January 20, 2010

After introspection comes action to make a great 2010. Action means change, but make sure that change produces progress. Continual improvement is what we’re after, and building on solid foundational principles comes first. I’m a strong proponent of innovative tactics, but without that foundation it’s easy to lose your focus. So let’s look at what do.

1. Refine your vision and tell your people. It’s the company vision that attracts and keeps good people. Does it need to change a little or even a lot? Look at the economic landscape, look at your competitors, look at all indicators and decide. Then communicate it to everyone in the organization in a variety of ways. Plan on how to reinforce it throughout the year. Don’t underestimate the power of a strong vision to build employee engagement.

2. Build the culture to support the vision. Corporate culture includes the values, norms, beliefs and behaviors of the organization. If you don’t purposefully guide its creation and development, your culture will become what others make it. Decide what you want the values to be. What beliefs do you want your people to have? How should organizational behavior look? Build the culture around your vision so that employees believe in what the company stands for and their behavior will reflect their belief. Your results depend on that.

3. Spend time on tactics first, strategy second. Countless hours are spent in strategy development, most of it wasted. Business Week once reviewed the history of strategic plans of major US companies and found over half were failures. I suspect that is still the case today. Tactics are active, strategy is passive and in the changing economic times of today you need to do things, evaluate them and try again. Along the way, that evaluation will lead to strategy unfolding. Do something, learn from it, then do something better.

By the way, if you’ve refined your vision and built a strong culture, your people will take the initiative to make your tactics and strategy succeed. Culture builds belief, belief determines behavior and behavior drives results. These are foundational activities and they take time, but the payoff is huge. Most of your competitors won’t do it, so get started.

January 13, 2010

2010 will be a much better year than last if businesses take the time for introspection followed by action. There’s been a lot of postmortem done by pundits and writers on how bad things were last year for the economy and what happened to individual companies. Many mistakes were made by the federal government and private sector alike. The feds continue to add to the economic uncertainty with the apparent huge costs to business in the health care bill, and the stimulus spending hasn’t produced much at all. We can’t do too much about that (although I strongly advocate voicing our opinions to Congress), but the business community can do a lot on its own for itself.

Uncertainty has a strange effect on people and companies alike. Many businesses, both large and small, went into reactive mode as the economy soured last year. Too many went into a kind of paralysis and simply lost their focus. Market and government forces were pounding them, and strong leadership was hard to find. That has to stop if there’s to be a recovery. Here are three initial steps every business should follow right now to get back on track for a better year:

1. Take your pulse. As you review last year’s performance, take a hard, critical, dispassionate look at every product, service and process in your company. No sacred cows allowed! Reexamine your vision and mission and make changes if needed (by the way, they’re needed). What should you drop? Or add? Or modify?

2. Understand the business you’re really in. Mont Blanc, for example, makes status symbols that write pretty well, too. I like mine, but in truth it writes no better than my Bic ballpoint. But Mont Blanc knows Bic is not their competition, but other luxury accessory product brands. What do you really do? Do you need to change? Refine? Reinvent?

3. Take a hard look at your workforce. Who’s really engaged in supporting the vision of the company? Who sees their work as simply a paycheck? This recession has helped companies tell the difference. Switch up people and job roles. Eliminate the non-producers and do everything you can to retain, promote and incentivize the people who have proven themselves.

These are only the first steps to take for a better year. I’ll have several more next time, but do these first. It’s a building process, and these are the foundation. I know companies that have done this already and the results surprised them. They did it before the end of last year to get a good start to 2010. Everyone can still do it now.