: “Thanks for shopping with us. We are interested to know what you might want next in your journey towards a fitter version of yourself. Please answer a few questions to help us meet your needs.”

As ordinary as these ideas may sound, I can’t think of three local companies who use them. Even those who have my information don’t contact me as a prior customer: I find out about their offerings from the newspapers, television or internet.

I imagine that they are wasting millions, reinventing one campaign after another, chasing after the same members of the public each time. The solution to this dilemma? Collect contact information from their customers and use it to develop deeper relationships. This approach may kick-start the digital transformation that keeps them alive.

There’s a whole school of thought which states that boards should leave strategic thinking to executives. Instead, board members should only provide oversight. Does this point of view have merit?

The COVID pandemic has thrown companies’ strategies in disarray, whether they are NGO’s, public or private sector organizations. Suddenly, reliable bedrock beliefs have been suspended as evidence pours in that a new normal is being born.

Too many boards are caught off-guard. Believing that strategic concerns are the purview of executives, they have taken a hands-off approach to recent events. For some time, many have never been regular attendees at their own board meetings. In some of our strategic planning retreats, they either decline to attend, fail to show up, arrive late, leave early, or spend the entire caucus distracted by email.

In other words, pre-COVID, they stopped providing strategic direction. Unfortunately, too many of them are public sector bodies.

Instead, they offer to ensure that the resulting plan is faithfully followed. They don’t want to “interfere.”

The folly of this thinking has recently become apparent. Here’s why.

1) COVID has collapsed the future

Our approach to running strategic planning retreats encourages companies to look 15-30 years into the future. Sometimes over protest, we explain the pros and cons of looking too far out, vs. not far enough. The key is to choose a “Goldilocks” planning horizon: one that’s just right.

Pity the companies which have chosen a horizon which is too short. Why? They’ll have to restart their planning process.

The truth is that organizations who chose long horizons already planned for the changes COVID has made urgent. The only difference is that the pandemic has brought the future closer: collapsing it. All they need to do is change the timeline. 

However, a company with a too-short strategy would miss the ball entirely. They’d have to rethink everything simply because of a tactical error in forming their plan. This is where board members make a difference:  they are usually the ones pushing for longer horizons. Their absence makes this mistake more likely to occur.

2) Fresh New Eyes Are Necessary at the Top

The pandemic has shown us what it’s like to be completely blindsided. However, it should also predict which individuals will rebound first.

Those who are younger and newer to the organization have an advantage. Just observe how they adapt themselves to the use of an app such as Zoom which has assumed a central role in most companies.

Contrast this reality with some leaders. I once worked with the head of communications of a large company who hid a big secret – he didn’t know how to use Powerpoint. How he got to that position without picking up a basic tool of the trade remained a mystery.

Boards need to challenge executives to keep developing themselves. They should also welcome fresher, younger eyes into their ranks to prevent companies from becoming stale.

As such, boards need to properly estimate how in touch they are. Unfortunately, many fail to include digital strategists in the boardroom so it becomes difficult to provide proper guidance on the most challenging issues of the day.

3) Bringing Back the Best Employees

Today, CEOs’ are looking around the office, shaking their heads and wondering: “Why did I ever think we needed so many people?” Now, their suspicions have been confirmed: when some employees stayed home, and contributed little, they weren’t missed. In other words, their absence wasn’t a problem.

Can organizations simply cherry-pick the best employees, pay them a bit more and let go of the rest?

I predict that the new normal will force them to do so, within the limits of the labour laws. Outsiders may complain that they are just being greedy. However, board members may

point to the need to survive the first worldwide disruption in business to occur in our lifetime.

They are more likely to switch to a more digitally-savvy workforce that can manage itself without being watched. Individual salaries may rise by so doing, but the number of total employees may fall. Overall productivity should increase even as payroll costs are cut.

Boards should also prevent executives from rushing to return to a pre-COVID status quo which wouldn’t be sustainable. They should have a well-established point of view developed from seeing the inside operations of other companies.

These are trying times, and the cozy collegiality of the board room must give way to the committed few who are willing to take a stand in an effort to keep companies afloat.

Organizations need their boards to jump into the fray wholeheartedly. They must intervene to make the best of a messy situation and play their part in crafting a strategy that serves all concerned.

Is your company being undermined by obsolete assumptions held by some of your leaders? To move forward, they must be challenged.

In our work to develop clients’ breakthrough strategies, we try to highlight such hidden assumptions. These are often unspoken, clashing ideas which undermine the corporate strategy. When the plan needs revision, the team should uncover and sort out these differences to act as one.

Unfortunately, most companies were rushed to respond to COVID-19 and created little more than a bunch of survival tactics. Now that the lockdown is being phased out, organizations must find a way to achieve their “new normal” if they hope to thrive.

However, as they do so, they need to look past the relatively simple task of putting people back in front of their desks safely. A fresh strategy is required to suit the times. One approach is to explore the foundation assumptions which are now embedded in their old business model. For example, they should date the following common, future milestones.

• New Coronovirus Case Level-Off Day
• Active Case Reduction Day
• Curfew Lifting Day
• Employee Separation Day
• Remaining Employee Return Day
• Customer Re-Opening Day
• Border Re-Opening Day
• International Flight Resumption Day
• End of Social Distancing Day
• Ro Below 1.0 Day (A measure of COVID-19’s contagiousness.)

Each of these public events signals a turning point in the crisis. While they are unknowable with absolute certainty, that’s not the main challenge. The problem is that executives in your company are likely to hold different estimates for each milestone. This discrepancy could just be an interesting curiosity, except that each individual is making daily decisions based on their personal understanding.

For example, if HR believes that Employee Return Day is on June 15th, but Customer Service commits to a Customer Re-Opening Day on June 1st, there’s a big problem. The company can waste time, effort and money if the two plans aren’t synchronized.

But this list of key dates is just a start. There are a number of other assumptions which only apply to your industry, or company which need to be unearthed. Here are some of the questions I have been urging clients to ask themselves. 

Q1 – What material changes have occurred in our business? Here, I recommend you brainstorm individually and then as a team. It’s no place for group-think – the tendency for people to conform to majority thinking. Focus on concrete changes which are tangible and can be measured.

Q2 – Why does the change matter? Here you must confront aspects of your business model which can no longer work. Query what will happen if you continue the old model in this new environment.

Q3 – If the change is permanent, what were the original assumptions that must be challenged? These were embedded in the old business model, perhaps never discussed. Now, you must make them explicit.

Q4 – What are the new assumptions? Given the data you have on hand, what will you assume moving forward?

Furthermore, to make sense of your predictions, also think in terms of “confidence”. For example, if your team believes that Border Re-Opening Day will be on September 30th, apply a confidence interval to this date. You may state: “We are 50% sure that the date will fall between September 1st and October 31st.” That’s very different from being “90% sure it will fall between September 25th and October 5th. “

This additional information helps you make better decisions, introducing added flexibility where it may be needed. Of course, this is just the beginning. You should continue the regular strategic planning process I have summarized in prior articles:

1. Create a current snapshot
2. Set a target month/year that will allow a breakthrough to manifest
3. Craft measurable outcomes
4. Backcast from the future to 2020, filling the gap with necessary actions and milestones
5. Finally, ensure that the context of the discussion is one of exploration and innovation. The fact is, there will probably never be another moment like this in your business. Discontinuities of this magnitude rarely occur more than once in a lifetime.

Needless to say, companies that don’t revise their baseline hypotheses will be left at the starting line. In like manner, those who allow their CEO to set a bunch of flaky assumptions by himself will also run last.

Take the opportunity to make the most of this crisis by challenging the assumptions that render your old business model and strategy obsolete. Get all the members of your executive team talking to arrive at a new baseline.

Feels uncomfortable? The fact is that you are making an educated guess, then taking a bet that you are right. Regardless, your organization needs you to make such commitments so it can find success within this pandemic. 

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/business/20200516/francis-wade-post-covid-assumptions

While your company awaits a return to business as usual, should your leadership be thinking about revisiting its strategy? Does the current pandemic mean that you should start the process all over again?

To say that the coronavirus has disrupted business is an understatement. Even if you are still operating at this time of lockdowns and curfews, you are probably doing so under duress. Nevertheless, you must look ahead.

At some point in the future, employees will have returned to their jobs, continuing to work in the old way. However, it would be a mistake to put your effort into “returning things to normal.” Chances are, there is a new normal and you should adjust to it, rather than seek to drag your business back to an obsolete state.

For example, take the case of an owner of a funeral parlour in New York City. As an essential service, the company has not closed down. In fact, like many morticians who are willing to deal with COVID casualties, the owner is overwhelmed by the volume of deceased persons being brought in.

While this could be treated as a windfall, the long-term question is “What does this mean for business?” In other words, is there an assumption that needs to be re-examined now that funerals are being conducted so quickly, in small groups, without a service, in large numbers?

Like this company, it might be time for your team to re-examine the assumptions behind its strategic plan. Here are three steps for engaging your executives and board members.

Part 1 – Enumerate the Disruptions 

Start by making a list of the most obvious changes. When the big-ticket items are out of the way, look for the ones that are harder to see but may be just as important.

One method is to begin with a single pronounced item but then ask “Why” to determine the reasons things have changed. Then repeat the process asking “Why?” five more times, until no more answers can be found.

Leave room to add other big items as you continue, but pull them together into new strategic themes before the next step.

Part 2 – Tear-down the Old Plan

Here, you are looking for concrete reasons why the current plan won’t work. Use the results of the prior exercise if needed, but in this phase you should be ruthless. Identify the assumptions (unstated or unimagined) which have been violated by the new normal.

At this moment, you need to bring your team to a consensus point of view regarding the plan’s gaps, seeking to go as deep as possible into long-term changes. For example, have your customers come to expect a higher standard that you never predicted? Has a new technology been introduced that you simply can no longer ignore? Have you fallen behind a nimble competitor?

Part 3 Assess the Plan’s Viability

In this final step, you decide whether or not the current plan needs to be changed and to what degree.

In some cases, your plan may have anticipated the disruptions which are underway as a result of COVID-19. For example, perhaps you contemplated that within five years you would be delivering service to customers remotely using a tool like Zoom or WhatsApp.

Now, you realize, you need to do so immediately just to keep up.

Or, you may have learned that the time horizon on your old plan was too short – a common occurrence. The changes that you see happening in the next year are so dramatic, they render your plan obsolete. A brand new, long-term destination is needed.

However you assess your current strategy, the final step is to conduct a joint activity to bring it up to date. This may mean starting from ground zero.

If you believe you can escape this kind of re-examination or leave it up to the CEO or Chair to do it alone, think again. Consider that this global disruption might be the single most impactful event in your lifetime.

The fact is, some assumptions in your industry have been unfrozen. Consequently, your firm has the chance to stick a wedge into a sliver of opportunity and turn it into a crack that will never be closed. If you move quickly, you can be the first (and only) company to capitalize.

The only difference is that these things usually happen slowly, over a decade or more. Now, for a change, they are happening with lightning speed.

The ideal way for your team to respond is not to sit back, wait and see what happens next. Instead, pull together your best minds to understand the entirety of the new normal so that you can craft a fresh strategy.

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/business/20200419/francis-wade-what-do-when-covid-ruins-your-perfect-strategic-plan?

As an executive, you must make an annual decision about your organization’s strategic plan. Should the exercise be done as a team, hire outsiders to perform a study,  or simply fall back on the CEO’s thinking? While there are pros and cons to each approach, one generally yields the best fruit.

Once your company successfully grows to a certain point, it must consider the long-term impact of its actions, and make a choice. Does it continue to allow the founder to drive the decisions on each major course of action? After all, he/she is the most knowledgeable person, and the only one who has the full-time job of thinking strategically.

However, even though CEOs are generally smart people, there comes a stage when their brilliance, and this tactic, only gets them into trouble. They find themselves alone in implementing their strategies. No-one else takes the time to understand or invest themselves emotionally. Instead, they sit back and wait for the Boss Man/Lady to do all the big-picture thinking…as usual.

In a small company with a “Snow White” organizational structure (i.e. a single strong extrovert surrounded by introverts) this approach can work. However, an enterprise that must grow by hiring talented people will eventually run into trouble. High performers either refuse to join, or leave after a few months.

An alternate tactic is to invite in an outsider. A consulting firm willingly does all the interviews, data gathering, analysis and report writing. The result is a beautifully packaged set of strategy recommendations.

However, they have actually done their client a disservice.

By undertaking the intellectual labour themselves, they also undermine the emotional commitment. In other words, by the end of the project, they believe in their ideas more than anyone else, especially those who must implement them. Even those who originally had the ideas are sidelined as they become branded by Consulting Firm X.

But there is a third tactic. You could treat the development of the strategic plan as a team exercise, like a sport: an effort in which each person must play their part. However, there are several pitfalls to this approach that need to be avoided.

1. Impartial Facilitation
The best event to forge final decisions is a strategic planning retreat. Unfortunately, most are little more than one of two extremes: a place to air opinions of all kinds without making any commitments, or a presentation of pre-agreed decisions in which people are “encouraged“ to buy-in. Neither produces satisfying results.

Instead, the most effective retreats allow consensus to build from the bottom-up. In most cases, this is best facilitated by an outsider who allows contentious issues to be brought up in a civil way that helps your team make final, binding decisions.

These new points of agreement are the entire purpose of the activity – to craft ultimate, difficult choices that close the door on other alternatives.

2. Immediate Capture
The second pitfall is to think that a hearty discussion is sufficient. In a tiny company, this approach may work as it’s easy to share information.

However, in a larger organization, these agreements must be translated into projects or initiatives which lead to wide-spread behavior changes. To ensure that this happens, your team should document the new strategy immediately after it makes decisions.

In other words, the written substance of each strategy cannot wait to be captured until the next day. If the team waits even a few hours to translate their decisions into words, you may learn the hard way that strategic conversations have a ridiculously short shelf-life. As soon as they are explored and completed, their essence begins to fade once a new conversation commences. 

The only option is for you to capture these conclusions immediately, before everyone scatters to go home.
Unfortunately, this approach is rarely taken because people believe that a fancy Strategy Report is the true final product. It’s not: the decisions your team made are far more important.

3. Instant Ownership
The last pitfall you could make is to leave the retreat without proper ownership being assigned. Overall responsibility isn’t enough: key activities may still languish due to a lack of personal accountability. 

The solution is simple: assign sponsors to each of your new initiatives, even if they don’t possess subject matter expertise. Their sole job is to shepherd the project until a manager is assigned. In fact, they may only relinquish their sponsorship years after the planning event, but when they play their role well, it keeps the retreat’s momentum going.

Every sport has its peculiar conventions and practices. Avoid these pitfalls and you increase the odds that your team will win.

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/business/20200308/francis-wade-why-strategic-planning-team-sport

Have you ever been presented with a strategy document that appears to be nothing more than a list of projects? If so, the good news is that you aren’t crazy if you thought that something was missing. A sound plan is more than a grab bag – it should bring an intangible hypothesis to life in words and images that staff members can use in their daily activities.

On an assignment recently, I was asked to look at a strategic plan put together by a public sector organization. Fortunately, it had all the boxes ticked. Every single item was cross-referenced with Vision 2030 Jamaica, United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals plus a number of other guidelines set by esteemed international bodies.

However, there was a gaping hole. The plan lacked any connection between detailed project plans and the reasons they were created in the first place. Apparently, the consultants who assembled these projects left out an important activity, such that employees were forced to take empty steps. With little emotional or logical guidance to the original ideas, they were going through the motions, but missing the point. How can you ensure this never happens to your team?

1. Stick to Breakthrough Goals

If your strategic planning team isn’t intent on crafting breakthroughs, then cancel the retreat. Save your North Coast hotel money and just follow business as usual. If the idea of producing breakthroughs sounds daunting, it should. By definition, these stretch targets don’t produce themselves, yet they are the reason leaders are appointed. Even with little explicit training in how to do so, executives are expected to realize the unimaginable and unforeseen.

One method I use to move leadership teams into this zone is logical: I request that they step into and create a specific 15-30 year future. I ask: “What are you willing to create?” and “How does it translate into numbers?”

As they follow the process to sketch out these results by the chosen year, they naturally produce stretch targets which cannot occur by accident.

To find an example of a breakthrough commitment, look no further than Vision 2030 Jamaica: “…the place of choice to live, work, raise families and do business”. We can probably all agree that this extraordinary outcome has no chance of being realized by routine actions.

2. Fire-Test and Adjust Breakthrough Commitments

The big problem leaders have when sharing such lofty targets is that the first reaction is one of disbelief. People hear the words and immediately dismiss them as fantastical; to be ignored.

A good way to alleviate this pressure is to build a logical bridge between the future to the present. This can be done by back-casting – working one’s way back to the present using the current day facts and future targets as anchors on opposite ends. Unfortunately, teams sometimes discover that such a connection is impossible to build. It could be that the goals, when taken together as a whole, are infeasible.

In this case, they must be readjusted in order to remain credible, a task leaders must undertake to retain their followership. This simple act restores trust: it’s the opposite of the nonsensical “I Don’t Care, Do It Anyway” pressure that some managers try to apply.

3. Preserve the Emotional Connection

Perhaps the hardest challenge is to help project teams who are executing each day to retain their link to the original intent of the Breakthrough Goal.

For example, I have met few at the lowest or even mid-levels of the public sector who are inspired by Vision 2030. Even though it articulates our citizens’ deepest commitments, it has gotten lost in mundane business-as-usual execution.

One approach to retain the link is to explain executive reasoning in words, images, videos and interactives. Together, they show how the Breakthrough Goals of the organization were derived in tones which are both logical and emotional, making them easy to understand.

Another way is to give staff the means to translate Breakthrough Goals into personal objectives. This exercise helps them retain the underlying intent, but own the outcome for themselves.

If your organization is looking at a list of projects which don’t add up to more than an empty bunch of activities, consider that your leaders skipped a task along the way. Instead, take actions to restore them. Trust that staff who appear to be merely going through the motions can be inspired. Shift to seeing them as people who are waiting for you and your fellow managers to step up and lead.

Like many solutions of this nature, the best examples are wrought from the very top of the organization. Leaders must tell the truth about their own lack of inspiration if they are to forge the kind of commitment which leads to sacrifices and risk-taking. These are a few of the essential ingredients needed to see a breakthrough goal become a reality.