A few months back at TechCrunch 50, the launch pad for many newly minted startups, there were a few people who asked "are these new companies really trying to change the world?". This was in response to what seemed to be a less exciting group of presenting companies than in past years, in particular Sarah Lacy posed the issue below:
Memo to Start-ups: You’re Supposed to Be Changing the World, Remember?I did interviews with most of the TechCrunch50 experts backstage and there was a common gripe about the companies launching there: Not enough passion, not enough swinging for the fences, not enough trying to change the world.
A comment that we really liked was:
A start-up's only edge is that it's not built into legacy businesses and preconceived notions and can do something, well, crazy.
When we started RapidInfluence we did so as many people do, because we saw a problem in the market that had affected us and we thought we could do it better by a wide margin. Now the real question was could we move the ball forward in a significant way, a notion that Tim O'Reilly pointed out in a recent video interview, in which he said he is not interested in companies that are making only minor changes to markets or problems.
In our case, the fact of the matter was that people have been consulting on strategy and business planning as well as implementation for decades but as we pointed out in a previous post - Strategic planning is boring .... exciting .... useless .... essential - the whole idea can send shivers down the spine of even the most experienced business person so much so that a large percentage of strategic and business plans actually fail, wow! if that is not a market ripe for change then nothing is.
So, what does it mean to change the world? Well, there are probably some general things that could make something world changing. BTW, I've always disliked the use of the word "world" in this context because of the chance for hyperbole but let's just say that the world really means the arena in which you are working in. So, the criteria or metrics might be:
- There is a radical change in how something is done - Zipcar comes to mind for car rentals, you walk up the street, get in the car drive it around for a few hours then take it back to where you found it and you pay an hourly rate that includes everything, no fuss no muss, not your typical car rental experience
- There is a radical change in the outcome - everyone's favorite Twitter is another example, people have used various forms of messaging for as long as the Internet has been in existence and some things like email and IM have been immensely popular all Twitter did was say what if I have a short something to say and there you have it a radical change in the outcome of messaging
- The thing that is being changed is removed from obscurity - Kiva is a company that fits this perfectly, we all know that there are poor countries but what about the entreprenuers and small business people in those countries who are willing to build something for themselves and their families, through Kiva we can see them and we can loan them money at the click of a button and now 1000s of people are all of a sudden out of the shadows.
Now, given these rather tough metrics you've got to ask yourself, "what would it look like if the strategic and business planning and implementation world were changed?
- It would become exciting - as mentioned previously the general tendancy is to run for the hills when people start talking about strategy or business planning, this fear :) has got to stop
- Anyone could do it successfully - as we have also discussed in the past the academics and MBA's (some of my best friends are MBA's) have hijacked the whole process such that most people feel that it is too hard to successfully implement a strategy or business plan effectively, this too needs to change, it's important that success is 9.5 out of 10 not 3-4 out of10 or how can you build efficient economic engines
- People could share their plans and collaborate on them anywhere they were working - most people freely admit that strategy is created on a white board and typed into a pretty document, which goes immediately to dust collection duty on the nearest shelf never to be seen again, surely if we can share music, pictures, and our every movement we ought to be able to share a simple strategy or business plan?
So, it became our goal to change the "world" of strategy and business plan implementation, making it exciting because you could get started right away, with the expectations of a great reward upon completion, making it so everyone could do it via a simple process of defining goals, creating some actions and then following them through and finally making it easy to share what was going on with the process.
These are really simple things but in the end we hope that it is in fact the simplicity that will allow us to change the decades old ideas on strategy and business planning and how these things are implemented acrosss organizations.
Please join us as we shake things up!
Thanks,
Ed Loessi
You've just finished your strategic planning sessions, the whiteboards are full, the mission statement is clear, the vision statement is inspiring, the corporate strategy and strategic initiatives are agreed and aligned and everyone is smiling and nodding at what a wonderful outcome.
Fast forward 3 months and the shine is off the apple, people are busy again and it seems that things just aren't getting done and the plan is wallowing. Unfortunately this is the outcome of most strategic planning activities; great excitement and efforts being overtaken by lack of action and collaboration.
So, what are the signs that your strategic plan is in trouble from day one and what can you do about it?
- Sign #1 - The outcome of the strategic planning sessions was a Word doc - the only real use for a Word doc is for it to be neatly hole punched and placed in a binder, filling that space on the shelf behind your desk, a fitting tribute to hard work and brilliant minds. But seriously, this is what happens to so many strategic plans and it is the first sign of things going off the rails when the plan is expected to be executed by referring to a document periodically
- Sign #2 - It's Monday morning and you don't know what the first step is - my favorite thing to ask people who've just told me that they have finished their strategic plan is "what are the next 3 things on the list?", which usually returns sort of a funny look and some mumbling like "well I have these goals and we all agreed that we needed to achieve X". Unfortunately goals and objectives are not actions, which is why knowing what you are supposed to do on the Monday morning after the strategy retreat is so important
- Sign #3 - You don't know what anyone else is doing on their parts of the plan - so, you can imagine if you find yourself being a victim of Sign #2 you are also highly unlikely to know what it is anyone else is doing on their parts of the plan. Given that most strategic plans don't entail only one strategic initiative or element it is pretty important that people are aware of what others are doing if for no other reason than to be able to help out if they can.
It's simple really, strategic plans require action and action needs to happen immediately or you are going to have a difficult time creating the right environment for change and growth.
If all you have to go on is a Word doc, some vague but nice sounding goals and you are operating in a microcosm only aware of your own or your group's own progress you are headed for a train wreck when it comes to strategic plan implementation.
So, what can you do about it?:
- Get the plan in a collaborative format - as soon as the plan has made its way from the white board to a set of notes it should immediately go into some sort of collaborative working environment, preferably Web-based so that it can be shared and edited over time, this can be as simple as a Wiki or a more tailored software solution for strategic plan implementation
- Get the specific actions in place from the beginning - don't leave the planning session until each person or group that is responsible for a part of the plan has actual action items written down so that they can be actioned on Monday morning. Don't confuse the process of creating objectives such as "increased sales" and goals such as 25% growth in "X" market as being actions, get down to specific actions such as "implement inbound marketing software solution to increase sales leads"
- Track and share where things are - in setting up your collaboration around your strategic plan implementation you need to check off action items as they are finished and have that information within easy reach and display of any person in the company involved in the implementation process. People need to see and be aware of what is going on around them in order to maintain forward movement
- Target resources where the challenges are cropping up - finally, if you have done all of the above start looking for the bottlenecks and challenges. In a past blog post - The Most Important Thing to Know About Your Strategic Plan - I mentioned a conversation with Ian Smith of Portfolio Partnership, where he indicacted that the most important thing to know about any ongoing strategic plan was what was "behind" in getting done so that he could go back to the teams that were ahead of schedule and get some help in the problem areas. The fact is if one part of the plan fails the rest of the plan will fail so knowing what is going on and getting all hands on deck goes a long way towards successful strategic plan implementation.
In summary, watch out for the signs and you will greatly increase your chances of successfully implementing your strategic plan.
Ed Loessi
I know that the idea of One Page "X" for business has been touted for quite some time but it seems to be all the rage again, at least in the Blog and Twittersphere that I have been hanging out in lately, a quick search of the One Page world shows that there are:
and the list goes on (see an entire compilation at Amazon). There are even entire works of Shakespeare printed on one page, but that is probably a different discussion.
So, why are people working so hard to get everything down to One Page?
Simply because so many things have been made too darn complicated.
In our area, strategic planning and strategic plan implementation, we like to say that somewhere along the line the MBA's and Academics hijacked the whole strategic planning process and made it too complicated for people to do without an incredible amount of angst (see recent blog post "Strategic planning is boring .... exciting .... useless .... essential").
Once the intellectuals start driving the agenda, watch out, everything is likely to become 3 times as complex and will mostly like take 3 times longer to complete. Now, I am not here to blame them it's in their nature, business actitivities are interesting areas to study and hypothesize on but at some point the rest of the us need to take back the agenda so that we can actually Get Something Done.
So, what is the essence of One Pagers and how can it be applied in strategic planning?
In short, break things down into manageable components , manageable in both understanding as well as in the ability to complete. Take the standard strategic plan as an example:
- Simple explanations - things need to be clear to every level of person in an organization - in the case of strategic planning it can be things such as, explaining that you want to grow market share, and the 2-3 things that will make a difference in that quest; the right customers, high satisfaction levels, existing customers driving new customer aquisition. Express the ideas in such a way that it is easy to understand even to people not in your organization
- Key Elements - group things in ways that they relate well - I've seen some strategic plans that were as long as 30-40 pages and seemed to go on forever, brilliant work and very thorough, but completely unable to be implemented! When I see something like this I just say "stop, what is the most important issue facing you today" You then take that issue and fix it first then on to the next most important. People can only manage a few things well, having 30 or 40 pages of well meaning activities means that "nothing" is key and that just won't work
- Simple Actions - the final and most important item in the One Page concept - People, it's all about the actions, once you have broken down the complexity you should have this nice little one page cheat sheet on actions. If you only have a few key elements to work on then you should only have a few actions to complete for each. The actions should be so clear that you could stop any one of your colleagues walking down the hallway and they should be able to rattle off those actions without hesitation.
In summary, we love the concept of One Page Everything, it makes sense, the key is to make it doable and make it memorizable.
Ed Loessi
Having created and implemented strategic plans in a number of company and organization types I have often noted the Jekyll and Hyde complex that seems to surround the strategic planning area.
My recent check of the Twitterverse and Blogosphere highlighted again the wide variation of opinions on the subject of strategic planning:
"All this swot etc is crap ...I can t believe mbas do this sh....t for 2 whole years"
"thinking of swot analysis. shoot me now!"
"We did some strategic planning earlier this year but no finished doc yet"
"Strategic planning at work this week - good stuff; big plans"
"Strategic planning meetings are a bunch of people talking just to hear themselves talk.... No value chatter monkeys"
"looking forward to upcoming strategic planning weekend"
"Playing lego with son - strangely more fun than strategic planning"
"just finished strategic planning sessions, 2010 is going to be a great year"
In looking over the various comments they seem to fall into several categories:
- Those that had never been involved in strategic planning before but were really ready to go - this group seems to be strangely euphoric about the whole idea and is ready to make change and do great things in their organizations
- Those that had been involved in strategic planning but seemed to have had bad experiences - this group is quite vocal about their agony and given that most strategic plans fail it is quite understandable that they would be so vocal about the potentaial of wasting their time and in some cases boring themselves to death
- Those that derive a living from helping others with strategic planning.
It's fairly easy to assume that people who derive their living from strategic plan facilitation would be out and promoting the benefits of strategic planning but it is clear that with a large number of people strategic planning ranks right up their with going to the dentist for a root canal, necessary, yes, and quite a lot better than doing nothing about that aching tooth.
So, why is it that this great idea of strategic planning seems to crash and burn with so many people?
In short, the experience is not consistent for people and neither is the outcome.
The fact of the matter is everyone knows intellectually that having a strategic plan makes complete sense. The challenge is that for many their experience has been one of absolute boredom and mundane chatter followed by the failure of a useful outcome.
By contrast with the dentist, even though that root canal is painful, most people will happily recommend a dentist because the outcome of a root canal for 99% of the people in the world is fantastic, not so with strategic planning.
So, what can be done about it?
To put it simply: reduce the complexity and get to the outcomes quickly.
- Breakdown planning into simpler concepts: the fact of the matter is people need to master things in segments in order to get good at them, this is no different with strategic planning skills.
A common cry that I have heard is SWOT, Capabilities Analysis, Mission, Vision help! If you are just starting your first plans or you are a planning consultant you've got to bring people into the planning and implementation process at a speed that makes sense.
It may be fun for you as a consultant or skilled person within a company to build a well documented and masterful plan but odds are the other people involved are going to be overwhelmed and Twittering out comments like the ones above. A plan that takes too long or is incomprehensible to the people who are most affected by it is useless.
- Get to the actions: in today's business climate we are measured by outcomes and outcomes are the result of specific actions, the plans that sit on the shelf because people don't know where to start on them are a waste of time. If you can leave strategic planning sessions with an actual list of do this, then this, then this, you will be able to increase the success of the overall strategic plan.
People are good at following steps, so get to the specific actions and give people a sense of accomplishment along the way.
In our business we live by a Manifesto, which covers both how we operate the business and how we build our strategic planning solutions. This Manifesto is very much based on the simplicity of concepts and the getting to actions.
It's up to the entire industry whether it be consultants or product providers to reduce this Jekyll and Hyde complex that surrounds strategic planning and get more plans completed and successfully implemented.
Ed Loessi
As many of our readers know, we believe in eating our own dog food and we are regularly documenting our own strategy implementation
process as a startup company to share with our customers and readers.
The following post focuses on our social networking
strategy, which is an action item within the strategic element we called Develop/Implement Marketing Strategy.
Social networking is still a relatively new concept for many businesses and falls into two very wide oponions, that of being essential and that of being a waste of time. As a company we had previous experience as individuals using and participating in social networks so we were fairly clear as to what value they would bring to us and how they could improve our business. As you will note we have come down on the side of essential for business.
There are many sources of information on social networking (here is good article from HubSpot) and how to go about it. In our own experience and based on our own research we came to the view that there are 3 primary areas where social networking can be an important part of the business strategy for startup and emerging growth companies:
- Building Community of users and influencers - one of the big challenges for companies is how to gain awareness for your company with a range of people, from users, to partners to influencers. Social networking sites can be great sources of these types of contacts
- Establishing your agenda - for many emerging companies, you went into business to solve a problem or change an entire market. In order to do this you are going to have to find a way to change the norm and in order to change the norm you need to establish your agenda; how you think about things, how you think things can change for the better and all of the ideas that you have to make it happen, in other words your Manifesto
- Interacting with people already in the market and discovering the real contributors - one of the things that the Internet has brought is the ability to find out lots of information. The challenge with using search engines to find information and to connect with people is that it is very rare that a general search is going to display conversations on the 1st page of Google. If you want to know what is live and relevant to your market you need to be where the conversations are happenging and that is in the social networking sites and the tools that aggregate that information. Once you plug into those channels then you can find out what it is people are talking about and what is interesting at the present time to your market. Then and only then can you start to build new customers and begin pushing forward your agenda.
So, we had things pretty clear as far as what our strategy needed to be: build a community of users, establish our agenda and plug into the existing conversation.
We then translated this into several action items:
- Seek out relevant business social networks that we could join
- Establish accounts at those sites
- Get involved in the communications process
- Adopt tools to help us manage the interaction with the networks
As far as Action Item 1 was concerned we focused mostly on business oriented social networks such as Linkedin and Twitter because we already had individual presences there and it made it easy for us to get up and running quickly.
For Linkedin we established a RapidInfluence Company Page and a RapidInfluence Company Group and for the group we invited some people from our personal networks to seed things. As a strategy, having a Linkedin group is important because it provides a communication point for people where you can use both discussions and news submissions to spur conversations on your company's area of business (create an agenda) it is also a way for people to find out about your product (build users and influencers).
Similarly we established a RapidInfluence Twitter account and we went the extra yard of spending $100 to have a nicer background created. We used several Twitter tools to find people who are speaking about strategy and strategic planning and we then followed those people and in turn many of them followed us.
Once various social networks were establised we had to set up a regular plan of interaction which included:
- Monitoring the conversation - keeping track of what is said and commenting on those conversations is important, if you have something important to say, say it and say it regularly
- Following new people - we regularly search for new people who are speaking about topics we are interested in and we subscribe to their groups and we follow them on Twitter
- Distributing our own content - one of the great things about social networking tools is that they allow for relatively easy distribution of the content that you are creating. This could include blog posts, white papers, news etc. all related to your company. The more people that are following or subscribing to your information the more points of contact you can create
- Distributing other's content - the other great thing about joining the conversation is that you gain access to other people's content and since social networks are all about sharing you can easily share relevant content that you discover with your following. Remember this is all about building a presence and supporting your agenda for change. The more information that you can distribute that supports your thoughts (real thoughts not fantasy) the stronger your position becomes.
For us we determined that 1-2 man hours per day was a good amount of time to put into our social networking strategy with a focus initially on gaining new sales leads. When viewed in this manner it was easy for us to say that of course we would spend 1-2 hours per day if not more in the pursuit of new customers.
Along the way, we realised that we needed tools to become efficient. While we checked out a number of tools for managing Twitter in particular (Cotweet, Seesmic) we settled on a product called HootSuite. This product essentially allows us to manage a number of Twitter accounts as well as people and topic searches and it saves us a tremendous amount of time (the other products work quite well also).
The Results - so, a few months into this what has been the result? Well, as you can see by our Web site traffic sources (a key measure for us in generating leads), we are receiving nearly 60% of our traffic from the social network Linkedin followed by Google and then by Twitter. Overall we are fairly pleased with the outcome of this work. We've used social networking as both a sales tool and an awareness tool and we have relatively quickly generated traffic to our Web site and Blog.
It is important to note that over time we would expect that the Google traffic percentage will increase but what you have to remember is that when you are a new company with a new Web site it takes a long time to rank effectively for keywords on Google, so the big advantage of the social networks for us has been lead traffic while we build out organic search capabiblities on the major search engines.
What next? - quite simply we will keep with the current strategy, building out the community and distributing our message. Early indications are positive and we are gaining traffic and leads 24/7 using this current strategy. We will constantly monitor and change our tactics and look for a major review in another 6 months.
For now though, we have knocked off another series of action items from our strategic plan!
Ed Loessi
We've been asked this question quite often by companies and organizations both large and small who are working on strategic planning. The fact of the matter is that strategic planning is a lot of work and requires a big time commitment from someone to bring together the people, facilitate the process and get down to the actions required to implement a strategic plan.
What most people are really asking though is do I need an "outside" vs. "inside" facilitator to help me with this process?
Checking on the Web the response to this question is pretty varied and includes interesting comments such as "Boulder City Council debates paying consultants for strategic plan", which suggested it may not be affordable or may be too disruptive to the culture, to a myriad of Twitter posts and business networking comments praising the job of facilitators who had a marked effect on the strategic planning process within an organization.
Now we didn't create a comprehensive survey or study but overall and by a fairly wide margin (via a Web and keyword searching) most companies and organizations seem to have much more effective strategic planning activities when they are lead by an outside facilitator and the number of companies and individuals offering these types of services would suggest that there is plenty of demand.
The following is a list of the most common reasons and considerations given for using an outside facilitator:
- Your organization has never engaged in strategic planning - this is probably the classic reason to engage a facilitator, simply because you need the outside expertise to guide you through the process, it's one thing to have read a book on strategic planning it's a completely different thing to have lead 100s of hours of strategic planning sessions
- Previous strategic planning was not felt to be successful - this can be true because of the lack of experience when the planning process was initiated and is often an indication that more experience is needed to get the plan together
- There are a number of ideas or concerns among organization members that will keep an inside facilitator from being objective enough and ending up without important concerns being fully vetted in the proccess - this is often true in organizations that are stagnating or that require big strategic changes, there will likely be people in the organization who like things just as they are and others in the organization may feel uncomfortable in challenging them in an open forum
- There is no one in the organization whom members feel has sufficient facilitation skills or time to manage the process - sometimes people are just plain busy and given that the strategic planning process can't be successfully completed at half-speed it often times makes sense to outsource the mechanics of the planning process to ensure that it gets done quickly and efficiently.
So the next question is how do you find an outside facilitator? A simple search of the web brings back a myriad of possibilities both in terms of individual companies as well as the NFDB, which is a database of independent facilitators:
- National Facilitation Database - http://www.nfdb.com
- Meeting Facilitators International - http://www.facilitators.com/index.html
As well, you can ask people from your own business networks who have gone through the process to see how it went for them and ask them for the name of the facilitator who assisted them in their strategic planning process.
In the end the strategic planning process requires organization, impartiality, experience and effort. It is possible to find those things within an organization but it is probably more likely that one or more of those will be missing such that you will get a better result with your strategic plan if the process is managed by an experienced outside facilitator.
Ed Loessi
As part of our continuing to document our own strategy implementation process as a startup company, the following post focuses on our CRM strategy, which is an action item within the strategic element we called operational systems implementation.
For many early stage companies CRM activities can creep up on them simply because CRM is not only about the first sale, which is easy to recognize, CRM includes many firsts:
- First potential leads
- First potential partners
- First customers
- First customer service requests
- First customer feedback and suggestions
- First invoicing and payments
Of course it's great when it happens but I have seen it catch many people off guard, causing them to rush around implementing bandaid solutions. I too have been quilty of implementing bandaid solutions in the past, which have included:
- Keeping track of customers in Outlook or Gmail only, unable to manage the lead to sale process with any degree of efficiency
- Keeping track of invoices on a spreadsheet and then having to back track months later applying payments and updating accounts
- Sending emails around when a customer has a service issue then trying to track down whether or not we solved their problem.
Determined not to invoke any of this stop-gap measures of the past, we added as part of our strategic plan a strategic element called "Define/Implement Operational Systems" and added a "Action Item" called "Trial and implement CRM solution"
The purpose of making the CRM a strategic process in our startup company was that we knew we had to get this correct sooner rather than later and opted for the sooner option. In effect reducing our own stress and creating the best customer experience possible even as a startup company.
Luckily we had experience with a range of CRM solutions over the years in other companies, everything from desktop contact managers of the early 90's to the range of Software as a Service products such as Highrise and Salesforce.com that have grown popular over the last decade, so we felt fairly confident that we could get this sorted out pretty quickly.
The first step was establishing the overall strategy for what we wanted:
- We needed to do something that would work for at least a 1 year window so we wouldn't have to revisit it again until we had some traction with the business and could determine just how successful we might become and how many features we really needed and were using
- We needed to make it very efficient all within the one system. We had experiences in the past of putting together 2-3 separate CRM components and while they were successful, the time and effort it takes when you really are looking for basic capabilities was just not what we wanted to do
- We knew it had to be online so we could all collaborate and we knew the system had to be low cost because we had very defined operational costs as we moved forwar.
In the end these are some pretty standard criteria especially for a startup company so there are no surprises here. The point is that we wrote down the criteria and agreed to a set of actions that ensured that we didn't spend any more time then necessary on this task but that we got what we wanted in advance of it becoming a critical need.
Our specific actions were as follows:
- The first thing we did was took a look at some systems that we were already familiar with just to see how they had advanced over the years
- Next we made a quick outline of what we thought the lead to sale process looked like as well as the long-term lead nuturing requirements so that we could test each product in a dry run
- Finally we tried 3 products out to see what it was like to run through the process
In the end we chose a product called Zoho CRM because it met our specific criteria; good enough to get started with and certainly enough capabilities to get us through the first year, low cost (3 users free, pay monthly at 4th user) and obviously online so it was easy to collaborate. I only plugged them in this post because it was what we chose but I would suggest that the others that we mentioned are also quite good and would work well for other people.
So, what will we do in 1 year? - Well, the first thing we have done is put in another Action Item to begin the CRM review process in about 10 months so that we don't forget or let it slip our minds.
Further to that we will most likely look at some more intergrated capabilities including: connection to outside lead sources such as Zoominfo or Demandbase, and connections to mobile devices. We will also be looking at how we are using the CRM to our strategic advantage and whether or not we are making the most of CRM as a core operational activity.
For the moment though we have successfully knocked another action item off of our overall strategic plan!
Ed Loessi
Earlier this week the
Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that supports Wikipedia put out a call to action for help in developing its
strategic plan:
If everyone who cares about Wikimedia — from the casual reader to
active volunteers — could come to a shared understanding of where we
want to go, we would have a much better chance of actually getting
there. See the call to action
Known for bold statements and large goals since its founding this call to action is not surprising and could be very interesting. As with all new approaches it will come under some scrutiny and cause a number of questions to be asked:
- What drove this unconventional approach? - in this case it's a pretty simple answer and that is, the culture of the organization. Wikimedia is an incredibly open largely volunteer effort that is responsible for millions of pieces of information being available over the Internet, one might argue that its strategic planning process could take no other form than to be crowdsourced
- How will it work? - drawing on their core strengths they will use the same wiki process that drives their core activities. I think though that unlike their information editing process for knowledge the potential for a flood of information to develop will pose some special challenges
- Is it possible? - who owns the vision, the mission (leadership vs rudderless wandering)? - As many who have facilitated or developed strategic plans will know sometimes the greatest skill in the planning process is keeping people on track and that involves lots of culling of ideas and opinions.
In big organizations the information gathering process is handled in two ways; one is by running surveys that tap the majority of the organization in an attempt to understand large groups of people's opinions and the other is by inviting individuals that represent subsets of the company to participate in group discussions. The purpose of course is to try and make the incoming information manageable. It is very difficult to hear the shouts of thousands and this will probably be the biggest challenge faced in this approach by Wikimedia.
- How will the strategic plan be implemented? - to me the biggest question of all is how will this strategic plan ultimately be "actioned"? In the corporate world the success of strategic plans generally rely on two things; buy-in and actions. It takes buy-in because people need to believe in the end plan and it takes actions because people actually have to do something.
I think the buy-in question will be interesting because it will come down to who has to buy-in. In traditional companies, smaller groups of people develop the plan and then the buy-in has to happen from the whole organization. In this experiment, a large group of people will be coming up with the plan and the buy-in will come from the foundation members (smaller group). This is the same with the actions, potentially the actions will come from a large group and then implemented by the foundation members. Both of these situations are sort of the opposite of the traditional strategic planning and implementation environment.
In the end this will be interesting for people looking at strategic planning on two levels:
- How does the wiki process for information collection and process transparency work with a large number of contributors?
- Does a crowdsourced strategic plan take an organization to places that it's core operators agree with, are they ready and willing to live by the will of the crowd? (I suspect with Wikimedia the answer is yes)
Ed Loessi
For the first time in the 15+ year history of the Bain & Company survey on Management Tools and Trends 2009, strategic planning was displaced as the #1 business tool and it was replaced by benchmarking. At first blush one might say "hey that was a good run that was had by strategic planning" and it was time for a new management tool to influence the growth of enterprise companies.
After thinking about this I started to wonder:
If enterprises were making business decisions by benchmarking what others were doing did it drive the herd towards a series of bad decisions that were validated over and over again?
- Did banks look at other banks making risky loans and say "look at what they are doing and see all that money they are making, maybe we should be doing that"?
- Did the U.S. auto makers continue making cars that were irrelevant and maintaining operational patterns that were sure to bankrupt them because their benchmarks were the other U.S. auto makers who aside from Ford were all doing the same thing?
In the above cases it would appear that everyone thought everyone else was smart and doing the right things so they all just kept on doing it because the 'benchmarking' against the industry was just benchmarking faulty assumptions and patterns.
It may be only coincidence that in between the last two Bain studies that benchmarking gained ground and overtook strategic planning as the top management tool but it would certainly on the surface seem to explain a lot about what happened.
If everyone believes that as an industry they are all fairly intelligent and if they then benchmark themselves against the perceived leaders in the industry then at some point there is no one to say "hey, wait a minute are we sure we've got this right?".
In the end the business community will be much better served if strategic planning regains it rightful spot for the following reasons:
- Strategic planning forces you to look under every rock
- Strategic planning brings out alternate opinions
- Strategic planning drives you to not copy the competition but to excel past the competition
Of course even strategic planning isn't a fail safe against bad performance and I am not entirely suggesting that it could have stopped the recession that we have just experienced (and may still experience for a while) but I would submit that as a business tool it is much more difficult to manipulate strategic planning for all the reasons above.
Ed Loessi
In a recent Linkedin discussion I provided a response to Zulfiqar Deo, a start up mentor and MBA student, regards the difference between strategy (planning, implementation, performance) for an SME or Start-up organization compared to a larger enterprise or government.
In his thesis there was a statement that caught my attention:
"Another issue influencing the study of strategy implementation is the perspective one has on strategy. Is strategy first formulated and then implemented, or vice versa?
My position is that for an SME or start-up company strategy is first implemented and then rationalized and improved where as for an enterprise or government department it is the exact opposite, strategy is first formulated and then implemented.
Having been involved in a number of emerging growth (SME) and start-up companies it is interesting to consider how people end up determining that they need to have a strategy.
In example, most companies start purely on the basis of an idea for a product or a service and then if they aren't afraid they build that product or start that service and then if they have enough fortitude they stick with it until either they or someone comes along and says "hey that is a really good idea you should really try and grow that into a major business".
It is of course at this point that most (but not all) companies start both thinking about and trying to implement a "strategic" plan, which of course is usually different than the plan that they are already implementing, which was 'had an idea, built a product and tried to sell it to people to pay the bills'.
The frustration comes when these companies have to start writing things down (see friendly facilitator standing at white board asking you all kinds of penetratig questions) and proving or disproving things because that is not typically what got them to this point, in most cases it was a combination of gut feel, hard work and a lot of luck and this of course is not part of the usual strategic plan.
The change in perspective can be very challenging for these smaller companies because they are essentially being asked to challenge their ideas, ideas which up until that time have been giving them reasonably positive and sometimes accidentally positive results.
Of course this is the polar opposite for an enterprise or government department as they are much older organizations and they have many more people and resources in play, which means they are often quite good at proving and disproving things that will work for their organization. They are also by nature plan oriented; they are risk adverse and position protective so you won't find to many rebels that rely on gut feel and luck to ensure that they still get that paycheck at the end of each week.
The biggest challenge of the enterprise or government organization is that of quickly taking action simply because planning and discussion take up such a big part of the overal strategic planning process. Of course once the planning is done they do tend to have the skilled people and resources (read money) to implement plans.
In the end the typical SME or start-up company is pretty good at taking action because that is their nature where as the larger enterprises are not so good at taking action (new action that is) quickly. For both of these groups they need to borrow from eachother, the SME should learn to plan or bring in facilitators to help them and the enterprise should look for rebels in the organization to drive new strategy.
Ed Loessi
