Category: Strategy Implementation

By M. Dana Baldwin

Strategy: the course and direction we want to take the company.  Culture: the way things are done in the company, the atmosphere within the company and the sum of the relationships within the company.  Not easily defined, nor easily quantified, it is the essence of the heartbeat of a company.

What does this really mean for a company and its people?  What are the implications for the effectiveness of strategies developed by the company and the company’s ability to implement and execute those strategies?

What are the implications of the impact of culture within a company?  Things start at the very top of the company with the leadership setting the tone for the company.  Leadership is responsible for instilling the principles desired within the company and leading by example.  Culture is something which cannot be directly ordered by the leadership.  It has to be lived so that the tone within the company is changed (if necessary) to reflect the values desired by the company.

Culture is very much affected by leadership.  Does the company have strong leaders?    Are the leaders actually involved in and responsible for the development of the strategic direction of the company? Are they good at communicating and reinforcing the strategies to the rest of the company? Are they involved personally in explaining the strategies or do they delegate the explanations to lower level people?  Is the information about strategies sufficient to inform the rest of the company well enough to allow everyone to support and buy into the course and direction of the company?

Do the leaders really “live” the strategies they have developed by supporting and guiding the company’s execution of those strategies?  How often and how energetically do they review and update their strategies?  Do the leaders participate in the execution of strategies or do they only delegate execution to subordinates?

Effective implementation of the strategic course and direction of a company requires a number of elements.  First, the leadership team must be directly involved in the development of the strategies that the company will follow.  A rigorous process should be followed in order to develop strategies which are appropriate and achievable by the company.

Next: the team that develops the strategies should be directly responsible for and involved in the execution of the actions required for the strategies.  Each senior executive should involve those people who are appropriate to help carry out the actions which are necessary to effect the strategy.

The senior team is also responsible for communicating the strategies and the desired results to the rest of the company.  Everyone in the company needs to know enough about the strategies and the desired outcomes to make them relevant to each person, so they will be “bought into” the process and the results.

In the end, the ability of the company leaders to communicate and execute their strategies effectively depends on:

a. the culture within the company,

b. the willingness of the staff to buy into the desired course and direction selected,

c. the eagerness of the staff to carry out the strategies, and

d. the belief in the senior leadership by the staff to develop appropriate strategies and to lead them through the execution of those strategies.

If you would like help in developing and communicating your strategic plan, please contact Dana Baldwin at baldwin@cssp.com.

For more information, we suggest you access the following article: Excellence in Strategic Management Teams by Thomas E. Ambler.

To enhance your company culture by communicating its strategy and enabling employees to participate in its achievement will enhance employee engagement.  To learn more about how to do this please click here to listen to our Strategic Alignment webinar.

M. Dana Baldwin is a Senior Consultant with Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc. and can be reached at baldwin@cssp.com.

© Copyright 2013 by Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc., Ann Arbor, MI — Reprint permission granted with full attribution.

Christopher Anbari

By Christopher Anbari, President & CEO Result Global

In 2007, according to Gallup lnc., American businesses incurred $350B in extra costs because all levels of employees were not fully engaged. Have you ever considered how much your company contributes to this phenomenal number? Is the current slow growth environment in any way attributable to lack of employee engagement? It sure is!  We innately impact each other with every move we make. Research shows that up to 25 percent of direct costs are related to disengaged employees. Complacency is not an option. Employers must challenge habits. Evoke change. Do things differently.

Employee Engagement -as defined by SegaVGibson, a leading HR consulting firm -occurs when employees know what to do and want to do it. The heart of the process is for both leaders and employees to act as partners in business growth. That means that not only the employees, but the leaders must participate. An employee or leader who “goes that extra step” on the job, even when no one is watching, is truly engaged.

As an employer, it’s critical that you consider your own involvement in the process. How is what you are doing serving the entity that you have committed your time and efforts to?   In this increasingly challenging economic environment, business leaders have no other choice than to courageously and honestly assess the engagement of all their employees at all levels – including their own. They must be prepared to make audacious changes allowing their business not only to survive, but thrive.

To successfully engage employees, you must create a strategy that begins with validating employee performance needs, wants and obstacles.  You must also increase their discretionary contributions to compete and prosper in today’s ever increasing global competition.

The following example illustrates how disengaged employees can hamper and ultimately derail a process.

A Case for Disengaged Employees

A food company servicing 200 regional grocery chains engaged Result Global to design a program tying employee incentives to business net gains, replacing discretionary raises with an Economic Value Added Performance (EVAP) incentive program.

Two years before our arrival, a costly initiative was started to upgrade packaging.  Its goal: improve profits.  Many visible signs of performance indifference, distrust and hostility toward management were detected.  The company failed to communicate the benefits of the new system to the employees, even overlooking the announcement that the new technology would not eliminate any jobs.  In addition, less than 10 percent of the overall investment was spent on training.

There was disengagement on both the side of the union leadership and the employees, who were under the mistaken impression that the new technology would eliminate jobs. Another major problem was that the new technology program did not assess or validate the employees’ needs, wants, opinions and training challenges.  The human element of the new process was ignored.

We suggested including all employees and management in an opinion survey.  Utilizing our proprietary system STAR™ (Strategic and Tactical Assessment to Re-engage), we collected information from ten key business and operational areas:

• Business Growth Strategy
• Emotional Intelligence
• Communications
• Organizational Collaboration
• Information Technology
• Diversity Management
• Career Expectations
• Rewards and incentives
• Training and Development
• Service Effectiveness

The assessment revealed issues that needed to be addressed, and together with management, we developed a long-range employee engagement strategy that involved all levels of the organization. The 24-month net result:

• Created measurable performance scorecard for management
• Initiated customized management training
•  Reduced cost of services by 20 per cent due to sharp reduction in labor/management grievances
• Improved customer service quality and loyalty
• Increased annual earnings sharply

Although the nature of business is ever changing, the heart of employee engagement remains the same. The fundamentals include eliminating dysfunction and indifference, cultivating employees’ skill development as the core of business growth, and providing an organization that is a positive, supportive and progressive place to work.

The Center for Simplified Strategic Planning has teamed up with Result Global to offer solutions to your employees’ engagement issues.  If you would like to find out more about how we can tailor a program for your company, please click here.

© Copyright 2013 by Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc., Ann Arbor, MI — Reprint permission granted with full attribution.

By M. Dana Baldwin, Senior Consultant

by M. Dana Baldwin, Senior Consultant

In the 80s, families, teens, many of us used to go to Blockbuster Video to select movies for our entertainment.  The business model was simple: go to the store, wander the aisles, select one or more videos to bring home, watch the videos and bring them back to the store within 3 days or so to avoid the late return fee. 

A significant source of revenue for Blockbuster was the fee for returning videos late.  If a customer returned a video late, the total cost for the rental could well double or triple. In 2000, Blockbuster reaped nearly $800 million in late fees alone.  This was nearly 16% of operating revenue.  By 2009, this number had dropped to $134 million, or about 3% of revenue. 

But in the market place, things were changing.  In 1999, a new startup appeared on Blockbuster’s horizon.  An upstart company, Netflix, started taking orders over the phone or on the internet for DVDs and mailing the DVDs to the customer.  They changed the terms of competition, too, by allowing the customer to keep the DVD as long as they wished.  The cost for this, instead of the late fee, was covered by charging a flat monthly fee for the service.  Blockbuster tried dropping the late fee a few years ago, but for Blockbuster this meant that some of the more popular videos stayed out longer, thus impacting their rental revenue. 

When other strategies didn’t work, Blockbuster entered the rental of videos by mail segment to try to compete directly with Netflix.  What this accomplished was to lower the average contribution per rental to under $2.80 per disc, about a dollar below their prior level.  

Even then, the management of Blockbuster considered Netflix to be only a sub-segment of the market.  By 2002 Netflix had gathered enough market share and volume, to go through an IPO and yet Blockbuster still dismissed it as a “niche service”. 

More recently, video rental services, including Netflix, have moved to downloading movies directly to DVRs in the home.  This makes delivery of a movie essentially instantaneous, saving a trip to the video store or waiting for the mail to arrive.   Not only did this service allow people to rent a movie on impulse, but it further cut the heart out of the Blockbuster model. 

Blockbuster’s innovative business model helped generate the growth of home video viewing and helped sell VCRs and, later, DVD players.  It also helped generate billions in revenue for Hollywood.  But, its success led to its own failure.  Blockbuster was hugely successful early on, with over 9100 stores.  Because it was so dominant for so long, it missed the changes in the market.  When the changes became so obvious, that they could not be ignored, Blockbuster still pooh-poohed the evolution and moved too late to accept the changes. 

The obvious lesson here is that Blockbuster could not or would not accept that their market was changing.  Their assumptions about the direction of their markets contained the fundamental error of assuming that the direction they were going would continue forever because they were good at it and dominated the market place for most of their 25 year history.  They refused to accept the facts that their market was evolving and changing, and kept their model intact – in effect, keeping their heads in the sand. 

There are 4 types of assumption errors: Missing, Wishful thinking, Excessive Conviction and Naïve Projection.  My “assumption” is that Blockbuster was primarily guilty of missing an assumption and wishful thinking, helped by their need to satisfy their parent at the time, Viacom, who likely acquired them as a Cash Cow. 

How does a company avoid making this type of assumption error in its strategic planning?  All assumptions are subject to errors because they are only educated guesses, not facts, and must be regularly reviewed for accuracy and how well they fit the current conditions in the market.  In addition, a reality check that asks, “What could go wrong with the results of your assumption,” should be performed.  If you need help in making and reviewing your assumptions, as a part of your strategic planning, please contact the Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc. at www.cssp.com.

M. Dana Baldwin is a Senior Consultant with Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc. and can be reached at baldwin@cssp.com.

© Copyright 2010 by Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc., Ann Arbor, MI — Reprint permission granted with full attribution.

By Denise Harrison, Vice President

Is your team honest with itself when discussing progress of your action plans?  Or is your team convincing itself that things are really on-track when they aren’t even close?  Recently I have come across a number of cases where teams have given themselves high marks on achievement, but the real strategic objective has not been reached.  Here are four examples of how you might be negatively impacting your strategic results by accepting less than optimal progress.

1. Redefining the objective
   Recently I observed a team celebrating the success of achieving one of their key strategic objectives.  The progress that had been made was significant: a new product launch. But did it really accomplish what we had set out in the original strategic objective?  The original project was to scope out the requirements of a particular market segment.  Significant regulatory changes had occurred during the year and these changes will impact this segment’s needs/preferences for the foreseeable future.  The product launch was a good thing for the business, but not the completion of the strategic objective – it totally missed doing primary research to understand the full impact of the regulatory changes.  In the short-term, the product launch would shore up revenues, but the team missed the long-term opportunity to help its customers navigate through the regulatory changes by providing unique solutions to the opportunities/issues that resulted from the change in regulations.  Don’t redefine your objectives so that you easily meet your targets using projects that are already in flight.  Be sure that your objectives are well defined going into the process and make sure that you continually check that the action plans are accomplishing what you actually set out to achieve with the strategic objective.
2. Only look at exceptions during the monitoring process
   In order to speed up monitoring meetings, some teams choose to just look at the action plans that are not on schedule.  This allows the team to focus on the key projects that are not moving forward as planned and allows the team to have discussions concerning the impediments to progress and ways of overcoming these impediments.  However, this approach misses an important aspect of the monitoring process:  communication.  Communicating progress on action plans that are on-track keeps the whole team informed and updates the team regarding changes to the plan.  Sometimes project leaders keep the plan on-track even though there have been significant changes to the scope of the plan so that the plan does not fall under the scrutiny of the strategic management team.  This allows key strategic objectives to go off-track because the rest of the team is not alerted to the changes.  In addition, the communication of progress allows senior management team members to suggest enhancements that were not included in the original action plan.  So, don’t assume the purpose of the monitoring meeting is simply to keep the action plans on track, the communication of where we are on key strategic objectives is also important.  This allows the whole senior management team to stay engaged on projects where they do not have an active role.
3. Defining “on-track” as being “on-track” with the things that you control
   Yes, this really happens…a team has a project that is significantly “off-track” due to events beyond its control and instead of simply identifying this, the team says it is “on-track” because the problems were not of the project team’s doing.  Beneficial? No!  When something is off-track, it is off-track – this is not an assessment of blame, but an acknowledgement of actual progress.  This accurate assessment is important for three reasons:
   1.  To communicate to those on the team that a key strategic objective is not going to be completed in a timely fashion.  This is important to know, as this is key to achieving our strategy.
   2. To allow the group to brainstorm on ways to overcome the impediments and perhaps come up with creative solutions to the problem(s).
   3. To allow the group to re-deploy resources, if, in fact, this strategic objective is really dead in the water.
4. Declaring victory before the actual objective is reached
   Remember the infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner on the aircraft carrier? Do your objectives really state the desired objectives?  Do you declare victory when your product and/or service is launched?  Or when the acquisition is complete?  Or do you declare victory when you have reached the stated revenue/profit numbers that give you the ROI that justified the project in the first place?  If you declare victory before you have actually achieved the metrics defined as success, you are cheating yourself out of the full potential for the project, as resources can be redeployed to other projects before this strategic objective is really complete.  This causes a great deal of frustration within organizations, as a project’s potential is not achieved due to the loss of focus.

Is it time to tune-up your monitoring process?  Is your team being honest about its progress?  The next time your team reviews its strategic objectives or key projects ask the following questions:

1. Are we really achieving what we set out to achieve? Are we being honest with ourselves concerning the progress that is being made?
2. If not, how can we fix it?
3. Do we need to take some projects off the table to ensure we are making progress on the critical few?
4. Do your objectives really focus on the desired result?
5. Have we added projects without taking anything off the list?

Take a look at your past progress and see if you are really being honest with yourself.  If not you can make significant progress by plugging the leaks in your monitoring process.  If you are not making the progress you want, or if you have fallen into the traps above, the Center for Simplified Strategic Planning can help you get back on track.  Contact us to help you regain your focus.

For additional information on how to enhance your execution success please read: Everyone Knows Execution is Important – So Why Do We Fail to Execute?

Denise Harrison is Vice President of the Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc.  She can be reached at harrison@cssp.com.

By Denise Harrison, Vice President

Execution of strategy: we know it is important, but why doesn’t it happen? Based on my experience working with over 100 companies on strategy development there are four key areas that lead to execution success.

1. Focus on the few:
   1. Select a few – 8-10 key strategic objectives to accomplish in the next 12 – 18 months. No more than 10! Don’t fall into the trap of “We have to do this!” and end up with 12 to 15. It is better to work on a few rather than work on everything and get nothing completed. Four to six is even better, especially if the objectives are large.
   2. Once you have selected the key objectives, then develop action plans that are detailed roadmaps of how you will accomplish these objectives:
      1. What are the action steps (granular detail)?
      2. Who is involved with/responsible for each step?
      3. How much time will each step take?
      4. How much money will each step cost?
2. Balance your resources:
   1. Now you know the amount of time and money for each objective, do you have enough resources? Do you have the right resources?
      1. Often the required financial resources are clarified in the budgeting process
      2. The human resource aspect is often lightly considered (if at all) and this is where many implementation plans go off-track.
         1. Understand that your people have day-to-day activities that help the business run in addition to the projects that will position the company for future growth; you have to balance these requirements so that both are accomplished.
         2. If you find that you do not have the resources to accomplish your action plans, evaluate how you can
            1. Delegate (both routine as well as project activities)
            2. Eliminate (routine and/or project)
            3. Reduce (routine and/or project)
            4. Postpone (project only – you can’t postpone routine activities; they just don’t happen)
         3. The operative word here is balance!
3. Monitor your progress:
   1. Monthly have your action plan team leaders report on their progress to the strategic planning team
      1. Work with the team to relieve bottlenecks if projects are behind
      2. The strategic planning team should be able to help reduce bottlenecks – use this meeting as a solution-finding meeting rather than a way to assess blame. The team should be working together to move things forward.
   2. If new projects come up, then evaluate each project in the context of what has already been selected.
      1. If the new project is more important than one of the current key objectives, then add it, but be sure to take one away.
      2. Do not pile objectives on top of one another – sometimes we assume that we have hatched new resources during the year.
      3. Do not evaluate new projects in isolation – evaluate them in the context of the projects that are already on your plate. If the current projects need to stay on the list, save the new one for next year’s strategic planning.
4. Communicate early and often
   1. Communicate the strategy and key objectives to all employees
      1. Make sure that communication is clear and concise
      2. Make sure the communication is two-way (see article: Lessons Learned in Aligning an Organization -Two Way Communication is Key)
         1. Give employees a way to react
         2. Have them prepare what their departments are going to do in support of the strategy and key objects – make sure the communication is two-way.
   2. Communicate frequently and update when changes occur.
   3. If everyone in the boat has his/her oar in the water and everyone is rowing in the same direction as the company, it will move forward quickly – outpacing the competition.

Efficient strategic execution is paramount to outperforming your competition during this recovery phase of the economy.  If you accomplish these four steps you should achieve over 90% of your objectives within the timeframe selected.

Denise Harrison is Vice President of the Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc.  She can be reached at harrison@cssp.com.

By Robert W. Bradford, President/CEO

When assessing strategic opportunities, we have for years examined four variables in the Simplified Strategic Planning process – value, probability, management effort and financial risk. Recently, I have taken to including a secondary analysis of opportunities, undertaken when reviewing opportunity screening worksheets in meeting number two. This screening is particularly useful when you are evaluating far more opportunities than your team can realistically handle (in my experience, from three to ten strategic opportunities, depending on the team and its resources).

The purpose of this screen is to enable your team to quickly sort out the opportunities with the greatest strategic potential for your organization. When reviewing opportunity screening worksheets, you simply ask the team to rate each opportunity on two dimensions –

resource requirements

and

strategic impact

on the organization. For resource requirements, you may want to anchor the rating on a one to five scale. In a medium sized company, a one might indicate resources commensurate with an individual employee’s initiative – requiring little management of either manpower or money. A two could correspond with departmental level resources, a three with two or more departments, and a five would indicate a need for co-ordination of resources across the entire company. For strategic impact, we used one for “nice to do”, three for “important” and five for “critical to our future”. Note that we do NOT rate on a purely financial basis, and in practice, opportunities with a strictly financial payoff were generally given a three impact rating – that is, a simple boost to profit is not enough to earn an opportunity high marks on strategic impact.

Some interesting insights arise when using this assessment tool. Your team will doubtless agree that priority should be given to high impact, low resource opportunities – I call these “no brainers”. Equally obvious should be the automatic disqualification of low impact, high resource opportunities – though, in many organizations, these grind up a lot of recourse as individual employees take on pet projects as personal initiatives. The most difficult discussions – and often the most strategically dangerous issues – occur in the middle zone – opportunities with moderate impact and/or moderate resource requirements. Each presents a different danger to a well crafted strategic plan – the moderate resource requirement opportunities can choke middle management as senior executives delegate a growing number of “just do it” initiatives to the next layer of the organization. The medium impact opportunities may actually receive top-level commitment in strategic planning – after all, how can you deny an opportunity that increases your profitability? These opportunities can mire your strategic level resources in initiatives that produce only incremental improvements in your organization’s performance, while more fundamental, truly strategic opportunities are starved for resources because they are “too difficult”.

If your organization is plagued by a surplus of incremental projects or “just do it” items that are overwhelming mid-level management, this approach to opportunity screening may give you one more way to rationally say “no” to things that will impede your strategic progress.

Robert Bradford is President/CEO of the Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc.  He can be reached at .

By Denise Harrison

Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner has not hit its development milestones, causing Boeing to take a $2.5 billion charge against earnings.  What happened?  Key to Boeing’s past success has been its ability to achieve its “big hairy audacious goals or BHAGs” (from Built to Last by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras).  In the 1950s Boeing bet 25% of its net worth on developing the 707 jetliner competing directly with McDonald Douglas the premier manufacturer of commercial aircraft at the time.  The Dreamliner, the world’s most high tech passenger jet, is another big bet – but what went wrong with its strategy?

The 787 Dreamliner is not only a bet on a large new aircraft, but also a bet on the composite materials that are being used in the design and manufacture of this new jetliner.  In order to keep development costs low and please Wall St., Boeing decided to outsource not only the manufacturing of components but also the design.  This way, its contractors would be taking on some of the financial risk of the project.  While this may have spread the financial risk, it increased the execution risk. 

• Many of the contractors were used to building parts and systems to Boeing’s design specifications. But now responsible for the design, they found they did not have the quality assurance systems in place to ensure the quality of the design and to ensure that it would work with the other systems that would eventually become part of the jetliner.
• By taking on more financial risk many of the suppliers are facing financial challenges during this recent global economic downturn – some may even have to file for bankruptcy protection.
• In addition, the contractors did not have any experience getting FAA approvals: this requirement slowed the process down considerably.
• The number of sub-contractors increased the complexity of the project as parts and systems were being designed and manufactured by people speaking 28 different languages.

The coordination tasks were and still are daunting – leading to this $2.5 billion charge.  What should Boeing have done?  Before a company embarks on a large new project it should assess what unexpected outcomes might occur.  For example: 

• Does it make sense to spread the financial risk among so many companies – does this increase the execution risk? Should we go back to our model in the 1950s and take more of the financial risk ourselves and take the hit on Wall St.?
• How are we going to manage all of these contractors in all of these countries with the different languages and time zones?
• What issues will arise from outsourcing design? What skills do we have in-house that may not be present in our contractors? How can we help them in this area?

If Boeing had taken a step back and thoroughly assessed the risks they could have taken a number of steps: 

• They could have kept more of the design in-house.
• They could have provided better support for design in terms of quality assurance and FAA approval.
• They could have consolidated the number of companies to which they outsourced this program.
• They could have developed more advanced communication tools earlier. For example technology allows you to video conference and share designs so that there is clarity around the issues being discussed – simple emails often do not communicate the full complexity of a specific issue.

Lessons Learned

As your company ramps up a significant new development effort, take the time to assess the risks.  Take a look at threats – things that can impact you from the outside.  Look for ways you can prevent the threats or reduce exposure.  What are some early warning signs?  Set up contingency plans and hedge your risk if you can.  These are the traditional risk assessment and mitigation steps.  However, often these steps are not enough.

In addition – you must also look for ways you could avoid shooting yourself in the foot – as Boeing ended up doing. Boeing’s problems did not just come from the outside; they were a direct result of actions taken by Boeing.  Talk about the good ideas that you have, but also about the possible unexpected outcomes.  For example, it was a good idea to mitigate the financial risk, but the unexpected outcome was to increase the execution risk.  Identifying this upfront would have allowed Boeing to mitigate some of the execution risk or decide to keep more of the financial risk.

Denise Harrison is Vice President of the Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc.  She can be reached at harrison@cssp.com.

by M. Dana Baldwin, Senior Consultant

How many tales are told about people who are very good at a particular job within a company, who are promoted beyond that position and then fail?  There must be many examples of this phenomenon that are told time and time again.  There is even a descriptor: The Peter Principle, for people who are good at one job and fail miserably at the next higher level.

As a part of Strategic Planning, the job of each senior manager should be to determine one or more potential successors for his/her position.  My older son worked in a company in which no one could be promoted until he/she had groomed an acceptable successor to the point where the successor could take over the job of the superior and do it effectively.  How many companies require this?  Is this a philosophy your company should consider adopting?  Inevitably, there are pros and cons to each different approach.

Why do people fail after being promoted?  After all, common sense tells us that if someone is capable in one position, they could have the attributes necessary to succeed at the next step in the progression.  Unfortunately, there appears to be the possibility of little correlation between the actual skills and knowledge required in the new position and those realistically present in the successful person in the lower slot.  How often does your company inventory the capabilities required for each position and then try to match the best possible candidates based on that assessment?  A formalized approach to succession planning/promotions should be an important part of the management of your staff.

What can one do about this?  The process must start at the highest levels of the company – in the executive suite, and should cascade down through the company to whatever level is deemed appropriate by the company.  Sometimes this will encompass only senior management and one or two levels below.  In other circumstances, depending on the nature of the business, this approach could delve deep into the company, extending even to people with highly technical skills and knowledge.  Your company should decide how deep to go during the process of building your strategic plan, and should review progress on a regular and repetitive basis.

How does a company go about setting up an effective program to help improve the likelihood that when a person is promoted, the individual will be successful?  After the determination is made that your company is going to change the way succession planning is conducted, the company needs to start at the basics. 

First action item is to conduct an assessment of the skills and knowledge actually required by each of the key positions.  These assessments should be in depth, so that there is good understanding of the attributes the company is seeking when a candidate is to be considered for promotion.  General agreement on the list of attributes should be reached by the appropriate people in the organization.

Second action item is to assess the strengths and weaknesses of each candidate for promotion.  Your goal here is to understand what each person knows and where that person may need some mentoring, added experience or education, in order to be considered qualified for the new position.  This often is included in the career path development for each individual. 

Once the standards are set, and the individual has met them, he/she is ready for promotion, with the expectation that there will be a better fit for the new job’s requirements, and that the individual will have a much better chance of succeeding, instead of being promoted beyond their capabilities.  This is one instance where everyone wins, because the process tries to assure that people are ready to be moved up, with some assurance that they will succeed.

As a footnote to this article, please visit our website, www.cssp.com, and select our Archives section.  See Tom Ambler’s article, “Building and Sustaining Intellectual Assets,” which provides a process for stewardship of Skills, Processes and Knowledge.  These are often the fundamental building blocks for determining what the requirements for each specific job are, and provide the basis for assessing the qualifications of each candidate for higher positions.

M. Dana Baldwin is a Senior Consultant with Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc. and can be reached at baldwin@cssp.com.

© Copyright 2009 by Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc., Ann Arbor, MI — Reprint permission granted with full attribution

by: M Dana Baldwin, Senior Consultant, CSSP, Inc.

In these uncertain times, it is very important to do things right, right?  Absolutely!  But doing things right is only good if you are doing the right things! What are some of the right things to do?

 

Make your company invaluable to your key customers.  Your company should be focusing on serving your core customers to the best of your ability, so they will continue to buy from you, even if those purchases are at a much lower level during these trying times.  But, are you really doing the right things to build your relationships with those key customers and clients that will keep them as customers when the economy finally does rebound and sales volumes really do increase.

 

One thing you should consider doing is working to become deeply integrated into your key customers’ operations.  For example, if you supply components to a manufacturing company, are you working with their purchasing group to optimize value for your customer?  If your customer does a lot of research and development for their product offerings, are you involved as a resource in the engineering and development areas of the company?

 

The purpose of these types of efforts is to become more important and more valuable to each customer.  By becoming better integrated into the fabric of those customers, when a customer has a need you can meet, your company will be the first one they think to ask for assistance with their problems.

 

Get rid of those things that are no longer necessary to the mission of your company.   Every company builds up things which are not necessary to the effectiveness of the core business during low volume times.  Those things that are outside the core business arena, or are no longer used and likely won’t be needed in the future, should be trimmed if doing so will help lower costs, provide more liquid assets (cash) in place of the unused items, or free up space which could be better utilized, either now or when business picks up in the future.

 

Look to the future.  Work hard at trying to predict where your markets will be headed once the economy starts to recover.  Look for niches where your expertise and your customers’ needs match, and brainstorm solutions to their problems. 

 

One approach is to develop new applications for existing products or services.  One company which sold lasers for measurement systems determined that there was a limited but potentially lucrative niche in applying laser measuring systems to parts of wind generator units.  While their original business segments are languishing, this new application is doing quite well.  The potential volume is modest, but for a smaller company, it is a lifeline.

 

Another stratagem is to work hard to anticipate how your company can better be a part of your customers’ futures.  Work to help them survive the slow times, and innovate so that you will be more valuable in the future.  Building these relationships, especially if you can do it while others are husbanding their resources, will very likely enhance your competitive position not only now, but when the economy improves. It should result in your expanded relationships becoming that much better, and closer, for both.

 

M. Dana Baldwin is a Senior Consultant with Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc. and can be reached at baldwin@cssp.com.