Vision Driven: Lessons Learned from the Small Business C-Suite. Mallary JD Tytel
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•What will you be learning and how will you be learning?
•What will you believe in?
•In what different ways will you find joy?
•What will worry you the most?
•What will you hope for?
Now think about your organization. Remember it is still ten years from now.
•Will it still exist?
•Will it be different? How?
•What will your world of work be like?
•What are your hopes for the future of your company?
•What are the implications for your thinking, planning and actions starting today?
As your challenges become more apparent, you can become more conscious about the gap between the way the world is and the way you would like it to be. You can address this with action.
From a financial perspective, this might mean developing new customers and new contracts; better financial and budget management techniques; new operating and accounting systems; and a healthy bottom line.
From a customer perspective, this might mean providing and adding value through enhanced relationships; collecting and analyzing client data; developing ground-breaking products and services; shifting to a more innovative culture of doing business; and managing private and public market segmentation.
From a perspective of organizational excellence, this might mean expanded, efficient systems, processes and quality standards; an effective communication plan; and enhanced performance management procedures with built in rewards and recognition.
From a perspective of innovation, learning and creativity, this might mean escalating research and development functions; expanding the corporate white space; and proactively developing new products and services to remain at the edge of anticipated changing markets.
Individually, you can ask yourself if what you are doing is ...
•Moving you forward to reach your goals?
•Bringing business in the door?
Collectively as a group, your organization can identify what you will need to reach your shared vision.
•Communicating openly, consistently, often and in all directions
•Innovating
•Identifying and measuring internal and external results
•Understanding and responding to your market
•Striving for and achieving excellence
•Maximizing financial and human resources
•Maintaining ongoing dialogues with colleagues and providing resources for improvement
•Showing an appreciation for diversity
•Providing feedback into the system
Keeping this in mind, the following questions are for your careful consideration:
•How will you manage the certainty of uncertainty?
•What are the implications of your answers to these questions in your thinking, planning and actions today?
Now, what are you waiting for?
8
Measuring Results: The Balanced Scorecard
“If we did all the things we were capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.”
Thomas Edison
Critical success factors are the measures that determine whether or not your organization is successful in achieving its goals. They provide macro containers for organizing and evaluating the outcomes and impacts of your efforts. Through the use of the balanced scorecard, management can distill those key factors that have to be achieved for an organization to be able to realize successful outcomes.
The balanced scorecard, a management system developed by Harvard University’s Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, enables organizations to clarify their vision and strategy and translate them into action. It provides feedback around both the internal business processes and external outcomes in order to continuously improve strategic performance and results. I am a huge fan of the balanced scorecard because it focuses efforts on strategy and vision while offering a set of unmistakable measures that give organizations a quick, but comprehensive, view of what is going on.
The scorecard is organized into four key perspectives: financial perspective, or how to we look to our shareholders, constituents, or funders; internal business perspective, or how we have maintained excellence in our business processes and procedures; customer perspective, or how our customers see us; and innovation and learning perspective, or how we can continue to improve and create value for all our stakeholders. Each point of view can be further interpreted as those specific factors that make sense for an individual organization.
For example, if you specifically identified financial growth and sustainability as a key perspective, one of your critical success factors might be profitability. Your measurement of this might be changes in top-line revenue with respect to the bottom line; analyzing pricing formulas; and whether you are in the red or the black on your financial statements at the end of the year. With quality systems in place – a critical success factor for operational excellence – you would also be able to measure, analyze and project a financial return on investment while tracking smart sustainable growth.
Once you know what your critical success factors are, you can then identify possible measures of your goals and results. Continuing to distill the process, you would then be able to list specific objectives and actions to achieve them. The example I’ve included might be your own organization’s scorecard.
From here your scorecard can be further expanded. Based upon the company scorecard, each business unit would then create its own targets and measures; and from those unit scorecards, individual staff success factors and scorecards would then filter down. This last step is an undeniable way to show how everyone’s individual actions support the whole in very real and connected ways.
The individual’s scorecard rolls up to the corporate scorecard; the corporate scorecard rolls down to the individual. You can now answer questions about how you (individually or corporately) are doing and you can see how any one action contributes to the whole.
The bottom line: if the organization is doing well, the individual, such as an employee or customer, is doing well; and if the individual is doing well, the organization is doing well, too.
How well are you performing up and down your organization? How do you know?
9
Smile!
“The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.”
Oliver W. Holmes
A very talented colleague of mine, Grace, works for an organization whose value statement is expressed simply as SMILE! They mean it. SMILE is an acronym that stands for: Sincerity, Motivation, Integrity, Laughter and Enthusiasm. I admit I cannot recall meeting anyone recently whose disposition and demeanor were not improved by a smile; however this sounded a bit too good to be true to me.
Grace