Posts tagged strategy

Look Before You Leap

Business Consulting Meandering Genius Strategic Planning Take A Leap Wednesday

Has anyone ever told you to, “Look before you leap?” If you’re thinking about leaping into a new small business, look before you leap means, create a plan.

Many businesses fail in four years and most fail in ten. There are many reasons why they fail, but the root cause is that they don’t have a good (or any) written plan.

Too often, small business owners think a plan is for getting a loan or an investor. They download a typical business plan template from the internet and fill it out. This is not the purpose of planning and isn’t what lenders are looking for. They want to see that you have thought through your business strategy and have a good implementation approach.

Also, many businesses think they build the plan once and leave it alone after that. A plan should be a living document, annually updated, and quarterly reviewed to ensure you’re on track.

New businesses should create a “Strategic Business Plan.” This contains the typical business plan items a lender looks for, but also overcomes the five reasons 70% of all plans fail. These plans are accompanied by a current “Annual Operational Implementation Plan,” which outlines steps for the year to make the business successful.

Have you looked before you leaped?

Why Do You Do What You Do?

Business Consulting Meandering Genius Speaking Strategic Planning

imageMany people start their own business for a variety of reasons: extra income, want to be their own boss, freedom of when and when not to work, stay at home parent, and a whole host of other reasons. However, many of these businesses fail over time, often because the owner didn’t document, follow, and constantly update a strategic business plan. The often overlooked and seldom thought about aspects of any strategic and business plan, is deep down, why you’re doing what you’re doing and where you want it to go — the mission and vision. Sure, many companies have an idea and even some of them they write it down. But, how good are these statements for your company?

Join John Knotts, a strategic business advisor with over 25 years’ experience working with companies of all sizes to improve their business operations. The first questions he asks in any engagement are: what do you do, why do you do it, where are you today, and where are you going. These questions begin to form, what he calls, the ‘Strategic Bridge’, a visual representation of your strategy at work.

Bring your current mission and vision statements for you company and let’s examine, along with John, what you do and why you do it.

Bulverde Spring Branch Business Networking
Friday, August 18, 2017, 8:45 am
St. Paul Lutheran Church of Bulverde (The Red Roof Church)
29797 US-281, Bulverde TX 78163
Free to attend

Experience-based Operational Excellence

Business Consulting Meandering Genius Performance Measurement Process Improvement Strategic Planning

customerexperiencepuzzle

The Customer Experience

Experience means many things.  An experience is a direct observation of or participation in events as a basis of knowledge.  In other words, the customer experiences something through observation or participation.  Experience also relates to a customer as the fact or state of having been affected by or gained knowledge through direct observation or participation.  In other words, the customer has experienced things with the company that they base opinion on.  Also, experience is related to an individual based on their practical knowledge, skill, or practice derived from direct observation of or participation in events or in a particular activity.  Customers all have different experiences that make up their background.  Individual experience is often related in the terms of degrees, certifications, and/or years of involvement in a particular thing.

In a nutshell, customer experience (CX) is something personally encountered, undergone, or lived through by a customer with a certain company.  It is the product of an interaction between a company and a customer over the duration of their relationship.  This interaction includes their attraction, awareness, discovery, cultivation, advocacy, and purchase and use of a service.

CX is simply the result of everything that makes up the company’s product or service delivery, visible or not.

Problems with Customer Experience Today

Many companies today only focus on the ‘touchpoints’–the critical moments when customers interact with the company and its offerings to establish the customer experience.  This is often depicted in marketing as an experience map.  Often, this is a narrow focus on what is important to the customer’s satisfaction at specific moments and often creates a distorted picture of the overall experience.  This can lead a company to believe customers are happier with the company’s products and services than they actually are.  This approach also diverts attention from the bigger and more important picture–the customer’s end-to-end journey.[i]

An emphasis on Operational Excellence within an company as the driver of the CX is important to carefully consider.

Experience-based Operational Excellence

Operational Excellence (OpX), as an official business concept, has not been around very long and is often misconstrued.  The best way to look at OpX is to think of it as an end-to-end enterprise-wide management practice that aligns everything in the organization toward driving excellence.[ii]  From a perspective of the CX, OpX essentially represents an organization’s focus on all things that affect the customer’s experience (see Figure 1).

 X-Based OpX

Figure 1: Experience-based Operational Excellence

     Normally, companies view CX as a result of the product itself.  Some broaden the view into the processes that impact the product delivery and many companies see OpX as nothing more than the application of process management and Lean Six Sigma improvement processes.[iii]  In reality, true OpX represents the end-to-end enterprise-wise business management.  The ‘experience’ is at the very center of where the product, process, and employee intersect–this is what the customer sees and feels.  The entire experience is influenced by high-level company strategies, internal and external communication, and employee development.  Everything within the company is supported by an innovative layer that includes technology and information.

Thus, everything in the organization is important in the CX equation and focusing simply on touchpoints will represent a lack of true focus on the CX.  From a company’s perspective, there are several representative performance metrics that are important to the overall CX.  A company cannot simply look at metrics like sales and net promoter score, but must consider all company performance as critical to the CX.  There are many things that measure the experience, but can generally be referred to as satisfaction, sentiment, and relationship.

Summary

In summary, the traditional view of CX as a stand-alone activity represents a shortsighted view of what is important to the customer.  Although much of what makes up OpX is out of the customer’s view, it all leads to the CX and must be considered and aligned.

[i] Rawson, A., Duncan, E., & Jones, C. (2013). The Truth About Customer Experience. Harvard Business Review.

[ii] Boothe, W., & Lindborg, S. (2014). Handbook to achieve operational excellence: A realistic guide including all tools needed. Ft Myers FL: Reliabilityweb.com.

[iii] Crabtree, R. (2010). Driving operational excellence: Successful lean six sigma secrets to improve the bottom line. Livonia MI: MetaOps Publishing.

Fix Your Roof When the Sun is Shining

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Lisa Hershman, Denovo Group, has a phrase, “We never fix the roof when the sun is shining.”

I don’t know if I really need to explain the saying, but often businesses wait until stuff goes wrong to try to fix it. Then, it becomes an emergency break fix and it is done poorly because they lack sufficient time to really solve the problem.

The thing is, in business, fixing things when the sun is shining applies to everything. This basically means fixing things that really are not broken.

Off the top of my head, here are a few items that we neglect until it is too late and then do wrong because we are hard-pressed to simply get it done.

Planning. Strategic, operational, and even tactical planning, we are tremendously poor at in business, but specifically strategic planning is often overlooked. All too often, businesses look to strategic planning when they are having significant problems and they think it will solve their problems (the proverbial silver bullet). The problem is that strategic planning is a long range effort (hence strategic) and not designed to solve tactical problems.

Process improvement. All too often businesses let shoddy processes continue as the company grows and they ignore things like defects, poor customer service, and excessive process variance until too late. Then, when everything related to the process is falling apart, suddenly the business tries to solve the problems that took years to manifest in the process. What is worse, all too often all of the business processes are in the same state of disrepair and instead of just fixing one process, the business tries to create a full blown process organization and expect it to happen overnight.

Development. Businesses often look to training to solve a problem, but do not look at development when there isn’t a problem. If you are considering going into a leadership position, this is when you start learning about leadership, not six years after becoming a leader and you suck at it. However, we get very tactical when it comes to solving problems with training as the solution.

These are just a few examples of how businesses become very reactive to things and treat everything as a fire fighter versus a fire marshal. Living the advice of Lisa Hershman is very important for all of us.

When You Need A Swiss Army Knife in Business

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Lately I have met several organizations that are at a crossroads in their own evolution. Many companies realize the importance of things like strategy, change management, process improvement, strategic communication, and employee engagement. However, these organizations are making tactical decisions on the direction of these areas versus truly looking at this from a strategic perspectives.

Instead of hiring several different individuals or creating separate teams all focused on doing the same thing, companies today should should focus on bringing all their Operational Excellence activities under one team working directly for the CEO or President of the company.  This group should be led by a senior leader that sits at the same table as the companies other leaders.

This Swiss Army Knife professional–SVP/VP, Operational Excellence–should manage things like:
– Strategy development, execution, and change
– Performance optimization through process, product, and functional continuous improvement
– Strategic communication inside and outside the organization
– Strategic human capital management to include education, training, and development and employee satisfaction, commitment, and engagement
– Information and innovation engagement

This team does not need to be big…depending on an organization’s size, it could be as small as three or four people.  However, it should leverage other support areas throughout the organization, like Human Resources, Finance, IT, etc. These organizations would not report to the position, but work with the position.

Today, some organizations have some or all of these activities occuring, but they are scattered across the organization and have very little singular direction. By bringing the functions together into a small effective team, an organization is equipped to deal with the challenges of today and the future.

Of course, the leaders of these types of organizations have to have a solid understanding of all these functions at strategic, operatiomal, and tactical levels and not focused on creating some massive sandbox of people with various skills. They need to be highly skilled with a focus on lean and mean.

Continuous Improvement Development for Leadership and Professionals

CIC Process Improvement

Train your leaders first to change the culture

Oftentimes we get leadership support to an initiative to change the culture, but they don’t have the actual skills to implement the changes they’re supporting.  Before you can expect your front-line employees to live a culture of continuous improvement, you have to develop your leaders, managers, and professionals.  Everything we’ve discussed over the past six blogs have built to this.  See how building a culture of continuous improvement starts with developing leadership and professionals.

http://ngs.edu/2014/06/20/building-culture-continuous-improvement-continuous-improvement-development-leadership-professionals/

A Continuous Improvement Culture isn’t built in a day–it takes strategy

Blogging Process Improvement

Building a Continuous Improvement Culture begins with the development of a strategy.  This blog continues our discussion with National Graduate School.  In this blog, I provide a strategic framework to help you develop your own culture change.  Although I can’t tell you everything you need to develop–I can help you better understand the strategic steps you need to take and why you need to take them.

http://ngs.edu/2014/05/27/building-culture-continuous-improvement-crafting-continuous-improvement-strategy/

Culture, most important aspect of establishing continuous improvement

Meandering Genius Process Improvement

We talk about “culture” all the time and there is often a misconception of what culture is.  According to Gallup, 30% of the US workforce is can be considered engaged in their work.  A Continuous Improvement Culture depends on an employee based that is engaged.  Building and Sustaining and Quality Culture had over twice as many sessions as three of the other theme and focus areas at the recent ASQ Conference, which presents it as one of the most important aspects in quality today.  Continue on my journey with National Graduate School as we explore my Continuous Improvement Culture Model and discuss ways to drive this culture into your organization.

http://ngs.edu/2014/05/08/building-culture-continuous-improvement-culture-building/

Blogging Weekly with National Graduate School

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john knottsHappy Cinco de Mayo!

I am now a weekly guest blogger with National Graduate School.  Please check out my blog there.

Follow us as we explore how to build a culture of continuous improvement.

Building a culture of continuous improvement isn’t easy and can take a considerable amount of time.  However, it’s very possible and results can be felt within weeks of embarking on the journey.  Over John’s 25 plus years of experience, he’s developed a model rooted in strategy and designed to build this culture in any organization.  Join John and National Graduate School as we weekly explore this model and ways to drive this type of culture.  We look forward to your thoughts and inputs along this journey, so join us and watch for our future blogs about once a week with the tag line “CIC.”

http://ngs.edu/2014/05/01/building-culture-continuous-improvement/

Leaders Think Strategically All the Time

Start With A Strategic Mindset

Leadership

Leaders Think Strategically All the TimeLeadership is a dying art in the world today.  The great leaders of the past are found few-and-far between these days.  There are some that have been fairly successful leaders that have rose to an iconic status, but have they been truly great leaders or just really successful at running something?

Often there is contention between the skills that a leader needs and what a manager needs.  I believe, if you’re not a good leader, you won’t be a good manager, and if you’re not a good manager, you won’t be a good leader.  It is my contention that those who apply both of these talents expertly demonstrate what I call, “LeadermentSM.”  This is the expert combination of Leadership and Management together.

Leaders Think Strategically All the Time.

Great leaders don’t hold strategic planning sessions once a year; great leaders think strategically all the time.  They still hold strategic planning sessions annually and more than not, once a quarter.  Because great leaders know that their leadership team doesn’t always think strategically and they have to set aside time for them to think as the leader does.  But the leader–a true leader–is always mentally in the strategy realm.

This doesn’t mean that they are out-of-touch with reality.  If you understand strategy, then you then know it’s more than just visions and big ideas…it’s tactics and actions that make these things happen.

I don’t care who you talk to, everyone has a different definition of strategy.  It becomes even more difficult when you through in terms like strategic plan, strategic planning, strategic mindset, strategic, thinking, etc.

I’m sure I’ll get a lot of comments from “strategy experts” on this, but for this blog, thinking strategically, means you think always about your Mission Vision, Values, Goals, Objectives, and Action Plans–your thinking takes the form of a strategic plan.  To Develop the Leader Within, you must learn how to think like a leader–this is a skill all managers and leaders should develop.

“Stuff” happens at the Tactical-level with whatever you do.  This is where the day-to-day activities take place.  We “live” here mentally all the time.  That’s because it’s what’s front of our nose’s day-in and day-out.  It is very hard for managers and leaders to step out of this tactical-level because they feel that if they take the time to focus elsewhere, they will lose focus on the operation and things will fail.  This is human nature.

Normally, managers and leaders are promoted to the their position because they showed skill at the Tactical-level as an employee.  This sent a message to their leadership that they might be good managers and leaders.  This doesn’t always prove to be true, but mainly this is because the newly promoted person can’t get their mind out of the tactical-level.  Normally, they are too worried that mistakes will happen and the mission will fail, so they stay overly focused on the day-to-day.  This often leads to micro-management of the people and frustrates everyone.

Focusing on the Tactical-level is a failure of effective LeadermentSM.

Above the Tactical-level is the Operational-level.  Here, long-range objectives become your daily bread.  Almost everything in the Operational-level falls into the form of projects and programs.  For definition sake, projects are duration-based activities–in other words they have a beginning and an end.  Programs run for a long time–they may end at some point, but they last a long while.  Many employees initially have trouble transitioning from the Tactical to Operational levels because they still think day-to-day.  Non-exempt employees are used to being hourly and when they move to exempt status and find themselves in the Operational-level, they often have trouble reacting.

Formerly non-exempt employees tend to move in one of two directions, which defines their behaviors for the future.

  1. They treat everything as a day-to-day task.  Thus, they can’t think in long-term projects and programs.  They feel overwhelmed because they feel that they can never get their work done.  This is frustrating to them and their managers because often they are shying away from long-term necessary work and focusing on things they can get done during the day.  They look at their day as a eight-hour schedule and see what they can accomplish in that time frame.
  2. They become workaholics that put in excessively long hours to try to get long-term tasks done quickly.  Their focus is to get everything on their plate off their plate as quickly as possible.  Thus they stay late to work on a project and push things through.  They’re often not extremely collaborative on their projects, because others don’t move at their pace.  Their management tends to reward these “high performers,” but the employee burns out and eventually gets frustrated because no matter how hard they work, the work never seems to get done.

Neither of these behaviors at the Operational-level are desirable.  Focusing on the Operational-level is a failure of effective LeadermentSM.

Then we have those that literally live in Strategy Land.  They’re constantly dreaming up things to do, directions to head, and brand new ideas.  They’re the big thinkers and the dreamers and we’ve all worked with and for them.  Life is easy for them, because they never get their hands dirty.  They’re the ones pushing new projects and programs to the Operational-level that fit the purpose of the day and move with the winds of change.  Managers and employees who exist and operate at the Tactical-level never know what direction the organization is heading, so they burrow in and simply focus on the job.

Leaders that live in the Land of Strategy find themselves very frustrated that all their grand ideas never seem to get accomplished, especially in the time frames they envisioned them occurring.  They become more-and-more impatient and they tend to push their employees beyond their limits.  They stress the entire organization and frustrate even the hardest and most dedicated workers.

Focusing on the Strategic-level is a failure of effective LeadermentSM.

So, if thinking strategic, operational, or tactical is a failure of effective LeadermentSM, how should a Leader think?

Leaders Think Strategically all the time…

This doesn’t mean they live in Strategy Land…this means they think all the time like their strategic plan.  Refer to the image below:

Strategic Thinking

All Leaders and Managers, regardless of what level they work at, should apply Strategic Thinking every day.  When you think strategically, everything you do starts to change.  This means that you are always considering all three levels every day and with every decision.

Strategic Thinkers ground themselves in the values, principles, mission, and vision of the organization–regardless if they came up with them or not.  They are constantly evaluating every decision to ensure it fits within the values and principles, is it part of the mission of what they should be doing, and does it move the organization toward the vision.

Strategic Thinkers understand that nothing–I repeat NOTHING–happens at the Strategic-level outside of creating direction.  Things do not get done at the Strategic-level and if they think they will, they’re simply fooling themselves.  If you are waiting for something “strategic” to happen, then you’re going to wait a long time.  Things happen at the Tactical-level.

Strategic Thinkers ensure that their programs are aligned to the strategy of the organization.  Programs are long-term and very lasting, thus they should be 100% aligned with the mission.  Programs do not support the vision–I know that may surprise you, but they don’t.  Strategic Objectives, which are aligned to Strategic Goals, take the form of Projects.  Operational Projects, which are temporary in nature, should be primarily designed to evolve Operational Programs to move the organization toward its vision.

Projects are not always 100% aligned to the mission and vision of the organization, but for the most part they should be.  Occasionally, you might have to do something that simply doesn’t move the strategic needle.

Strategic Thinkers know that this means that Programs are mission-focused and Projects are vision-focused.  Thus, Strategic Thinkers don’t live in Strategy Land pushing down new idea after new idea.  They ensure the programs running in the organization support the mission 100%.  They also ensure organizational Projects are designed to move the organization’s Programs toward the vision.  If something isn’t supporting the strategic plan of the organization, it must be questioned.

At the Tactical-level, Strategic Thinkers know this is where the real work gets done.  However, there are two types of tactical work–Program and Project.  Understanding this helps those who operate at the Tactical-level connect to the mission.  Also, understanding this helps those that operate at the Operational-level better focus on how their day-to-day actions affect the bigger picture and thus relieves a lot of stress and frustration.

Additionally, Strategic Thinkers understand that the act of strategic planning is a tactical activity that should operate within an operational program–in other words, organizational strategic thinking is a strategic program that should always exist.  The problem is that it seldom does.

If you work at the day-to-day Tactical-level, your actions exist within a Program and sometimes they support a Project designed to evolve a Program.  Just thinking this way fully aligns what you do every day to the strategy.  If what you’re doing every day doesn’t support this, ask yourself why.

If your mind exists in one level–strategic, operational, or tactical–then you will fail to achieve effective LeadermentSM.  No matter where you operate, you must always think strategically–think like a leader.  Following this guidance will build your competence in the LeadermentSM YouniversitySM and prepare you for greater challenges.

When you think of great leaders think about what styles and concepts of LeadermentSM they employed.  What did they do that was so effective…that propelled the masses under them to great things.  As we can see, these styles vary in application, but an effective leader and manager should understand and apply all traits in a combined approach as appropriate.

LeadermentSM and YouniversitySM are service marks of Crosscutter Enterprises