strategic planning: innovation: management:success

SOME DO’S AND DONT’S OF THE PROCESS

You’re finally going to do it. You are a born again believer in the benefits of business and strategic planning. To prepare you for the plunge here’s some rules of the road to guide you through the process.

The planning process can be exhilarating, frustrating, enlightening, demanding and a host of other descriptive adjectives. Hopefully you’ll find a nugget or two in these do’s and don’ts that will keep the emphasis on the positives of your unique organizational growth experience. Carpe Diem!

“Plans are nothing; planning is everything.“-Dwight D. Eisenhower

SOME PLANNING DO’S:

• It’s the process that counts! Think verb rather than noun. Bringing your team together, fostering interaction, and forming a climate of mutual interdependence and commitment is the real achievement. The final document is not as important as the process that gets you there.
• Do trust your instincts. You have lived and breathed what your company is all about. Your plan has to feel right in your gut. Contemplative logic and passionate emotion are good tools. Use them both.
• Keep the emphasis on communication. Your planning is the linkage between your future, the team that will take you there and the other stakeholders in your enterprise. It’s the glue that binds it all together and drives performance. Communication is the oxygen for your organization’s future.
• Focus on EXECUTION. Remember, results are what count. The best plan in the world is worthless if it can’t be executed. Unfortunately, they don’t give Pulitzer Prizes for business plans. An executable plan on a napkin is a preferable alternative to an elaborate document that gathers dust.
• Keep it flexible, adaptive and evolving. As Yogi Berra said, “the future ain’t what it used to be”. Your planning should be an ongoing living process that can adapt and change as competitive, technological and social conditions evolve. Keep it dynamic not static.
• Stretch. Challenge your organization to extraordinary achievement. Your plan should inspire, motivate and paint a compelling vision for performance. It should keep everyone’s juices flowing.
• Expect unintended consequences. There’s an old English Proverb that states “every path has its puddle”. Regardless of your collective wisdom, there will be unforeseen ramifications, pro and con. Acknowledge this as part of the planning process.
• Enjoy the process. What a wonderful opportunity to bring together the people you admire to form a compelling future together. Getting a lot done and having a lot of fun. Go for it.

SOME PLANNING DONT’S:

• Don’t delegate responsibility (embrace it). This is one management project you can’t delegate away. As CEO, you have to embrace and champion the process. Leadership goes with the position. Rise to the occasion.
• Don’t get caught in the terminology trap. Planning terminology (vision, mission, strategy, tactics, performance metrics, etc.) can murk things up. It should help your team communicate not hinder them. The challenge is to keep the process understandable to all. It’s not important what you call it as long as it drives team performance.
• Don’t get overwhelmed. Keep it simple. If it seems to complex, then back off. Try to rephrase and simplify the process. A plan doesn’t have to read like “War and Peace” to be effective.
• Don’t look for the perfect plan. Perfection is for the next life. As Patton’s’ law expresses it, “a good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow”.
• Don’t deny the facts. Reality can be harsh, but the sooner you accept it, the sooner it can be addressed. There is a fine line between rationalizing failure and denial of reality. The challenge is to know the difference.
• Don’t get trapped by your plan. The purpose of the plan is guide and drive performance. If it becomes unrealistic don’t continue to follow a bad road map. Change it.
• Don’t do it if you’re not going to use it. Be committed to the process. Your passion must be overwhelming if it’s to be effective. You have the opportunity to develop a culture of performance. Don’t go through the motions if it won’t make a difference.

“It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark.”  Howard Ruff

Greg Pashke , CMC is  President of Pashke Consulting and provides business mentoring, strategic and tactical planning, and financial modeling services. Greg is a big proponent of The One Page Plan approach to managing the day to day performance of an organization. It’s simplicity in action. He is committed to continuous learning and skill development. Greg’s mantra is “to get a lot done & have a lot of fun”.
Website: http://www.pashkeconsulting.com/

strategic planning: innovation: management:success

TRACKING ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE

Does your score keeping track useful metrics? Or does it produce data that no one really uses? Finding the right metrics is not always an easy task. A good place to start is to challenge what you are currently producing. Who gets it? Do they use it? Is it what they need?

Times do change! What might have been helpful in 1975 might no longer does the trick. Let me share with you a story about a new plant manager we’ll call Tom who was assigned to turn around a troubled manufacturing facility several decades ago.

“We are glutted with data and yet there is a shortage of wisdom”- Michael Toms

DATA FOR THE SAKE OF DATA BENEFITS NO ONE

Tom was hard at work. He’d spent his first week trying to get an overview of the plant operations and the challenges he was facing. He met with his team, he smoothed relations with the union, and contacted and reassured key customers. He noted every morning he found a six inch high stack of computer printouts in the upper left hand corner of his desk. But he had been to busy to look at them, so they became a three-foot stack in the corner of his office. Tom was working late when Bob, one of his key direct reports, stopped by. As they chatted, Tom asked Bob about the daily stack of printouts. Bob revealed he received the same stack each day, as did the top dozen managers in the facility. Bob, also confessed, he seldom looked at them and did not use them to manage his activities.

Tom and Bob then took a walk down the hall to the EDP department. The staff was gone for the evening, but the “daily report” was printing away on an old dot-matrix high impact printer. The report was being burst into the individual stacks that would be delivered to desktops early in the morning. Tom walked over to the printer and stopped it. He took his trusty Cleveland Indian ball point pen and wrote as hard as he could, so it would penetrate all the copies. “I’ll pay $1,000 to anyone who reads this!”, and then, he signed his name. How many checks do you think Tom wrote out the next day? Zip, zero, nada! The old physics law of inertia (a body at rest tends to remain and rest, and a body in motion tends to remain in motion) had permeated the plant over the years. Reports that no one needed, no one understood, and no one used, had taken on a life of their own.

We are creatures of habit and it’s easy for complacency to set in. When was the last time you took a cold hard look at your existing information systems and the output they generate? You might be in for a nasty surprise. To stop doing the unnecessary is a big first step towards an improved information system.

“When you are drowning in numbers you need a system to separate the wheat from the chaff.” – Anthony Adams

Greg Pashke , CMC is  President of Pashke Consulting and provides business mentoring, strategic and tactical planning, and financial modeling services. Greg is a big proponent of The One Page Plan approach to managing the day to day performance of an organization. He is committed to continuous learning and skill development. Greg’s mantra is “to get a lot done & have a lot of fun”.
Website: http://www.pashkeconsulting.com/

strategic planning: innovation: management:success

ARE YOU READY FOR A HABIT AUDIT?

We all have habits. Some good and some not so good. It’s the same for our organizations. Some foster organizational progress and some detract from it. Are the ingrained habits at your organization working to benefit the company or are they aiding and abetting the competition?

Old habits die hard. That’s why they are called habits. But when habits prevent fresh thinking, become out of date routine patterns, or become mindless repetition, habits can become disruptive.

THE SIX QUESTIONS FOR A HABIT AUDIT?

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” -Aristotle

It’s a good idea to occasionally review the habits that become part of every organization. The six inquiries for such a Habit Audit are:

1) What are your organizational habits? Do you know what they are? Can you compile a list of them? Are there any “unspoken habits” that are not generally acknowledged?

2) Is the habit supportive of your culture, vision, mission, strategies or objectives? Or does it detract in some fundamental way?

3) What drove the formation of the initial habit? Does it continue to make sense?

4) Does the habit give you a competitive advantage or does it put you at a serious disadvantage? Times change and sometimes our habits need to adjust. Dynamic organizations are always evolving.

5) What behaviors are driven by the habit? Do they move your organization in the desired direction?

6) Are the benefits of the habit greater than the cost? What resources does the habit consume and does it contribute to organizational growth?

Is your organization habitual in the things that matter? Be sure to acknowledge and evaluate the habits that permeate your organization. It’s a healthy check-up process and “a good habit” to boot.

A PRODUCT COSTING HABIT EXAMPLE

A specialty manufacturer asked me to evaluate a product cost model it had been using for 40 years. At one time, the model’s concepts were cutting edge, but they had grown obsolete as manufacturing changed over the years.

The company had evolved from a labor-intensive to a capital-intensive operation, and this had major implications for the underlying allocation assumptions in the old model. However, despite convincing information about the model’s shortcomings, the management team held on to it. Their emotional attachment to a piece of company history was more powerful than the facts – a problem that could undermine the company’s productivity and bottom line. The habit of the “old model” became a threat to the future of the company.

“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.” – Jim Rohn

Greg Pashke , CMC is  President of Pashke Consulting and provides business mentoring, strategic and tactical planning, and financial modeling services. Greg is a big proponent of The One Page Plan approach to managing the day to day performance of an organization. He is committed to continuous learning and skill development. Greg’s mantra is “to get a lot done & have a lot of fun”.
Website: http://www.pashkeconsulting.com/

strategic planning: innovation: management: success

SOME BUSINESS RESOLUTION THOUGHTS

What successful companies have mastered…

Are you running your business or is your business running you? If you feel it’s time to regain control, you might want to review this list of the seven interwoven characteristics of superior organizations. Consider working these into your business or organizational plans for 2009.

SEVEN CHARACTERISTICS OF SUPERIOR ORGANIZATIONS

1 They are Customer Oriented.
Be passionate about serving the needs of your customers. Listen to them and be committed to enhancing the relationship with superior service.

2 They Have a Plan.
You’ve got to know where you are headed. A solid plan brings together the necessary focus, clarity and accountability. Keep the plan simple, understandable and use it religiously!

“The future ain’t what it used to be.” – Yogi Berra

3 They Have an Operating Budget Including Cash Flow.
You’ve got to have some financial discipline to go with your plan. Understand how your costs behave and how they can be controlled. Which expenses are fixed? Which ones vary with volume? What is your break-even point? Know your cash flow cycle and how it behaves.

4 They Keep Score.
You’ve got to track progress. It is difficult to manage what you can measure. Use graphs and make your score-keeping highly visible. But don’t forget your “gut” as many aspects of any business can be difficult to measure or graph.

5 They Have Routine Business Review Meetings.
Gather your team monthly for a disciplined review and assessment. Are you on track? What’s changing and how can you react to correct problems and harvest opportunities? Is everyone on your team on the same page? Do they communicate with each other and understand how what they do helps the organization?

6 They Hire Right, Train Rigorously & Reward on Merit.
A good team is essential. Hire carefully, develop skill sets, and reward performance. To remain competitive you’ve got to be a continually learning organization.

7 They Use the Best Affordable Tools.
Use the best affordable technology to help you. Be picky about your tools but don’t skimp on the ones that will drive performance. Invest in your tomorrow.

To be a winning organization you’ll need a combination of passion, discipline, creativity and accountability. Are you up for the challenge?

Greg Pashke , CMC is  President of Pashke Consulting and provides business mentoring, strategic and tactical planning, and financial modeling services. Greg is a big proponent of The One Page Plan approach to managing the day to day performance of an organization. He is committed to continuous learning and skill development. Greg’s mantra is “to get a lot done & have a lot of fun”.
Website: http://www.pashkeconsulting.com/