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As soon as your strategy is agreed upon, it’s just slightly out of date.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.

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.

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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.

The Rolling Stones said, “You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you get what you need.” Welcome the U.S. Health Care bill.

Harry Reid, the majority Senate leader put it this way to his fellow members of the Senate in late December 2009…”We are bringing security and stability to millions who have health insurance, and bringing health insurance to millions who have none. We may not completely cure this crisis today or tomorrow, but we must start toward that end. We must strive for progress, and not surrender for want of purity.”

Think about that last line for a second, “We must strive for progress, and not surrender for want of purity.” In other words, shit or get off the pot…there’s important work to be done and if we wait any longer our intestines are going to explode.

When it’s time to make the important decisions, leadership has to make them with the best thinking they can put together. The more work done in advance of things turning sour, the more time everyone has to develop the best strategy. The longer you leave it, the less time you have. Simple, right? Only thing is, sometimes leadership drags it out, either refusing to read the writing on the wall or not understanding what it’s saying.

When corporate executives resist the pressure from stakeholders - employees, customers, suppliers - and fail to take decisive action, they lose support. It can get so bad that it doesn’t even matter what new strategies or ideas leadership comes up with, their stakeholders will no longer support them. Without support, strategy - any strategy - fails. The reason is that implementation is weak, delayed, and often sabotaged by those who don’t believe.

Does that mean leadership has to compromise? Yes. Of course. Compromise is a sloppy word but it does suggest that good, responsible leadership can garner enough support for a strategy to move forward. As it does, and implementation goes well, those same responsible leaders have the opportunity to take the organization to the next level, and the next after that. With each new step, fear dissipates. There’s more confidence that taking the next step won’t result in complete chaos. Buildings won’t burn. Customers won’t defect. Employees won’t revolt. Leadership will still lead.

Can you go back to the way things were if the decision doesn’t work out? Ummm, no. Why would you want to? The way things were was part of the problem. If your new direction doesn’t work out then make adjustments. Stay on top of developments and don’t, for the love of all that is strategy, don’t wait until it’s too late. Take the step!

Creating the Conditions for Stepping Forward

1. It’s okay to be afraid to make strategic decisions that change your organization. Don’t be stupid, and make them while there is still time.
2. Listen very carefully to what your people are saying. You need their support or your strategies will fail.
3. Stay on top of your decisions. You might not be able to go back but you are able to navigate forward.

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.

I’m a big proponent of collaborative work styles and even co-developed a process that leverages collaboration to develop and implement strategies for success. As good as it is, and it is really good, there are many variables to getting it right. As South Africa’s environment minister Buyelwa Sonjica said after the UN Conference, “Process is important, since it determines outcomes, but some ill-restrained interventions combined with poor decisions by those guiding the process meant that process problems caused the loss of three days - precious time indeed.” She was referring to the talks being “hijacked” by, of all things, how to handle the process.

What I’ve learned from designing and facilitating hundreds of collaborative work sessions is that the process has to be well defined and at the same time, totally adaptable to account for, well, people. We’re different in many ways, especially how we look at problems and solutions. Each participant brings their own individual biases, personal values and emotions into a work session. The process, any process, won’t completely align these variables. That’s part of the reason you get through a session as they did in Copenhagen and within days hear things like Brazil’s government, after backing an accord reached past the 11th hour, later calling it “disappointing”.

There are a number of aspects that a collaborative process, and those managing the process, have to appreciate.

• Not everyone will be honest.
• Not everyone will be receptive.
• Not everyone will care about the same things.
• Not everyone will be flexible.
• Not everyone will share the same objectives.
• Not everyone will use the same criteria for their decisions.
• Not everyone will have the same experience working together.
• Not everyone will agree.
• Not everyone will interpret the results in the same way.

There are many techniques and steps throughout a collaborative process to deal with these very human realities, some of which I occasionally write about in this blog or post in SlideShare presentations, such as working together to formulate the criteria for decision-making BEFORE applying it to decisions. While some participants may not like the outcome of the decision, they can’t argue with the criteria that was used to make the decision.

The area I’d like to highlight this time around is…

Creating the Conditions for Collaboration: Facts

1. Sessions go sideways when participants either don’t have the facts, don’t understand the facts, don’t agree on the facts, or just feel too intimidated to discuss the facts. When preparing for a collaborative work session, whether it’s a once a year thing for your company or part of your daily culture, do as much work as possible in advance to collect, organize and share facts.
2. A pre-session questionnaire gives participants an opportunity to share their feedback on the facts and raise questions that can be addressed before or as part of the work session.
3. Once you’re together, you want to spend time and energy on what do to based on the facts, not wasting time debating what’s real and what’s not.

Now channel the feeling you had when you were told, “great job” and “we couldn’t have done it without you”, or the ever exhilarating, “you rock”! Oh yeah; much, much better. Unfortunately, we don’t connect these successful moments with responsibility, but that’s exactly what they are…examples of how we’ve taken responsibility for success.

What is responsibility anyway? Forget the dictionary version. They refer to it as a “burden of obligation”. No wonder we associate responsibility with negative feelings. It’s the wrong message. Responsibility is a cycle of improvement:

1. Making decisions;
2. Taking action;
3. Learning something; then going back to #1.

It doesn’t mean you start making only right decisions, but you do become more decisive, more willing to take action and more receptive to the lessons that only come with experience.

Making Decisions For Success

You’re always making decisions, even when your decision is to wait and do nothing. Of course, from a business perspective, doing nothing is often the worst decision to make. It says to your colleagues, your employees, your shareholders, your bankers, your customers and your competitors that you are not taking responsibility for success. Instead, you’re leaving it up to every other element, controllable or not, to determine whether your company survives, thrives or dies.

Back in the 70’s, everyone either owned or craved the absolute coolest technology in photography - the SX-70 Polaroid Instant Camera. Point, shoot, and out spits a square, blank, slightly gooey piece of stiff paper. Then you, “shake it like a Polaroid picture”, for a minute as the image magically appears before your eyes. For over a decade the product was on fire, although the company was poorly managed. When digital photography was introduced, Polaroid had a big decision to make. Polaroid’s decision was, let’s keep doing what we’re doing, only let’s invest more to innovate film. They didn’t listen to the market or to their customers. So much for Polaroid. Of course, Ken Olson didn’t do much better in 1977. As the President, Chairman and Founder of Digital Equipment Corp. he made a big decision immortalized in the statement, “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” Oops.

Making decisions is not just about deciding yes, no; go, no go. Decisions require the best thinking you can muster in the time you’re given. You need inputs. Data and facts balanced with perspectives and insights. Rarely are things so black and white that decisions are easy, at least not when it comes to the big stuff.

Taking Action For Success

When you make decisions, things change. Either you’re instigating the change or you’re waiting for things around you to change. Don’t wait. It’s much better to be in the driver’s seat, as long as you trust your abilities.

I came across an interesting case study during a consulting gig for Hay Group, a worldwide HR consulting company. I was helping them build a business case for a new product they licensed called Resilience Factor^TM - Achieving Success By Overcoming Adversity. The study examined how two groups of sales people at Edward Jones responded to a disturbing decline in sales activity. The Control Group dealt with the problem by abdicating responsibility to everything else around them - the economy, the marketing, corporate leadership. The Resilience Group, using the training program, identified factors that were controllable and formed strategies to help them overcome the hurdles. In other words, this group accepted responsibility for their success by dealing directly with the factors that they could affect - customer education, communications, leveraging each other’s talents and skill sets. The Reliance Group produced over 101% higher Assets Under Management than the Control Group and enjoyed over 85% higher gross commissions.

Making a decision can feel like standing at the edge of a tall cliff overlooking the water. You can decide to jump, but still find yourself standing there hours later. Taking action is obviously making the leap. The fear is that if you jump you might belly flop and break your neck. Or, if you’re thoughtful and controlled, you’ll probably live and might even have the rush of your life. In business, you can’t stand there forever noodling your decision. Think through the implications, mitigate the downsides and focus on the factors you can influence to deliver the best results.

Learning What It Takes To Be Successful

Sometimes the decision was wrong. Other times it was the action. One thing is for sure, if you stay focused, and calm, you’ll learn something that allows you to change course before disaster strikes.

When you’re acting on decisions, you have to pay attention to what is going on along the way. It’s okay to make a mistake, but if you only discover that you’ve made a mistake at the very end, you haven’t taken responsibility for success. You must stay plugged in and be prepared to navigate, retreat, redirect and yes, make new decisions and take new action. It takes guts. As Sir Winston Churchill said, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

Leadership Means Taking Responsibility For Success

As individuals we have a responsibility for our own success. Throughout our lives we make decisions, take action and learn lessons that we hope will get us to a better place. When you’re running a company, you have a responsibility to make decisions and take action that will lead the organization and everyone involved to a better place. That’s not a “burden”, but it is an “obligation”. It’s one you’re fortunate to have. Most people aren’t built to take the lead. You have it. You have the opportunity to create the conditions for success for your employees, suppliers, customers and of course, yourself. You. Because, you rock!

Creating The Conditions For You To Take Responsibility For Success

• Make it a priority to understand the problems and opportunities of your company, market, competitors and customers.
• Build your input sources - people, research, data, articles, books.
• Don’t be idle with your decisions. When it’s time to make a decision, make it!
• Plan the appropriate action with timely measurement and focused oversight.
• Stay plugged in so you can learn from what is happening.
• Have the courage to make adjustments, revisit your action plan and even your decision if necessary.

It doesn’t really matter where great ideas come from but it absolutely matters that you create the conditions in your company for ideas to emerge. Aside from all the business books that encourage idea generation as a proven business strategy there are some very basic, very compelling reasons why your company should be cultured to breed ideas and structured to bring them to realization.

• Ideas exponentially build your Intellectual Capital by adding Creative Capital.
• Ideas put you steps ahead of competitors.
• Ideas keep you more relevant to your customers.
• Ideas ensure that your company is future ready.
• Ideas generate internal buzz.
• Ideas create more meaningful employee engagement.
• Ideas make you an employer of choice.
• Ideas save you money.
• Ideas produce new revenue.
• Ideas improve the way you do things.
• Ideas influence executives to spend some valuable time thinking about “what can be” instead of resigning themselves to only “what is”.
• Ideas inspire more ideas.

Back to the napkin for a moment.

Since the invention of the disposable dinner napkin, average people have recorded moments of extraordinary brilliance on a piece of absorbent paper originally purposed only to wipe away the personal remnants of your meal; usually off of your face. There are all kinds of stories and myths about companies, inventions, creations and innovations birthed from napkins.

• Five-foot-three inch tall Terry Campbell sketched his concept of a seat belt adjuster for short drivers on a napkin. The Master Design Seat Belt Adjuster (United States Patent 5201099) has sold more than 10 million units to date.
• In 1974, Arthur Laffer drew a diagram on a cocktail napkin for Dick Cheney to explain why the economy would falter on planned tax hikes. The Laffer Curve became better known as the Law of Diminishing Returns and continues to guide national economic policy.
• Legend has it that Southwest Airlines got its start on the back of a napkin. I’ve heard tell that’s not exactly how it happened, but it sure does fit their brand personality.
• If they were handy at the time I’m sure Einstein would have had his share of scribbled napkins with loose thoughts scattered around his celebrated office. How could one of his “loose thoughts” change the world today? At the very least, how much do you think a crumpled up Einstein napkin would score on eBay?

Napkin thinkers. From the ordinary to the extraordinary. It’s not that napkin thinkers don’t apply rigor to their thinking. It’s just that, well, you never know when a new idea is going to pop into your head or where you will be at the time. Millions of great ideas have been jotted down on napkins, and even though most found their way into the circular file bin, quite a few certainly made the journey to fruition. I know for sure because I’ve had napkin ideas that became a CRM system module, a couple of marketing campaigns, and a strategy to restructure a company’s financing model for accelerated growth. That last one was done on the back of a coffee joint napkin sitting on a comfy chair, enjoying a camomile tea and double chocolate chip cookie. That’s how it happens. What about you? You’re just as likely to be a napkin thinker as the next guy.

To borrow a set-up from Jeff Foxworthy…

If you find yourself ordering your meal with extra napkins and a pen, you might be a napkin thinker.

If patterned napkins without lots of white space for writing piss you off, you could be a napkin thinker.

If you wipe the spaghetti sauce off your mouth with the sleeve of your suit jacket rather than messing up your napkin, you are most definitely a napkin thinker. Or eight years old.

Everyone is a napkin thinker at one time or another. Some of us are just around napkins more often than others. So here’s my idea to harness the creative energy and ingenuity of everyone in your organization, and the napkin it rode in on.

The Idea Napkin

I was waiting for my lunch, looking at this napkin on the table and thought, “What if you could provide each employee with an easy, efficient, engaging, entertaining and inspiring way for them to capture, share and transform ideas into game changing opportunities for your company?” Okay, I didn’t think of all that at once. I just started by writing “idea napkin” in the centre of my napkin. The rest kind of just, exploded from there.

The Idea Napkin is a simple methodology for capturing ideas and keeping them alive long enough to be turned into something really valuable. I will outline how the process works from start to being incorporated into your existing system of idea development. If you don’t have a system to develop ideas yet, you will. For today, let’s begin at the beginning.

Why A Napkin?

There is something very liberating about writing on a napkin. Sure it tears easily and ink bleeds through. Big deal. It’s a small trade off for just enough space to get an idea out of your head without the distraction of keyboards, widgets, colours, shapes, clip art, animation, audio and Starship Enterprise tools that drag you into the mire of designing a presentation instead of focusing on your brainwave. An idea, simply described. Potentially a diamond in the rough. At worst, a thought starter for another idea.

By the way, don’t use actual napkins. They tear easily and the ink bleeds through. Instead, apply the attributes of what makes napkins a handy tool for ideas.

• Napkins have no lines, punch holes, logos or spiral binding. Nothing gets in the way of a good idea.
• Napkins aren’t tied down. You can pass a napkin with your idea onto your friend. Notebooks are full of ideas that never get shared and therefore never have a chance of being developed. Eventually it’s time to toss out all those old, dusty notebooks. Treasure lost.
• Napkins are non-judgemental. If your idea was on a Word document or worse, PowerPoint slides, you’d want to put much more into it on your own before you feel comfortable sharing it. What happens? You just forget about it.
• Napkins are there exactly when you need them. Spontaneous thoughts? No problem. Grab for the napkin and you’re ready without the fuss of starting up your laptop.
• Napkins are agnostic. Write. Print. Draw. Doodle. Doesn’t matter. Napkins accept whatever you want to put on them in whatever way gets your idea across.

For your Idea Napkins, use white sheets of paper. Cheap paper. Made of 100% recycled materials. It has to be cheap, recycled paper because people have to feel that the sheets are basically worthless and available in abundance. Something you can write on without thinking about the cost. You never want to hear, “I don’t want to waste a page”. That’s death. But here’s the secret… those worthless, abundant sheets of cheap, recycled paper may be worth a fortune with the right idea scribbled on it; turning nothing into something. Something real special.

I know what you’re going to say. “We’re trying to eliminate paper from our workplace, not introduce more of it.” You’re right. Absolutely. Except for one thing. You can’t. Not yet. Not for a long time. Flexible LCD screens, E-Ink and OLED’s (Organic Light Emitting Diodes) are years and years away from being an inexpensive ubiquitous alternative to paper. It’ll be nice when the technology is here but for now, paper still rules. Put forms, templates, memos, reports online. They’re just cold information and don’t have to be on paper to do their jobs. Ideas, on the other hand, need a fertile, warm place to sprout. For now, that’s paper. Don’t worry, you’re not going to cause more trees to be cut down. The paper’s recycled. Nor will you be throwing out more paper. I’ll explain in a moment.

Guillotine 8.5 x 14 sheets in half. More square then rectangle. Take these sheets of paper - let’s officially call them Idea Napkins from this point on if that’s alright with you - and put them in cheap and cheerful napkin holders you buy at the Dollar Store. Seriously. Don’t get fancy holders specially made. This needs an authentically cheap and abundant feel to it. Rest a basic ball point pen in the holder. Step back and marvel at the idea capture device you’ve created.

Now construct a bunch more and place them in strategic spots around your company where people gather, relax and work:

• Meeting rooms
• Near the coffee machine
• Cafeteria tables
• Lounge areas
• Waiting area
• Reception
• Board rooms

If you want to send a strong message to your people; one that says “dream, imagine, create, think…because your ideas will drive the future success of our business”, put an Idea Napkin Holder on every desk.

Recognition and Reward

Two things to remember. Ideas come from your people. Recognize their contributions and reward any ideas that get implemented. Five hundred dollars as a standard prize is a small investment for an idea that could be worth millions in the future. Of course, for certain ideas you may choose to up the ante, such as those that land a big new contract. Second thing to remember: incentives work.

Using Idea Napkins Is Easy

Simpler than the instructions on a match book. Whenever and wherever a light bulb goes on in your head just reach out for the Idea Napkin and write, jot, scribble, list, draw; whatever works to describe your idea. It might be a full scale diagram or a few words. That part doesn’t matter. What does matter is that when you look at your Idea Napkin, you see the idea.

You know the saying, “There are no dumb ideas”? One hundred percent true. But not everyone feels confident enough to take the chance. No worries. We have an idea to solve that problem, too. Codes. Every employee gets their personal Idea Code to write on their Idea Napkin. Only HR knows who’s who. That way, no reason to ever hesitate sharing your ideas. The only thing you might want to do is make a copy for yourself in case you get the urge to flesh it out a bit.

Whether you make a copy or not, never, never, never…throw out your Idea Napkin or tuck it in your notebook where it will get lost forever. Give it a chance for life. Put it in the Idea Bin! It’s more rewarding then recycling and might even end up being better then sliced bread.

Idea Bins are cosy little boxes from, you guessed it, the local Dollar Store. Set a few around the office, warehouse, factory; wherever you find Idea Napkin Holders.

Idea Bins (Not Suggestion Boxes)

Suggestions get no respect. Ideas, well, they should be treated like the life blood of your company. They may be incremental or transformational. Who knows? The important thing from a corporate perspective is that they represent your company’s Creative Capital, exponentially increasing the value of your Intellectual Capital. The Idea Bin is the first step towards shaping ideas into full-fledged, fully implemented solutions. In other words, they’re part of the process:

1. Capture idea on Idea Napkin
2. Drop Idea Napkin into bin
3. Get decision-makers to consider idea
4. If it’s a possibility, establish idea as a project
5. Develop and test idea
6. Implement and measure

From Thought To Action

Ideas are thoughts. Transforming them into something tangible requires more thought. Idea Curators and Captains help ideas make the transition.

Curators are responsible people. They take great care of the artifacts that have been entrusted to them. In this case, we’re talking about precious gems, gold nuggets and a few diamonds that might be lying around your office. Each week, Idea Curators collect the contents of Idea Napkin Bins. Respectfully, thoughtfully, Curators decipher each idea without editing. They sort the Idea Napkins into a few categories, such as functional areas of your company.

• Operations/Admin/Finance
• Marketing/Sales
• Products/Services
• Customer Service/Customer Relations
• ?

Yes, that last one is a question mark, not a typo or “etc”. It’s a category reserved for ideas that are unclassifiable. These might not only be the most entertaining to read, they could very well be the ones to change your future.

The Idea Curator, attentively places each pile into category folders and expeditiously delivers them to the designated Idea Captains.

Each category has an Idea Captain. For ? ideas, decide who is the most open-minded senior level thinker at your organization to take on that portfolio. Maybe, it’s your CEO? Idea Captains must be senior executives. Sorry. No disrespect intended to anyone but it’s critical to have decision-makers make the first decisions. They’re the only ones who know what’s going on behind the scenes. We hope. By the way, their decision is always, yes.

Yes, the idea gets tabled “Now”; or
Yes, the idea gets tabled, but “Later”. File these Idea Napkins in the Idea Bank folder.

For Idea Napkins that get tabled now, the forum is the monthly Idea Share attended by Idea Captains, including the CEO even if he or she isn’t an Idea Captain. Imagine…senior executives getting together for about an hour once a month to talk about nothing else but ideas to help make the company better, faster, healthier, greener, more competitive, more relevant, more profitable. What could possibly happen? Anything. Everything! These are the people who make things happen. Unfortunately, most of their time is spent dealing with what is already happening and very, very little time is invested on a regular, formal basis dream about future possibilities. Idea Share creates the conditions for this group to change the game from within.

The agenda is uncomplicated. Each Idea Captain presents Idea Napkins designated “Now”. Captains discuss the merits. Then they make a decision, and by the way, their decision is always, yes. Again.

Yes, the idea proceeds to development “Now”; or
Yes, the idea gets tabled again, but “Later”. Add them to the Idea Bank.

If it’s a “Now” Idea, the Idea Captain is charged with assembling a small Idea Development Team. Initially, the team may only be comprised of two people, including perhaps, the employee who thought of the idea in the first place. Their job is to flesh out the idea. This is where your existing development process comes into play. A robust idea development process, including online tools, gating techniques and measurement criteria gets sophisticated very fast. If you don’t have one it place, keep things simple. Outline a high level action plan with immediate next steps, potential milestones, due dates and update meetings. This will quickly get things moving in the right direction. If the idea flies, congrats to all. If not, great experience and learning for another day.

Keeping Dreams Alive

Every six months, Idea Captains get together for an Idea Revival Session. Depending on how many ideas you have in play and in the bank, this might take a half day to a full day. All ideas in development are discussed. Mini presentations updating the group are made. Input provided. A bit of navigation. Again, this session should dovetail with your internal idea development process. It’s all good but here’s the part with sparks - Opening The Idea Bank.

All those “Later” ideas are pulled out and reviewed to determine if there are any whose time has come. There will be ideas whose time never comes. That’s okay. They’re used to stimulate new ideas. For this session, I recommend a facilitated format so you can creatively explore new possibilities. A good starting point is a Mind Map. Write “Idea Bank” in the centre of your white board. Take each “Later” idea from the bank and one by one, ask how can you use these ideas today? What might they mean for you tomorrow? How can they embellish other ideas? What new ideas do they inspire? Ideas that become “Now” are put into process. “Later” Ideas are placed back into the Idea Bank for discussion in another six months.

It’s essential that senior executives exercise their creativity as a team. Too much of their time is spent trudging through the daily, weekly, monthly and yearly routine. Collective idea generation creates the conditions for closer ties, greater trust, revitalized focus and new thinking that leads your company into the future.

Refuelling Your Organization With Good News

Ideas fuel your opportunities and the energy of your employees. Keep them in the loop with the bi-annual Idea Napkin News. It helps everyone in your company remain fully engaged in the idea process. Your local Idea Napkin News should include:

• Highlights from the CEO talking about the process, significant contributions and implications for the organization.
• Idea Captain Updates outlining their list of ideas in play and progress made to date. For ideas that are secret, meaning that it wouldn’t be smart to reveal too much before implementation, refer to them by code names. It makes them even cooler and gets your people talking, in a positive way, about all the things that are driving your organization forward.
• When appropriate, and with permission, identify employees responsible for Idea Napkins.
• List employees whose ideas have been implemented and have received their rewards. Show the total paid to date. It creates more incentive.
• Eventually, you’ll have a large section devoted to Ideas Implemented. Treat them like mini-case studies. Explain how they’ve made an impact. Include photos of the actual Idea Napkins. Use these case studies for PR. Reporters love to profile business stories with a human interest angle.

Idea Napkins Change Your Game

Be brave and declare to your employees, “our future is driven by your ideas.” The Idea Napkin is a simple, easy system to implement. Cheap to set up and maintain. Fun. Engaging. Involves everyone in your organization in a way that creates forward thinking momentum and great internal buzz. It efficiently captures all kinds of ideas. At the very least, incremental benefits that help your company operate and perform better. Potentially, ideas that change your fortunes. All you have to do is create the conditions for it to happen. And it all started on the back of a napkin.

Creating The Conditions To Become An Idea Generating Company

• An idea, simply described is the best way to get the ball rolling. Don’t complicate the mechanism with lots of steps for people to complete before an idea can be considered or they won’t bother following through.
• Enable your employees to freely, easily capture ideas whenever and wherever they pop into their heads. Provide Idea Napkins in convenient places. If possible, put an Idea Napkin Holder on every desk.
• Keep things cheap, cheerful and recycled. The authentically abundant feeling makes it emotionally easier to use up Idea Napkins. You don’t want to prevent a potentially breakthrough idea from being shared because your employees are worried about wasting the paper.
• Incorporate recognition and rewards into the program to help stimulate more participation and share success to inspire others.
• Provide a coding system for employees to submit their ideas without fear of embarrassment. They’ll be more comfortable with the process.
• Appoint a reliable Idea Curator and senior managements as Idea Captains. They’ll be the ones who truly understand the importance of their roles and have the authority to help usher ideas through development to implementation.
• Make monthly Idea Shares and bi-annual Idea Bank Reviews high-priority-do-not-miss sessions where executives can focus on working toward “what can be”, not stuck in “what is”.
• Integrate Idea Napkins into your idea development process. If you don’t already have one in place, put a simple process together by managing them like projects.
• Communicate. Keep everyone in the loop and celebrate accomplishments. Together, you will create a perpetual idea generation machine that changes your company, and your world, for the better.

According to the study which used “Loyalty Card” data from 25,000 stores tracking 32 million customers, 52% of highly loyal customers in 2007 either reduced their loyalty or completely defected from the brand in 2008. Of course, it’s the recession. Consumers are making choices based on price because for many, price has become more important than brand. As long as the cheaper product is pretty good, and frankly it often is, the brand loses out.
I thought I’d go back to that article I wrote, pull it apart and update it for today’s market to see if the model I proposed still creates the conditions for a more loyal customer relationship. You decide.

Remember when the Lord of The Rings was released in 2001? Like most people my age I read the trilogy growing up, then went back to read The Hobbit. The story and imagery were phenomenal, but the thing that I didn’t see in my teenage years reading the books that stood out for me as an adult in the movie versions was the deep, unshakable relationship between Frodo and Sam Gamgee. That was true loyalty. It got me thinking whether companies can ever expect loyal behaviour from their customers to mimic the loyalty we watched in The Lord of The Rings as the Fellowship stuck by Frodo no matter what creepy special effect sprung up from Middle Earth? Um, no. That’s fantasy. But there is lots of room to improve loyalty between companies and their customers.

According to the Customer Loyalty Research Centre, loyalty is defined as “the extent to which your customers continue with key loyalty behavior when competitors offer more attractive prices, products, and/or services.” Peppers and Rogers, the acknowledged Customer Relationship Management (CRM) gurus, define it as “the degree to which customers are predisposed to stay with your company and resist competitive offers.”

Here’s the first problem with those definitions. Relationships work both ways. If a brand isn’t sensitive to the financial needs of its customers and doesn’t take appropriate action to remain competitive either through price, incentives or other value-adds when the other guys are fighting hard to win people over, then the brand deserves to lose.
The other problem with the definitions marketers typically apply to explain loyal customer relationships is that they are missing the foundation of what makes a relationship tight, namely emotional attachment. Without emotion there is no loyal relationship.

Much to the chagrin of CRM purists and ad agencies, loyalty inevitably gets defined from the perspective of dollars by brand executives who measure loyalty programs against the bottom line. Ideal loyal behaviour for these financially pressured executives is when customers return to do business under pretty much any circumstances, and that they purchase the maximum amount of the highest margin items. Wow, that really is fantasy!

Forget the fantasy of loyal customer behaviour under any circumstances. Customers will be tempted to buy from competitors at least once in a while. Temptation even happens in our personal relationships, or so I’ve heard. Why do we try to resist temptation when it comes to our home life but not when it comes to products and services? It’s not just the threat of a frying pan upside your head; that’s the rational reason. We try to remain true because our loyalty is based on the emotional attachment we feel for our partner.

Organizations invest huge sums of money and resources to influence customer loyalty, but in the best cases only manage to create behaviour that resembles loyalty. Customers are still drawn away by better offers, rewards and services. Essentially, something is missing in the relationship. It’s loyalty without any heart, or to use a term coined by Andrew Guido from iQuest Inc. and myself, Tin-hearted Loyalty. Yes, also inspired by a movie. If you can’t guess which one you will by the end of the next paragraph.

The lack of emotion in the current definitions of customer loyalty cement most companies in the transactional world of reward points and price deals. Without the inclusion of emotions, companies will never connect with customers in a way that delivers the full potential of those relationships, or as Mr. Guido and I call it, Lionhearted Loyalty. Welcome to the land of Oz.

The very idea of Lionhearted Loyalty is not always met with enthusiasm from marketers. The Vice President of Strategy for a Canadian agency providing “end-to-end, fully integrated marketing solutions”, summed up the thought of being emotionally attached to a brand by saying, “That’s just BS.” Apparently, this VP has never dissed a town’s primary sporting franchise in the local bar, or brought up his politically left-leaning views at a Republican dinner party, or felt the roaring heart beat of a Harley Davidson, one of the most irrational purchases a middle-aged briefcase toting father of three can make. If that’s not emotional attachment, what is?

Lionhearted Loyalty Is A Commitment

A commitment implies a promise to remain loyal, even when things do not always live up to expectations or when the environment changes, such as recessionary times that require more financial compromises. It works both ways. When issues are raised parties work together to resolve them, either proactively or responsively.

When Lionhearted Loyal customers experience poor service or discover that the product they purchased is defective, rather than give up on the relationship they grant the company an opportunity to correct the problem. In turn, the company makes it easy to be contacted and treats the situation with the utmost sincerity and respect. In other words, do not mess up any chance to make things right between you and your customer. When finances become a priority, brands make an effort to alleviate some of the pain, such as guaranteeing car payments if customers lose their jobs. A car industry insider confirmed that this strategy has been a home run, helping to win over new customers from the competition. This is not just your average discount incentive. It shows an appreciation of the economic situation and demonstrates a commitment to helping customers get through it. The brand becomes more of a partner in the relationship rather then a supplier.

Commitment takes time to develop. It is built on trust, consistency and getting customers comfortable to the point that they are not suspicious of your motives. Selling is not an abhorrent concept to consumers. However, if you don’t use best selling practices, if you are not realistic about your expectations of the relationship, if you try to push product rather than satisfying needs, then you will have blown any chance of gaining your customers’ commitment to being true to your brand. You will have reduced their purchase to a purely rational decision without emotional attachment. In fact, emotions can play so strongly against your company that even if the rational reasons are compelling, customers may defect just because of the way you’ve made them feel.

On the positive side, when customers feel an emotional attachment to your brand, your company benefits from sales, endorsement, referral and the all important customer feedback. That feedback can become your company’s proprietary goldmine providing new insights, ideas and directions for continued growth opportunities. Ask the right questions, pay close attention to responses, and you could tilt the playing field in your favour. Tin-hearted Loyalty can always be bought by the competition. Lionhearted Loyalty is much harder to break.

For example, as a business traveler we have many choices for accommodations. When I return to a Ritz Carlton they remember that I requested extra pillows on my previous visit and may have them already stacked in my room upon arrival. That “homey” feeling goes a long way to securing my repeat business and valuable referrals.

Even more compelling is when companies become involved in other aspects of their customers’ lives that are within the permission territory of the brand. For several years back in the 90’s the CRM company I ran was designing a program for Janssen-Ortho, the makers of a drug for the treatment of schizophrenia. We conducted an ongoing interactive forum to facilitate knowledge sharing among psychiatrists. A participating psychiatrist sent a note into the forum describing a patient whose condition had improved to the point where she felt prepared to attend university. Unfortunately, the tuition was prohibitive considering the cost of her medication regimen. Shortly after receiving the letter, acting on our recommendations, the brand established a bursary program for patients diagnosed with this disease, regardless of the medication being used. The patients benefited, their caregivers were grateful and the key target market, psychiatrists, exhibited a heightened affinity for the brand, making the program mutually rewarding for everyone.

Gourmantra Foods Indian Food Meal Kits has established a brand that actively encourages customers to participate in the creation of new recipe and serving ideas. The founders of the company, mom and her two daughters, are highly visible at consumer food shows and even show up at supermarket demo’s across North America. The emails these women receive speak as much to the great taste and quality of the food as they do to how much they’ve inspired their customers with their startup story and ongoing adventures. For many, the emotional attachment to the founders’ personalities has grown as strong as the commitment to the product.

Lionhearted Loyalty Takes Heart

Depending on what it is that you sell, you must satisfy at least one or two of your customers’ rational needs just to be in the game. After that, the game is played for the heart. If emotions aren’t part of your brand’s loyalty equation you will continue to wade through countless reward programs, personalized offers and platinum services until you rush into the next great competitive advantage concept.

By adopting Lionhearted Loyalty thinking into your strategic planning, and supporting it through your marketing programs and sales force, you’ll inspire your team to think beyond the transaction model. It will reveal new territory for making connections to customers that ultimately reveal themselves on your P&L. Lionhearted Loyalty will no longer be something you only experience at the movies.

Creating The Conditions For Lionhearted Loyalty

• Search for ways to create emotional attachments with your customers that go beyond price but are within the permission territory of your brand.
• Establish communication channels that make it easy for customers to contact you with problems and when they do, do not mess up the opportunity to make things right.
• Incorporate feedback mechanisms into your marketing and operations to give you an ongoing source of insights that you can leverage to stay a step or two ahead of competitors.
• Demonstrate your commitment to the relationship by taking proactive steps to address big issues affecting your customers (recessionary times, ice storms in Quebec, brush fires in LA) at the appropriate time and in the appropriate way.
• Help your fellow executives, managers and employees understand how emotional attachment fits into your model of selling and servicing; changing the mindset from purely transactional to one that explores new opportunities to form more meaningful relationships with customers.

There are 7 Choke Points of Strategy Implementation. When you first read the list you’ll think, “that’s pretty obvious.” Good. If you know they’re out there you have a fighting chance to avoid them. However, unless you specifically address these points when developing your strategy it’s very likely you’ll create the choke points before you get to implementation stage. Yes, you create the problems, just like you create the conditions for success.

In the end, as in the beginning, it all has to do with people.

If your Corporate Strategy is not being effectively implemented it’s because your people either…

1. Don’t know it.
2. Don’t understand it.
3. Don’t agree with it.
4. Don’t feel attached to it.
5. Don’t have a process to improve it.
6. Don’t have a framework to bring it down to a tactical level.
7. Don’t have benchmarks to navigate it.

At the onset of your strategic development process, when the executive team is working on its Strategic Mandate and before the (hopefully) expanded development team begins generating insights and ideas, list the 7 Choke Points of Strategy Implementation on the whiteboard. Consider your top line tactics to avoid the choke points. Along with your key objectives, these are your development guideposts. Don’t forget about them. Refer to them at each stage. Before you melt the wax and press your seal on the final document, go back one more time to make sure the 7 Choke Points won’t end up squeezing the life out of your strategy. Sorry, that was one last metaphor I couldn’t resist.

A great strategy unimplemented is as useless as having no strategy. Get this part right.

Choke Point 1: Don’t know it.

How many times have you heard stories of CEO’s, incognito, asking employees what makes their company different and getting wildly different responses, none of which were correct? That hurts. It’s happened in my consulting gigs working with the C-Suite of billion dollar organizations where executives could not articulate the corporate strategy or agree on its fundamentals. That really hurts. I actually had one senior executive approach me to apologize after I revealed the misalignment on their team. He was embarrassed. He was pissed off. He was also inspired to rethink how the team and the company can work together. He now runs that corporation, by the way.

Not knowing the strategy is a symptom of two endemic problems - little or no employee engagement through the process of developing strategy, and weak communication. It usually happens in companies where the CEO or a groupthink management team insist on formulating corporate strategy in isolation. Let’s be honest. We’ve all seen it or have ourselves been guilty of thinking alone in our box. It doesn’t work well. Even when the strategy looks brilliant, it’s not worth the napkin it’s written on if it fails to be executed by the people responsible for making it happen.

You can’t share every detail with your employees. Some elements of the strategy and the information that supports it should remain secret. New product development, new markets, new technology, new acquisition. These are closely guarded until the right time so as not to alert competitors. Your employees get that. Although, within those secrets are critical strategic issues that everyone in your organization has to know about and help address.

The very basics of your strategy, the fundamentals that drive your business, must be well communicated to everyone in your company so that your people are informed and enabled to contribute their part, however big or small that might be.

Choke Point 2: Don’t understand it.

Strategy isn’t best communicated by only a memo. Even if it is extremely well written, which it never is, there are too many nuances that don’t make it onto paper. You also can’t rely solely on executives to pass it along to managers who explain it to supervisors who have a staff meeting and later get the full-timers to explain it to the part-timers when they show up for a shift. Playing broken telephone was a riot when we were kids and probably pretty funny when we were experimental teenagers. As business leaders, not so much.

One of the most important jobs of the development team, in addition to formulating the strategy, is the creation of a plan to communicate the strategy throughout the organization. More specifically, to decide who needs to know what, when, and how they should be told. Think of the work that goes into a marketing plan. Segmenting customer groups, treating high value customers differently, multi-channel messaging. Same thing goes for communicating corporate strategy to your employees. Different areas need different information. Certain departments and people have to be brought on board sooner than others. It may not be efficient or even possible to gather employees in the field for a work session. Find other ways to reach and engage those people. Like any great marketing program, communicating strategy requires a combination of outbound efforts integrated with feedback mechanisms and reinforcement messaging.

It’s not just about a comprehensive communications plan, of course. The way you speak about the strategy has to make sense to your audience. If they don’t understand it in a language that they’re used to hearing, they won’t get it. For example, that young MBA you hired may be all excited about his new “strategic imperatives” but dude on the production line wants to hear where he should spend more of his time and why that’s going to make his life better.

This is where a good corporate communications person is vital. Even if your company doesn’t have that role, you surely have marketing resources who can put their expertise to good use.

Choke Point 3: Don’t agree with it.

You believe you have a well articulated strategy; communicated in a way that everyone knows what it is and totally understands what you’re saying. But they don’t agree with it.

No matter what you do, not everyone will agree with your strategy.

That’s okay. As long as you did your pre-launch homework.

Before you officially launched your strategy did you check that everyone on your development team agrees with it? What about your board? Your advisors? Key employees? Close suppliers? Trusted customers? Just because a few people don’t agree with the strategy doesn’t make it wrong, even at the pre-launch stage. In fact, you might find many people won’t agree with it. Despite what the industry was doing, and what analysts were saying at the time, IBM transformed itself from a hardware company into a services company and never looked back. It took time and Herculean strength to make that shift. When a radio station switches format overnight, most stakeholders think the strategy, or more specifically, the person who decided on that strategy, is crazy. Sometimes that’s true; but when you take an underperforming business based on a short-sighted strategy and transform it into a money-making enterprise with long-term potential, you’ll be lauded as a genius.

The benefit of hearing from people who don’t agree with the strategy before you launch is that it acts as an early warning system. Drill down. Ask specific questions about their reasons for disagreeing. Listen to their answers. Perhaps more importantly, listen carefully to how you answer their questions. Can you respond quickly, clearly and convincingly? Can you support the strategy with evidence? Use these points to identify and address potential gaps in either your strategy or your communication.

If you’re coming up short, have the team return to the insights you used to formulate the strategy and examine their validity. Can the insights be trusted? Did you interpret them correctly? If any decisions are based on weak insights, put your heads together to conceive of quick, efficient ways to gather and test new insights that strengthen the foundation of your strategic decisions. Time and money are big factors so you have to balance the risk of delaying launch against the risk of implementation failure.

Choke Point 4: Don’t feel attached to it.

While general agreement from your employees is important, you need more than their heads to ensure successful implementation… you need their hearts. People work harder when they are emotionally attached to their work.

Involve as many people in the strategic development process as possible and as early as possible. This is how you create corporate-wide ownership of the strategy. Development team members have people and departments that report to them. In essence, each member is representing a larger group of employees with insights, opinions, experience and expertise that you can use throughout the development of your strategy. Leverage those relationships! Development team members should leave work sessions with homework for their teams. Researching, testing, calibrating. These are best done by groups outside of the development team and frees up team members’ time for quality thinking.

Find the Sparks in your company; the opinion leaders who command attention from co-workers. Get them on side early. No matter what their position on the totem pole, Sparks can either spread the fires of discontentment or rev up your engine. Take the time to help them understand the underlying reasons for your strategic direction. Give Sparks the basis to believe and they will influence others to believe. Keep in close contact. Demonstrate your appreciation of their unique role and you will have harnessed a powerful force to build support of your strategy.

Getting your people passionately supportive of strategy isn’t easy. It takes a consistent and persistent effort, best delivered through multiple touch-points. For simplicity sake, this can fall under three categories:

Big Messages: Communications from the core development team that lay the foundation for the corporate strategy, keep employees aware of overall progress, ignites enthusiasm and stimulates feedback.

• Corporate wide
• High level
• Key Stages
  • In process
  • Pre-launch
  • Launch
  • Post launch
  • Reinforcement

Focused Messages: Communications from managers that translate Big Messages for departments and staff.

• Department and/or topic specific
• In depth, as appropriate

Engagement: Involve people outside of the core strategy development team to provide input or support the team’s work.

• Feedback Mechanisms
  • Big Messages: Collect feedback through online surveys so the core team can quickly assess and utilize the input.
  • Focused Messages: Feedback should flow up through managers who are better equipped to address specific issues.

Choke Point 5: Don’t have a process to improve it.

Your strategy is not perfect. If you involved the right people in its development and did your homework you’ve dramatically upped the odds in your favour. The foundation of your strategy - your Purpose and Core Values - may never change. Just don’t carve anything else in stone. Instead, establish a process to improve the strategy throughout implementation and beyond.

Basically speaking, only two major forces will push your strategy around.

One, your world changes. This change might be an external disruption. A competitor surprises the market, and you, by launching a remarkably better product, service or business model. A new technology changes the game. Terrorists convert commercial airliners into tactical weapons. It can also be an internal disruption. Deadly bacteria is found in your meat processing plants. Raw sewage from the city’s largest ever concert backs up and turns your entire inventory into garbage. Your key executives were on that unfortunate plane. All of this has happened and thrown affected companies into a spin cycle. Some recovered and some did not. As much as you can be prepared, you simply can’t be prepared for anything.

The other force is less dramatic but quite insidious. The good news is that you can turn it into a huge plus. Employees far removed from your boardroom will see things right away that can slow or even derail the implementation of your strategy. Rather than having them complain or shrug off the failure of management to understand their street-level challenges, give employees a mechanism to identify issues, generate potential solutions and share their insights with managers who have the authority and mindset to take appropriate action. While your strategy works on paper it will definitely need tweaking as it moves through implementation. That’s called Learning and Adapting.

The following chart depicts a proven high level process used for collaborative problem solving but is equally applicable for Learning and Adapting. Just fill in the operational procedures to get you from one stage to the next.

The beauty of a such a process is that once properly deployed, it always exists as an open channel for improvement and innovation. It helps makes companies great by creating a perpetual and proprietary pool of new thinking and the means to act on it. It also helps smooth the rough spots of your strategy to accelerate it through implementation.

Choke Point 6: Don’t have a framework to bring it down to a tactical level.

Great strategy on paper can easily fail in the field if it isn’t translated into tactics. Managers and employees need to know how the new strategy changes what they do on a day-to-day basis. How does it affect reporting, customer service procedures, production? Does it require new metrics, new marketing plans, a new greeting on the voice mail system? How much time are these changes going to take, who is responsible and how does everyone know they’re doing the right things?

Since your strategy development team includes some of the people who understand what will be required at the tactical level, you should be fine. They won’t have all of the answers but enough to identify potential hurdles and solutions. To avoid dragging your development team, and other executives, into the minutiae, give some thought to setting parameters for tactical implementation that will help guide managers and employees as they translate the final plan into their reality.

Any way you look at it, strategy means change. How much change is dependant upon two attributes of your strategy:

1. How different it is; and
2. How new it is.

How different; as in “how different is this strategy for your industry?” If there is no precedent it means there is no one available within the industry to help you in the execution. You’re going to borrow from other industries as well as making it up as you go along. Exciting stuff.

How new; as in “how new is the strategy for your company?” You’ll draw on capabilities and skill sets you might have never utilized before. It could mean new processes and ways of working together. Very revitalizing.

Change always has both benefits and risks. As long as you’re cognizant of the potential risks, you can find ways to mitigate or overcome them before they turn into problems. A simple way of looking at it is by charting your strategy against the degree of change it demands. On the extremes, the risk is always highest. Too little change and you risk giving your competitors an opportunity to catch up. Too much change and you might run into debilitating resistance from employees, board members, even suppliers. I’m not suggesting you find a cozy spot in the middle. You do what’s best for your company. As long as you know what to expect you’ll gain the insights to deal with it, in advance.

As part of your strategic implementation plan, package up guidelines, metrics, expectations and examples for your managers to work more effectively with their teams. Empower your people to be creative by inviting them to build on the strategic foundation you’ve built. Establish channels for ideas to flow top down and bottom up. Their tactical input will fortify the strategic framework to deliver better results today and position your company for continued long-term success.

Choke Point 7: Don’t have benchmarks to navigate it.

You obviously have metrics that you’ll use to assess the performance of your strategy. Right? Right. Before you can measure performance of your strategy you have to implement your strategy. Have you incorporated those metrics into your plan?

Implementing strategy takes time and resources. You can track both dimensions to measure progress, costs and highlight issues that need to be addressed quickly. You‘ll also use these metrics to evaluate internal processes, helping your organization become better, smarter and faster. Two benefits for the price of one. It’s a great deal.

Details bog down strategy development but are essential to bringing that strategy to life. That’s why during development of your strategy it’s advantageous to spin off a small team of three people to formulate the implementation plan and benchmarks. This gives them an opportunity to focus on the internal issues of implementation that get missed by the core strategy development team.

The objective is to create a set of measures that…

1. include milestones to help everyone, from the top down, pinpoint their progress against expectations;
2. features simple triggers that direct employees and management to take appropriate action in a timely manner; and
3. is followed up by a learning module to improve and permanently embed better processes in the organization.

A valuable metric that begins during implementation, and extends weeks or months beyond it, is Adoption. It’s difficult to measure Adoption based on hard numbers alone, but if you have included feedback mechanisms through the strategy development phase, you can continue to use those channels to tap into your employees. Asking the right questions of the right people at the right time will reveal crucial insights that directly impact the successful implementation of your strategy.

To keep it simple and quick for executives, Adoption is best measured as positive or negative. Either it’s working or it’s not. The grey areas in between are for managers to address and correct, or recommend solutions that require executive decision-making. There are three dimensions to track - Days off schedule, percentage off performance and whether feedback is mostly positive or mostly negative. The first two are quantifiable. The third, Feedback, means someone is interpreting survey and anecdotal data to apply a value. It’s not scientific. It’s not meant to be. Do you really want to spend resources generating a mathematical quotient when you have a strategy to implement? This is a proactive measure designed to spotlight issues so management can quickly get things back on the rails.

Each dimension for measuring Adoption has its own trigger. For example, executives might not consider the schedule an issue until its three days late. Performance - such as sales, delivery times, cost containment, or whatever you choose to measure based on your industry, company and business model - may draw your attention if its 0.5% off target. Feedback can be a combination of questions asked through surveys featuring a scorecard approach, some open-ended questions to understand why there might be an issue, as well as proactive communications between managers and their staff. Each week, in the boardroom, you want to look at a stripped down Adoption report:

When everything is positive, you move onto other discussions. When something is negative, deal with it. The combination of positives and negatives will help to zero in on possible Choke Points or strategic development issues.

By asking you get insights. When you get insights you can address problems. Provide benchmarks and you’re giving your people tools to measure their own progress and indicators for you to help successfully navigate the implementation of your strategy.

Creating The Conditions for Successful Implementation of Strategy

• Engage as many people in the organization as possible to contribute to strategy development, even when its just compiling information.
• Communicate the direction and reasoning of your strategy in a way that makes sense to each audience.
• Listen to what’s being said and learn from others in your organization who are responsible for bringing the strategy to life.
• Help to bring the strategy closer to the minds and hearts of your people by developing a multi-channel, two-way communications program.
• Provide a simple method to share thinking up and down the organization.
• Establish a framework that empowers managers and employees translate the strategy into their workday.
• Measure what you do, how you do it and be proactive.

The tough economy has forced executives to take a hard look at all aspects of their company in search of cost savings and efficiencies. Cut, cut, cut. Consolidate. Divest. Reduce. Except in one area… sales. Well, sales departments are suffering too but as bad as things are, you don’t want to obliterate your “life-blood” department. This is an opportunity to dramatically improve your team and position the company to dominate your playing field when wallets start loosening up. You may not even have to spend more money if you’re willing to make some trades.

It’s never a good time to be mediocre in sales. The past few years leading up to this downturn has been non-stop growth. Unfortunately, and incredibly, unabated growth is like fertilizer for mediocrity. Either everyone responsible for maintaining high performance standards is too distracted with workload to pay close attention or the underperformers themselves are doing okay in spite of their abilities. The orders just keep coming and the numbers look good. Today, mediocrity is still difficult to spot just by looking at numbers. Even top performers are hurting. However, look a little past the numbers and you’ll see how sales stars are fighting back compared to laggards who have lots of complaints but no strategy or tactics.

Once you identify your underperformers, take action. Figure out what’s wrong and fix it, move them to a more appropriate position that leverages their skills, ship them out or make a trade. You can’t afford to wait. Timing is everything.

Sales stars think of tomorrow, not just today. They plan. They maintain relationships. They look for new avenues to meet people. They suggest different approaches and offers. They are busy creating the conditions for success, even if that success means months or years. That’s who you want on your team. A rolodex is great, but even those contacts won’t get sales people very far until the economy warms up. Stars don’t just know people, they know people; where to find them, how they think, what’s important to them and what it will take to secure their business now and in the future.

When you’re searching for the right stars, the best place to start is with your own strategy. Gather your team. Like always, if you want to create the conditions for success, add brainpower. Draw a chart with two columns. Column one is Our Strategy. List key points about your vision, markets, products, services, culture, selling style, customer relationship processes, future plans and anything else you feel is relevant to your company’s success when it comes to sales. Column two is Star Performer. For each point under Our Strategy, list the corresponding attributes, capabilities and assets that you need in a star sales performer. That becomes your recruitment criteria.

New chart. Two columns. Column one is titled, Competitive Package. List the salary, bonuses, territories, structure and everything else you imagine competitors can provide to this star performer. Call column two, Our Package. Point for point, I think you know what to do. Now take it further. What can you offer that none of your other competitors can offer? By the way, the answer probably isn’t monetary, unless you’re offering an equity opportunity. That might count big. More likely you’ll find the answer is in your strategy. What makes your company different is how you look at it, and the plan you’ve put in place to make it successful.

Of course you have to address the short-term. Everyone needs money now. Star performers however, will also be attracted to what’s coming next. If you’re able to clearly differentiate your future from competitors then you’ve just landed a new sales star, and did it without spending much more then you’re paying right now.

Creating The Conditions For Improving Your Sales Team

1. Use down time to identify underperformers by tracking their tactics. Stars work on sales today while positioning themselves for future success. Underperformers don’t or can’t.
2. Help underperformers in any way possible, including retraining, support or moving them to the right job. If that’s not going to do the trick, then do the best thing for both of you, and terminate their employment.
3. Work in a team to determine the optimal recruitment criteria for new sales talent by aligning their attributes, capabilities and assets to your strategy using the Our Strategy / Star Performer chart.
4. Figure out what you can offer star performers by completing the Competitive Package vs. Our Package chart. Remember, your strategy will differentiate you from competitors and give star performers a more compelling, long term reason to join your company.
5. Find a recruiter who specializes in finding the top sales performers in your industry. Unless you know of sales people who fit the profile you’re looking for, recruiters are the best source for talent and will keep your poaching at arms length.