Strategy Is Not An Intervention
Is it that time of year for your company?
Time to pull together your numbers, check what you did last year that you can refurbish, then sketch out some rough plans? Welcome to budget planning mode.
The problem is that budget planning requires strategic planning, and strategy shouldn’t be condensed into an annual event. It’s not simply about gathering together the troops, spending a few days or weeks figuring out your plan, then taking the rest of the year to implement.
As soon as your strategy is agreed upon, it’s just slightly out of date. The world isn’t statically waiting to receive your strategy. Competitors are hyperactive. Customers are bombarded with options. Suppliers are changing. Employees are coming and going. The economy is up in the morning and down by the afternoon. Everything is in constant flux and you have to adjust your strategy accordingly.
Of course, you need to establish your strategy for the year and beyond. But once you’ve got that in place, you should be meeting on a regular basis to assess the progress of your execution and recalibrate the strategy based on what you’ve learned. That way, when it is time for planning, you’re not waiting for a strategy intervention to allocate your budgets.
Every CEO Should Ask
Since I’m also writing for iQuest’s Blog, and I’m working on the book, I thought it would be a good idea to post on Creating The Conditions as well. Please visit www.iQuestinc.com to read more, including the 9.5 Reasons Strategy Fails.
When is a question more influential than an answer? Almost always. Effective leadership isn’t about telling people what to do, it’s about getting people to want to do it.
The great thing about questions is that they pull people into the process. Questions get people thinking, and isn’t that what you really want from your employees? Okay, not everyone feels the same way. There’s the old school leader who has been known to declare, “I don’t pay you to think. I pay you to do your job.” That’s a problem for two reasons. One, there aren’t too many jobs where good thinking couldn’t improve the results. And two, that approach rips the heart right out of your employees. The only thing you’re left with is someone who does just what’s needed to get the job done. Just.
Questions create engagement with the problem, which leads to involvement in the solution and ultimately, commitment to implementation. Asking questions more often, rather than always giving answers, helps employees to take responsibility and ownership of the situation. It helps create the conditions for them to want to do it.
Own What People Say About You
Do you care what people say about you? Sure, you do. We all do, even when we try to shrug it off. Brands, now there’s an entity that cares deeply about what people are saying because it ties directly to sales performance. Brands can’t afford not to care.
The reality is that you are not in control of what people say about you as much as you’re not in control of how you feel in response to what you hear. However, what you do in response to hearing what people say; well, that is in your control.
When the media shares a story about your Brand, good, bad or indifferent, there’s little you can do to control what information they use, how they spin it or how people will react to it. You can issue press releases, stressing the facts, but in the end you won’t have shifted the story in your favour until you take ownership of what people are really saying. You have to get involved.
In early 2010, Toyota, world renowned for their quality workmanship, issued their largest recall ever. Not only a recall. They halted new sales of their vehicles. Imagine telling your distributors, in this case car dealers, not to sell. Those guys must be choking on their hair gel (sorry for the stereo-type but that’s who I saw being interviewed). The company did the right thing issuing the halt considering some accelerator pedals were getting stuck and unsuspecting Toyota owners were driving into grocery stores. There were already a number of accidents and unfortunate deaths attributed to the sticking accelerator pedal.
Instead of coming out with a series of their own communications using popular online channels that have become the preeminent source of immediate news, real or embellished, Toyota issued staid releases explaining the issue and announcing halts to production and sales until the problem is corrected. People do not respond to “staid”.
When, as consumers, we’re told the “facts”, especially as interpreted by media, we wonder. We wonder what we’re not being told. We wonder what this means about our safety. We wonder what happened to those people who drove into stores. We wonder if we would ever want a Toyota again. The wired world starts buzzing, loudly, with all kinds of new stories, mostly interpretive, of what’s really going on. Today, crowd-buzz happens in moments.
As an example of crowd-buzz speed, take the death of Michael Jackson. The story broke on June 25th 2009 at 5:20 pm, reported by TMZ on a tip. Between 5:40 pm and 6:15 pm, Google’s servers were so overwhelmed with searches on Michael Jackson that their system interpreted the barrage as a hacker attack. By 6:30 p.m. web traffic to news sites increased by approximately 50%. YouTube suddenly had thousands of new postings featuring Michael, people doing Michael or just sharing their thoughts about Michael. Within a few hours Jackson’s Thriller album was the number one seller on iTunes.
That gives you an idea of the speed; let’s talk about owning what people are saying. In 2008, Maple Leaf Meats jumped to attention when news of their listeria contamination was released by media. Their share price plunged from $11 to $7.
CEO Michael McCain not only issued immediate updates, he could be found online, on TV and in the news sharing his personal heart-felt message to the public. Accepting full responsibility, McCain carefully explained the work being done to eradicate the problem and help those families affected. He even went so far as to directly admit that it will take time to earn back the trust of consumers but that Maple Leaf Meats was determined to make that happen. They later followed up with a $27 settlement instead of dragging the lawsuit through the courts. What was left for people to say? Today the company’s shares are back at $11 during the worst recession in 60 years.
Even when it’s good news, smart brands take ownership of their message. On Wednesday January 27th, do you know what was the most watched program on the planet? I don’t think it was U.S. President Barak Obama’s state of the union speech.
I was waiting in my office to meet with the president’s of three different companies, working to put together a strategic marketing program. The first came in, somewhat reluctantly because he had been parked in his car watching his iPhone. When the other two walked in the first words out of their mouths… “did you see the iPad announcement”? We delayed the purpose of our meeting so we could fire up the projector and watch Steve Jobs introduce the latest product from his incredible brand. That is power!
Creating the conditions for taking ownership of what people say about you
- Establish an internal network within your company so that in a crisis, or a new product launch, you can consolidate everything that is really going behind the scenes within an hour.
- Flip through all major online channels and search for anything about you. Group the tone and pull out key points of what people are saying.
- Outline your objectives and message series, at least by topic, so you have an idea of where you are heading. You can fill in the blanks as more information becomes available.
- Establish an external network of crowd-seeders; people who actively contribute to online channels including YouTube, Twitter, Digg, and blogs. As quickly as possible, give them the inside scoop to begin seeding the right message.
- Get online! Post your own communications. Record and upload your own messages. Make sure you respond to what people are saying in way that respectfully clarifies misconceptions, reinforces positives and puts you ahead of the crowd-buzz.
Strategy is a Stepping Stone to Better Strategy
Resistance to making important, game changing strategic decisions is based almost entirely on one thing…fear. Fear of what will happen when and if you press the big, red, ugly decision button inscribed with the words of doom, NO GOING BACK. Scary.It’s like opening Pandora’s Box. Crack the lid and you never know what you might get. No matter how much intellectual work is done to prepare leadership for the decision, the fear of evil what if’s and unknowns debilitate leadership’s ability to make smart decisions. The problem in many organizations is that leadership takes too long, or waters down the strategy too much before making the decision. Then the evil really starts.
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The Cold, Hard Facts of Collaboration
Lock people into a room for hours, or days, and eventually you’ll get an answer. The only problem is that it might not be the answer you want, the answer you expect, or it may end up being the answer to a entirely different question altogether. Such is the risk when working in a collaborative session.
As we saw in Copenhagen, during the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference, finding solutions to challenging problems can be extremely difficult. Getting everyone to agree can be near impossible. The president of the UN Conference, Connie Hedegaard, herself a former Danish climate minister, made it clear that “This is a UN conference, and everybody has to agree on everything. And if they don’t, you get stuck. That is the reality here.” The truth is, that’s the reality everywhere, in every company and organization.
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