Strategic Position

Long-term business success is rooted in the ability to build and sustain a product or service offering that is different than that of its rivals, and different in ways that are important to customers.

The definition of this offering, and how it relates to the customer and competitive offerings is a strategic position.

For a strategic position to be sustainable, the detailed activities required to deliver it must be different. The offereings and activities must force competitors to choose between maintaining their current strategic position - or attack yours.

If you're not familiar with strategic position, we encourage you to read Michael Porter's Harvard Business Review article "What Is Strategy?"

• Keep the description of the strategic position simple - just a few words.
• Your strategic position should not change much - should last for at least 10 years.

Download an example of a Strategic Position from the top-rated book, Six Disciplines for Excellence.

Creating A High Performance Culture

Creating a high-performance culture with requires a systematic approach to managing the performance of organizations, teams and individuals.

While leadership and discipline are the defining elements of that approach, they are not the only elements.

Over at the Ivey Business Journal, these authors outline a road map for changing organizational behaviour and, ultimately, for implementing, promoting and sustaining a high-performance culture.

In order to make this disciplined performance culture work, organizations must have:

• Openness and trust
• Managed differences
• Simplicity and focus
• Playing to people's strengths

BOTTOMLINE: "Human performance is the function of many influences: accountability, feedback, motivation, skills and knowledge, rewards and recognition. It is the combination of these factors that results in the desired performance and the associated leadership
behaviors that support the performance culture."

Be Excellent™ Named A Top Blog for Entrepreneurs

Scott Allen, over at About Entrepreneurs posts his list of the Top Blogs for Entrepreneurs.

"Here are some of the best blogs with information to help entepreneurs succeed. These cover a wide range of topics and were selected for their relevance, quality, timeliness and consistency (very important in a blog). If you are only going to read a few blogs about entrepreneurship, this is where to start."

Humbly, Be Excellent™ is included on the list.

"Skip Reardon and the folks at Six Disciplines Corporation offer up an insightful mix of original content and commentary on leadership, strategy and personal development. I particular like the frequent "Bottom Line" comments which cull out the key points from the articles and news stories they coment on. Nice, concise reading."

Check out all of the Top Blogs for Entrepreneurs here.

What Makes Six Disciplines Work?

There are many business improvement methods out there. What we don't really need is YAGI (yet another great idea.)

But if you've been following our blog, you'll understand that the reasons most businesses fail is not strategy - it's execution.

More to the point: Knowing what to do isn't the problem - doing it is!

The Six Disciplines program is specifically designed and optimized for strategy-driven execution.

When diligently and consistently applied (with the help provided by Six Disciplines Leadership Centers), the Six Disciplines program will help organizations go beyond efficiency - and beyond effectiveness - to achieve lasting excellence.

The design requirements behind the Six Disciplines Methodology are:

1. Make it easier than alternatives
2. Think holistically about the business
3. Be process-driven
4. Establish business habits
5. Promote life-long learning
6. Instill constructive accountability
7. Build a measurement culture.
8. Encourage effective communication
9. Leverage the Internet
10. Proactively pursue alignment

BOTTOMLINE: It you've read Good to Great, E-Myth and others - and were left hungry for more - not how why companies can become excellent, but HOW they can be come that way, it's time to read Six Disciplines for Excellence.

Five Keys To Building A High-Performance Organization

A recent Gartner review , published in Business Performance Management Magazine, of the practices of successful companies in a variety of industries reveals five characteristics that are key to success. Emulating these organizations requires a focus on performance management.

High-performance organizations (HPOs) seem to understand the market earlier and more thoroughly than other businesses, retain the best staff members, and have less trouble responding to external pressures.

Gartner analysts found that HPOs share five characteristics:

1. They set ambitious targets and consistently and continuously achieve those objectives.
2. They display a strong sense of purpose through shared values both inside (among employees) and outside the organization (among customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders).
3. They have a strategic focus and alignment so that employees know how they are contributing to the results of the organization.
4. They have the agility to adapt to changing circumstances quickly.
5. And, finally, they have a common and shared business model throughout the organization

(In a former life, I managed industry analyst relations for Microsoft. One of the analyst firms I worked with, and found of value from -- was Gartner Group.)

Small Business Trends Showcases Six Disciplines Podcast

On this Small Business Trends radio broadcast, Anita Campbell has as her special guest, Gary Harpst, CEO and founder of Six Disciplines Corporation.

According to Anita:

"As the former founder and CEO of Solomon Software, Harpst’s company grew to over 400 employees, merged with their largest competitor — and eventually was acquired by Microsoft."

"Gary has a strong interest and passion for understanding how high-performing organizations develop and maintain culture. His presentations weave together the principles and strategies which are the foundation of the Six Disciplines™ Methodology."

"Gary’s work as an author, keynote speaker, television and radio guest, and executive mentor has created nationwide interest in applying the Six Disciplines Methodology for ready and able organizations that passionately want to be excellent."

Gary talks with Anita about why most businesses eventually lose their edge, and what are some things that can be done to keep their edge.

You can download the podcast (in Windows Media format or MP3) here.

Focused Strategic Planning

Marakon Associates published a quick review of the Harvard Business Review article from Michael Mankins and Richard Steele of Marakon entitled "Stop making plans; start making decisions."

Their premise?

• Most executives view traditional strategic planning as worthless. Why? The process contains serious flaws.
• First, it’s conducted annually, so it doesn’t help executives respond swiftly to threats and opportunities (a new competitor, a possible acquisition) that crop up throughout the year.
• Second, it unfolds unit by unit—with executive committee members visiting one unit at a time to review their strategic plans.

The solution? How to improve the quality and quantity of your strategic decisions?

• Use continuous issues-focused strategic planning. Throughout the year, identify the issues you must resolve to enhance your company’s performance—particularly those spanning multiple business units. Debate one issue at a time until you’ve reached a decision. And add issues to your agenda as business realities change.

BOTTOMLINE: Your reward? More rigorous debate and more significant strategic decisions each year—made precisely when they’re needed. Don't make strategic planning just an annual event!

Make The Choice to Be Excellent

Over at ThinkTQ, they offer up "10 choices you must make"....to chose EXCELLENCE over MEDIOCRITY:

1. Choose to be ENERGETIC—instead of permitting yourself to become run-down and burned-out.
2. Choose to be PASSIONATE—instead of permitting yourself to become aimless, apathetic and indifferent.
3. Choose to be ENTHUSIASTIC—instead of permitting yourself to become half-hearted and discouraged.
4. Choose to be SELF-DIRECTED—instead of permitting yourself to become directionless and uncertain.
5. Choose to be PREPARED—instead of permitting yourself to become shortsighted and reactive.
6. Choose to be FOCUSED—instead of permitting yourself to become scattered and impulsive.
7. Choose to be SUPPORTIVE—instead of permitting yourself to become critical and judgmental.
8. Choose to be SYSTEMATIC—instead of permitting yourself to become haphazard and disorganized.
9. Choose to be TIMELY—instead of permitting yourself to become distracted and preoccupied.
10. Choose to be PROACTIVE—instead of permitting yourself to become procrastinating and hesitant.

BOTTOMLINE: Within your organization, you have choices every day, every hour, every minute. Don't just choose to do things right (efficiency). Don't even stop at doing the right things (effectiveness). Make the choice to Be Excellent™.

Does Discipline Squelch Flexibility and Creativity?

Here's one from Inc. Magazine: Does Discipline Squelch Flexibility and Creativity?

"Can a business have formal disciplined systems, yet still provide a creative environment for employees while profitably providing responsive flexibility for customers?"

BOTTOMLINE: "The reality is you have a much better chance with disciplined systems than you do without them. How can that be? Because without discipline and systems, decision-making is more chaos than repeatable or reliable. Moreover, if there is no defined way for how things get done, any idea for an improved method merely means one more option for employees to ignore when they choose to. As they say in movie disclaimers, any resemblance between chaos and profitable responsive flexibility is purely coincidental."

Ready to read "Six Disciplines for Excellence" now?

Weekly Planning - Why We Resist

From Ricky Spears, comes this insightful piece called, "Why We Resist the Weekly Review and Plan (and What You Can Do About It)"

His assertion?

"Regardless of whether you are keeping your life organized using the Getting Things Done methodology or the FranklinCovey methodology, a central component of both systems is the “weekly review” or the “weekly plan”.

For many practitioners, this is the single most difficult discipline and yet also the most crucial discipline. Over the past few months I’ve spent some time thinking about why we resist the weekly review or plan, and what we can do about it. I trust that the following will help you in discovering why you are resisting the weekly review or plan and in discovering ways to overcome them.

BOTTOMLINE: Weekly planning - very critical to becoming more self managing. Read the entire, very useful article here.

(Tip of the hat to LifeHack.Org for this one!)

Five Actions for Organizational Change

Hal, over at Reforming Project Management, posts this entry on Five Necessary Actions for Organizational Change

1. Be clear why change is necessary in terms that make sense to the individuals.
2. Declare an initial set of standards for measuring performance and get agreement that people will set out to perform to those standards.
3. Show how it is done.
4. Measure, acknowledge, reward new behavior, and be clear on the consequences.
5. Work with them on improving.

(This posting was abstracted from Lean Project Consulting's special report: Five Necessary Actions for Organizational Change, by Hal Macomber and Gregory Howell. You can get a complete copy by sending an email to 5-actions-change@leanproject.com. You'll get a link to a 2-page PDF which you are welcome to share with your colleagues.)

Examples of Excellence: Tiger Woods in Golf

So much has been written about Tiger Woods, that to wax on eloquently about his passion for excellence - would be superfluous.

But when you see headlines like:

• 10 unforgettable years of Tiger
• Woods on a bad day still too good
• Woods wins 4th straight

....you just have to sit and ponder about the level of excellence he has achieved already, at the ripe old age of 30.

Doing The Right Things Right

Successful companies execute well against their strategic plans and deliver against goals and measured expectations.

Simply put:

1. Figure out what to do (doing the right things) - primarily effectiveness
2. Then you need to do it (doing things right) - primarily efficiency
3. Then, you need to (do the right things right) - combining effectiveness and efficiency

BOTTOMLINE: By doing the right things right - and doing it over the long-term, transforms your organization into one that learns, leads and lasts.

Change Is A Good Thing

Ann Michael, over at Manage to Change, offers this great thought provoker:

Change is offensive. It challenges the status quo.
Learning is offensive. It forces us to grow.
Decision making is offensive. It’s discriminating.
Leadership is offensive. We don’t always get our way.
Innovators are offensive. They challenge us.
Thinkers are offensive. They ask a lot of annoying questions.
Honesty is offensive. Sometimes the truth hurts.
Integrity is offensive. Its presence highlights where it’s absent.

Offensive: causing resentful displeasure; highly irritating, angering or annoying.

Culture and Passion Are Key Drivers

The new Inc. 500 is out. According to one new inductee:

"It's definitely an honor to make the 500, and a nice boost to the team. But it definitely signifies a transition from scrappy disrupter to growth-oriented execution company. What keeps me up at night? It's not cash flow. It's not marketing. If I'm going to rant on any topic, it's culture."

• We did a Stop/Start/Continue exercise recently ("what's one thing we should stop doing, one thing to start doing and one thing to continue doing?"), and 75% of the team said that we need to continue our passionate culture.

The big question then is how do you combine your aggressive growth plans without losing the culture that has defined you? What are the best practices?

1. Take interviewing seriously: We have a detailed, consistent, structured process for finding the right people, (consider using behaviorial assessments)
2. Accept change: We need to embrace the growth process and understand that some changes are inevitable. We want to operationalize the elements of culture that are most important so they don't get lost in the process.
3. Market the culture: We write down what makes our culture great. Then share it, live it, update it. Do some internal marketing that reflects our core brand to keep people fired up about why the company is great....and that the mission has never waivered.
4. Hire athletes: Great people that don't have the specific skill set ("athletes") are much better for us than good people with the exact skill set ("experts"). Athletes can be trained, but we can't train passion.
5. Keep the magic: It's not about money -- money is the air we breathe to help us chase our goals. It's about a bigger mission.

Ways To Stay Focused At Work

An individual's competence to execute strategy on a daily basis is key to a successful small business. But we all recognize how easily and quickly it is to be distracted.

Here are 18 ways to stay focused at work:

And...here are 11 more ways!

BOTTOMLINE: Decide what's important, set goals that lead, align systems, work the plan. Stay focused!

Planning and Execution

From the "School of Doing Business":

Running a small business can be boiled down to TWO activities:

1. PLANNING
2. EXECUTION

There are only 4 possible combinations to the above formula, and two possible outcomes:

• GOOD execution of a BAD plan ----> leads to failure.
• BAD execution of a GOOD plan----> leads to failure.
• BAD execution of a BAD plan----> leads to failure.
• GOOD execution of a GOOD plan----> leads to success.

Top Six Drivers for Business Success

eePulse Inc. and the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business today announced the results of the Leadership Pulse, which reveals leadership energy trends, the importance of specific drivers for business success and undervalued drivers in select industries.

Out of 22 drivers, based on a study of long-term stock price and earnings growth conducted by eePulse, respondents indicated six “higher-order” categories in order of relative importance to their firm’s overall performance (1-to-5 scale was used, where 1 = not at all important and 5 = very important):

• 4.34 Agility and Quality
• 4.25 Strategy/Leadership
• 4.12 Technology
• 3.97 Human Capital
• 3.91 Product
• 3.82 Costs

Interestingly, the majority of respondents felt that human capital drivers (e.g. employee-development practices, the manner people are energized, overall culture and rewarding top-performers) are perceived as important but are underused and/or underrated business drivers.

The Strategy Execution Disconnect

OnPoint Consulting's recent survey yields insights into what causes the strategy-execution gap . . . and what might be done to close it.

Their assertions:

• We discovered that almost half of the leaders surveyed—49%—do perceive a gap between their organizations' ability to develop and communicate sound strategies and their ability to implement those strategies.
• 64% don't have full confidence that their companies will be able to close the gap.
• "Vision" isn't the problem. The majority of respondents - 75% believe their companies have clear and inspiring visions.

So what is contributing to the strategy-execution gap?

Eight central factors set apart those companies whose employees have confidence in their company's ability to effectively execute from those with reported strategy-execution gaps:

1. Change is well managed by top management
2. Decisions and actions are well coordinated across different levels of management
3. The actions and decisions of top management are consistent with their espoused objectives, values, and priorities
4. Decisions and actions are well coordinated across different work units
5. Effective human resource management systems and practices are in place for selecting, training, and compensating employees
6. The current organizational structure supports the implementation of the business strategy
7. There is a proper balance of centralized and decentralized responsibility required to achieve the strategy
8. Top management appropriately involves people in decisions

What are the implications? Their survey yields several critical lessons for business leaders:

• Successfully achieving execution takes more than clarifying and communicating the organization's strategic direction. You've got to come up with a common picture, clarify the focus and scope, before you can get to the actual behaviors. For many companies, this step—clarifying assumptions—is missing. (See Discipline I - Decide What's Important)
• Few organizations appear to ask whether or not they have the proper management systems in place to support the achievement of the strategy. (See Discipline III - Align Systems)
• It is also important to go beyond gaining understanding and acceptance of the strategy throughout the organization. Monitoring may be the most critical aspect of the process. (See Discipline III. Align Systems)
• Leaders must behave in a way that is consistent with organizational values and priorities. (See Discipline I - Decide What's Important)

BOTTOMLINE: "Gaps between strategy and execution that are neglected tend to grow into chasms. Closing the gap between strategy and execution may be the most important thing you can do for the future of your company."

Knowing vs. Doing: Why Is It So Hard?

A key challenge for today’s small businesses – and for the team members within them – is to build a culture of execution.

It's not enough to know what to do (theory). It's doing it (execution).

Knowledge is only useful if you do something with it.

So...why is it so hard?

Today, there are plenty of management experts on everything, even on how to get things done.

But even those who focus on getting things done, focus primarily on efficiency.

But what about getting the right things done? What about effectiveness?

Perhaps even more important, what about getting the right things done....right?

BOTTOMLINE: "Your job is to do something today that’s better than what you did yesterday. And to do something tomorrow that’s better than what you did today."

Continual improvement. Doing things right (efficient) - AND - doing the right things (effective) - and doing the right things RIGHT.

(Hat tip to Jeffrey Pfeffer)