Why vision is key to successful implementation

Posted on June 8, 2012 by John.Myrna
….. Typical Bicycle Cab …..

My wife Mary and I were on an anniversary trip to take in a couple of new shows in New York City. One of the challenges we faced as theatergoers was finding a cab to get back to the hotel or train station when the shows let out. Hundreds of theater patrons flood the streets, all looking for a ride at the same time.

We walked a couple of blocks away from the theater but a dozen apparently empty cabs passed us without stopping. As I stood out in traffic with my hand raised, the driver of a bicycle cab, also known as a pedicab, stopped and offered to give us a twenty-block ride to Penn Station at a very competitive rate. He explained that we had just experienced not only the flood of matinee patrons but also a shift change for the cab drivers.

As he zipped us through Times Square, we commented on his fitness. “I’m training for the marathon,” he said. “What other job could pay me to work all day at getting fit?” When we asked what his ultimate goal was, he quickly replied, “The New York Triathlon.”

It wasn’t hard to reconstruct his planning. He started with a visualization of where he wanted to be within a specific time period — in his case, entered in a very competitive triathlon. He then established a goal to reach within a shorter time frame (eighteen months), running in the New York City Marathon. He then created an action plan to get himself there. His action plan included getting fit through daily exercise as a pedicab driver.

Whether you’re striving to achieve individual goals or company targets, Yogi Berra’s observation about planning is true. “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.”

Do you and your team know where you are going? Can everyone on your team answer “yes!” when asked if what there’re focused on today is consistent with where the company wants to be within five years? If not, consider investing a couple of days in strategic planning to make sure everyone is on the same page regarding where you are, where you want to be, and how you intend to get there.

For more thoughts on strategic planning read my Business Strategy Series article A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss: Prevent Your Strategic Plan from Stagnating or my how-to book on strategic planning Where the hell are we?

If you’re interested in having us facilitate a strategic planning meeting that moves you from concept to tangible implementation, check out our service offerings online, contact us by email, or better yet, give us a call at (800) 207-8192 to arrange for a complementary consultation to determine if you are ready for strategic planning and if our program is right for you.

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The business power of social engagement in planning for success

Posted on June 5, 2012 by John.Myrna

When Rome was the power to reckon with, a Roman soldier could legally require anyone else to carry his pack for a mile. (In Matthew 5:41 Jesus suggests carrying it a second mile in part to have a greater understanding of another person’s lot.) Native Americans have been credited with the proverb that you can’t really understand someone else unless you walk a mile in their moccasins.

Back in 1976, I walked into my first strategic planning meeting with a bias — no, let’s call it by its correct name, prejudice — against salesmen. As an engineer and confirmed nerd, I viewed salesmen as obstreperous, obnoxious, and oleaginous. As far as I was concerned, they were evil and only concerned with themselves.

The stereotypes I carried in my mind about other non-technical professionals were similarly negative. The folks in the accounting department were bean counters who knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing. The CEO may have been a nice man, but he didn’t appear to be adding any real value to the company.

One of the most valuable take-aways from that first strategic planning meeting was the realization that each member of the team was in fact passionate about the company’s success. Their actions were informed by their worldviews, which were shaped, as were mine, by their narrow day-to-day activities taken on behalf of the company.

Each department’s worldview was shaped much in the way the old story explains how the six blind men formed differing opinions of an elephant’s appearance by feeling different parts of the animal’s body.

I left that strategic planning meeting understanding that salesmen weren’t intrinsically evil, they were just focused on revenue and the customer’s satisfaction. The operations people weren’t sitting on their hands to slow things down — they were just focused on how to reliably deliver a new product that met the company’s quality and on-time delivery standards. Accounting wanted to make sure we generated enough cash monthly to make payroll.

Over the past twenty years, I’ve had the opportunity to work not only with companies but also with various non-profits dedicated to improving society’s view of specific minority groups. One of the most effective ways to break down stereotypes is a process called “social engagement” – essentially, spending time with actual living, breathing members of the stereotyped group.

A team-driven strategic planning process is an excellent way to build trust and respect among your executive team members. For companies, it is the easiest way to utilize social engagement to dispel the harmful stereotypes that get in the way of successful strategic planning, execution, and achievement.

If you’re interested in having a facilitated strategic planning meeting that helps you navigate from concept to tangible implementation, while building trust and respect, check out our services. Contact us by email, or better yet, give us a call at (800) 207-8192 to arrange for a complementary consultation to determine if our program is right for you and your organization is ready for the program.

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Chance favors the prepared mind

Posted on June 4, 2012 by John.Myrna

One might think that the Greeks, who sustained a central role for mathematics, would have discovered the laws of probabilistic thinking. The evidence is that they didn’t. Greeks considered matters of chance to be the exclusive purview of the gods. According to this world view, any attempt to understand what happens and what should happen was a infringement of God’s territory. It was none of man’s business.

It wasn’t until the mid-1600s that “modern” probability theory was developed. Today it’s obvious that when you toss two dice the  likelihood of the dice adding up to 12 is a less than the probability of adding up to 7. The ancient Greeks, however, put money on the line assuming that every outcome was equally likely. With a world view that the Gods controlled the outcome it didn’t occur to them that the Gods appeared to favor some combinations over others.

In my decades of facilitating the development and execution of strategic plans I’ve encountered  more than one executive that saw the process of visualizing the future as a waste of time. “I can’t predict what I’ll be doing this afternoon, how can I predict where the company will be in five years?” Framing planning this way relieves executives of responsibility for the future.

It isn’t about predicting the future, that’s all but impossible. It’s about making choices today consistent with your visualization of the future. The Gods will grant your wish when a company’s executives make their daily decsions based on a clear, shared, visualization of where they want the company to be within five years. The future is more likely to be what you want when everyone asks themselves “is what I’m doing today consistent with where we want to be within five years?”

Creating and sustaining a shared visualization of the future should be an essential part of your annual strategic planning process. If you’re interested in having a facilitated strategic planning meeting that moves you from concept to tangible implementation, check out our service offerings online, contact us by email, or better yet, give us a call at (800) 207-8192 to arrange for a complementary consultation to determine if you are ready for strategic planning and our program is right for you.

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Unconscious decision making can be detrimental to your company’s health

Posted on June 3, 2012 by John.Myrna

Late one Sunday evening I pulled a couple of frozen yogurt bars from the freezer we keep in the garage. Earlier in the week, my son had mentioned that we should defrost that freezer, a task I’d been putting off.

When I got back in the house, it was obvious that the frozen yogurt bars were not frozen at all, rendering them too soft to eat. Something was wrong. I put the bars in the kitchen freezer and told my wife Mary that we’d better defrost the garage freezer the next day. Without doing so consciously, I had associated the failing freezer’s performance with my son’s observation that we should defrost it.

The next morning, before starting the defrosting process, Mary suggested we first verify that there wasn’t something else wrong with the freezer. An inspection of the rear of the freezer quickly revealed that the compressor had burned out. Defrosting the freezer had nothing to do with the appliance’s poor performance, and wouldn’t have solved the problem.

In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman discusses recent research on how we make decisions using two systems. System 1 operates automatically and unconsciously to come up with an answer by associating what we are observing with past experiences. The more recent the experience, the greater the weight System 1 places on it. System 2 analyzes data to rationally come up with an answer. (It usually just rationalizes the System 1 answer unless System 1 can’t provide an answer, as when you are asked to multiply 57 times 234.)

System 2 thinking uses up substantially more mental energy, specifically in the form of glucose, than System 1 thinking. Most people have used up their available mental energy by the end of a busy day. At that point, lacking any outside pressure, we all just accept the “easy” answer — in my case, “defrosting.” System 2 thinking works best in the morning or just after a meal.

System 1 thinking is a great way to get through the day and the many decisions that have relatively low risk. These might be when to brush your teeth, where to go for lunch, or how to respond to the typical customer request. System 1 thinking is a dangerous way to make major decisions about things like restructuring your company, hiring a CFO, or “firing” a customer.

If you are making high-stakes company decisions, you should rely on System 2 thinking, fed with a diversity of input. Structuring strategic planning meetings in a way that requires every participant to utilize System 2 thinking is essential. A successful planning process balances the power and efficiency of System 1 thinking with the enervating utilization of System 2 thinking to validate and/or expand on it.

If you’d like to see this in action, consider sponsoring a facilitated strategic planning meeting that moves you from concept to tangible implementation. Check out our service offerings online, contact us by email, or better yet, give us a call at (800) 207-8192 to arrange for a complementary consultation to determine if you are ready for strategic planning and if our program is right for you.

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Reading the market

Posted on June 2, 2012 by John.Myrna

As an electronics enthusiast, I started tracking videotape recorders in 1956, when Ampex introduced its first unit, which sold for $50,000. By the early 1970s, the arc of enabling technology suggested the feasibility of a consumer device within five years. I told my family that we would purchase a video recorder as soon as there was one on the market that met three key requirements: color recording with built-in tuner, at least two hours per tape, and available for less than $1,000. (Early recorders were black-and-white without tuners, and most movies on TV were more than one hour but less than two.)

In 1976 I asked the local electronics store manager if he would sell me the Quasar “Great Time Machine” for $999. He said yes, and we became early adopters of VCR technology. At the time, Sony had introduced their Betamax VCR but its recording capacity was limited to one hour. The Quasar was our VCR through early 1980, after which we shifted to a VCR based on Panasonic’s four-hour, market-winning VHS format. (Curiously, the history of VCRs never mentions the Quasar or its unique technology.)

Every product balances four factors: quality, quantity, timeliness, and cost. I may have been more explicit than most people in articulating my VCR-buying criteria, but every consumer has a mix in mind that will lead them to purchasing a new product.

It appears that Panasonic studied the market and set a target for their engineers – selling price under $1,000, color with built-in tuner, four hours of recording time, and a release date that didn’t allow Sony to lock up the market. (Panasonic felt that a major part of their initial market would be sports fans recording televised games, which would require four hours of taping capacity.)

Whenever you develop new products for your market, make the four factors – quality, quantity, timeliness and cost — explicit to your development team. Hewlett-Packard’s TouchPad tablet computer failed in part because it was too little, too late for the price point HP tried to maintain. The developers of the Apple iPad, on the other hand, learned from the myriad of early attempts such as 2001’s Microsoft’s tablet PC. They got inside the “firing box” with screen size, weight, memory, battery life, user interface, and application environment.

Over the next three to five years, what new products will your market and technology enable? Can you set a “firing box” for your development team that will lead to the creation of a winning product? “Reading” the market successfully is easier when your company has a solid strategic plan.

Answering these questions should be an essential part of your annual strategic planning process. Your senior team should be prioritizing today’s actions based on a clear visualization of what products and markets they want to be part of the company’s future within five years.

If you’re interested in having a facilitated strategic planning meeting that moves you from concept to tangible implementation, check out our service offerings online, contact us by email, or better yet, give us a call at (800) 207-8192 to arrange for a complementary consultation to determine if you are ready for strategic planning and our program is right for you.

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Commit, explode, recover – a winning strategy

Posted on June 1, 2012 by John.Myrna

Bill Walsh, who coached the San Francisco 49ers to three Super Bowl championships, had a simple strategy for winning. He felt that his football team needed to follow a cycle of “commit, explode, recover.”

To win in football or in business, a team must commit to a plan of attack, execute it, and then react to the results. A team crippled by indecisiveness will just cause individual efforts to flounder.

Winning starts with a process of listening, understanding, and considering input from diverse points of view. The next step – deciding and committing to a plan of attack — comes after everyone on the team understands every point of view and the issues, their relative importance, and potential responses.

Once the team commits to that plan of attack, they develop specific action plans, the plays in football. Commitment includes clear, personal accountability for specific actions and results.

The team then explodes — everyone executes with passion, without hesitation, with full personal commitment. Individuals and teammates hold each other personally accountable for execution.

The next step in the cycle is to recover, i.e. to respond and react. As German military strategist Helmuth von Moltke is often quoted, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” For a football team, every play is a learning experience because it provides an opportunity to refine the plan.

The same holds true in business. Strategic planning is the process that enables companies to sustain a winning cycle of commit, explode, and react. Establishing an aggressive implementation process is an essential part of your strategic planning. Your senior team should be prioritizing today’s actions based on a clear, shared visualization of what products and markets they want to be part of the company’s future within five years.

If you’re interested in having a facilitated strategic planning meeting that moves you from concept to tangible implementation, check out our service offerings online, contact us by email, or better yet, give us a call at (800) 207-8192 to arrange for a complementary consultation to determine if you are ready for strategic planning and if our program is right for you.

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Are you floating or navigating toward your goal?

Posted on May 9, 2012 by John.Myrna

A squid fishing boat ended up off the western shore of Canada a year after the 2011 Japanese tsunami. Without anyone on board to navigate, it still crossed the Pacific intact, illustrating a paraphrase of an old saying, “if you don’t know where you’re going, any current will get you there.”

I’ve seen too many companies follow a strategy of drifting with the current in their market. They believe that as long as they focus on making payroll this month and not running out of cash this year, all will be fine. Companies with this strategy will survive as long as they are in a strong, growing market, on the principle that “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

However, as Warren Buffett observed, “You never know who’s swimming naked until the tide goes out.” In 2008, the tide went out for many companies. Overnight, some firms saw revenues drop over 30%, and many a successful company ran aground. We also observed other companies that not only survived, they thrived, rebounded and took advantage of the recovery. The difference between these companies and those that ran aground was that the thriving companies were navigating toward a goal rather than simply allowing themselves to float with the current.

So, is your company floating or navigating? Do you know where your organization wants to be within five years? This is a question we always ask of senior executives as part of helping them to create and implement their strategic plan.

Often, the team doesn’t understand the question. The typical response goes something like this: “Well, if we continue to grow at the current pace we should be as large as …” I say, “No — how big do you WANT to be? I’m not asking for a forecast or a projection. I want you to visualize the future in a way that informs your daily decisions.” To continue our nautical metaphor, forecasting is standing on the stern of the boat (at the back), looking at where you’ve been and projecting where the current will take you. Visualizing the future is standing on the bow (at the front of the boat) and scanning the horizon to plan where you want to go.

Imagine standing on the bow of the your boat, picking a point on the horizon and navigating to reach that port. Now imagine what happens when the senior team shares a common visualization of the goal the company is heading toward? What happens when the team’s daily decisions are based on everyone asking themselves, “Is this action consistent with reaching our goal? If not, what can I do to realign my actions — or our shared long-term goal?”

What happens is that individual decisions reinforce themselves, creating synergy. With a clear picture of their destination in mind, people quickly recognize every opportunity that can get them there quicker. Working back from the destination creates support for the investments in building the capabilities required to get there.

Strategic planning is as simple as determining where you are right now, where you want to go in the future, and what you need to focus on this year to navigate your way to the goal.

If you’re interested in having a facilitated strategic planning meeting that helps you navigate from concept to tangible implementation, check out our services, contact us by email, or better yet, give us a call at (800) 207-8192 to arrange for a complementary consultation to determine if our program is right for you and your organization is ready for the program.

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What strategic planners can learn from honeybees

Posted on May 7, 2012 by John.Myrna

New research on how honeybees choose a location for a new hive reveals a decision process that parallels how the most successful companies identify new markets to enter.

There is an ideal size for a new hive, according to an article by Carl Zimmer in the March 2012 issue of The Smithsonian Magazine (The-Secret-Life-of-Bees) It needs to be large enough to support the community of bees over the next few years. It also needs barriers to entry that can be defended from the inevitable competitors. These criteria are exactly the same for a company deciding to enter a new market.

Step one is when the hive decides it’s time to find a new location. That is the signal for some of the worker bees to start scouting potential locations. When a scout returns to the hive it “talks up” the potential location. (Bees communicate via the language of dance.) The better the potential of the new location the more enthusiastic the dance. “Enthusiasm translates into attention. An enthusiastic scout will inspire more bees to go check out her site. And when the second-wave scouts return, they persuade more scouts to investigate the better site.” This is very much like the way people share their enthusiasm for many things, ranging from new markets to new movies. Look, for example, at how people act on social media when they recommend things.

Multiple scouting parties return to the hive from multiple potential locations. Bees follow a natural process where early enthusiasm wanes as better opportunities are identified. This allows a swarm to avoid getting stuck in a bad decision. “Even when a mediocre site has attracted a lot of scouts, a single scout returning from a better one can cause the hive to change its collective mind.”

The more enthusiastic bees take action to squash the other’s dancing. Ultimately, a critical mass of enthusiastic bees ends up promoting the best location. “Once the scouts reach a quorum of 15 bees all dancing for the same location, they start to head-butt one another, silencing their own side so that the swarm can prepare to fly.” Once that critical mass is achieved, the hive “makes the decision,” all dancing stops, and the swarm then moves en masse to build a hive at the new location.

In the strategic planning meetings we facilitate for clients, we ask the team to visualize where they want their organization to be within five years. Quite often, that visualization includes a new market. Perhaps the company’s current market is recognized as not having sufficient growth potential. Perhaps the team anticipates that new technology or competitors will eliminate barriers to entry. If they want to have a thriving new market within five years, they need to start today with an action plan to identify and enter it within the next couple of years.

  • Just like the hive, the team needs to identify the size and defensibility of acceptable market “candidates.”
  • They need to send scouts out to identify potential new market candidates.
  • Each candidate market needs to generate a core of enthusiastic company supporters.
  • Just as important, there has to be a process to dampen enthusiasm for the less-than-optimum potentials.
  • Finally, there has to be a way to make the decision and fully commit, lest you spend the next five years scouting rather than building.

“One of the strengths of honeybees is that they share the same goal: finding a new home. People who come together in a democracy, however, may have competing interests. [Cornell biologist Thomas] Seeley advises that people should be made to feel that they are part of the decision-making group, so that their debates don’t become about destroying the enemy, but about finding a solution for everyone. ‘That sense of belonging can be nurtured,’ Seeley said. The more we fashion our democracies after honeybees, Seeley argues, the better off we’ll be.” The same dynamic comes into play when creating and implementing your strategic plan.

If you’re interested in having a facilitated strategic planning meeting that moves you from concept to tangible implementation, check out our service offerings online, contact us or better yet, give us a call at (800) 207-8192 to arrange for a complimentary consultation to determine if you are ready for strategic planning and our program is right for you.

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Why you need face-to-face meetings

Posted on May 2, 2012 by John.Myrna

I recently participated in a five-hour videoconference. In so many respects, the technology was amazing. We had participants from across the US who only had to step into their office at work or at home to join the meeting. I could watch everyone’s face in split screen, albeit in relatively low resolution. No one had to waste a day or two traveling. No one had to spend the night sleeping on a hotel bed, eating hotel room service. No one had to dip into their travel budget. What wasn’t to like?

However, as I reflected on the meeting, I remembered an old joke about doctors. “How did the operation go?” one doctor asked his colleague.

“Oh, the operation went well,” the surgeon replied.

“How is the patient doing?” was the follow-up question.

“Oh, he died, but the operation was a great success.”

The meeting held via videoconference didn’t succeed in helping the participants reach a greater understanding; in fact, it failed in its truth-seeking objective. The participants didn’t leave with any greater insights than the preconceptions they had coming into the meeting. When all was said and done, audio and low-resolution video doesn’t communicate nearly enough information.
 
In the April issue of Pacific Standard, PACIFIC*STANDARD Clifford Nass notes some of the issues with relying on non-physical communication such as Facebook. “The human brain is built to unconsciously detect remarkably small changes in other people’s smile and frown muscles, pupil size (larger pupils indicate happiness), wrinkles around the eyes (genuine smiles have them, but false smiles don’t), skin color (faces get pale with fear and red with rage), eyebrow movement (arching indicates puzzlement), pitch (happy is higher-pitched), volume (loud is more excited), speech rate (rapid can indicate fear), and posture (tight bodies and downward head indicate sadness).” There is an absence of these cues from the text-based interaction typical of the Web, and we don’t get the full effect of these cues from a videoconference, either.
 
In the high-stakes strategic planning meetings that we facilitate, we always specify a u-shaped table or a conference table arrangement. This enables people to watch and “listen” to all the non-verbal clues of their fellow teammates. We also ask everyone to put their wireless devices, cell phones and iPads into airplane mode. That’s because you can’t really listen when your eyes are focused on the latest email or tweet.

Strategic planning meetings are a truth-seeking investment to optimize the quality, quantity, and timeliness of decisions. Engaged attendees participating in face-to-face interactions can better catch the verbal and non-verbal cues from their colleagues. The more they learn and understand, the better they will be able to apply it to their thinking and planning — and the better the decisions that come out of the strategic planning meeting.
 
If you’re interested in having a facilitated strategic planning meeting that moves you from concept to tangible implementation, check out our service offerings online, contact us or better yet, give us a call at (800) 207-8192 to arrange for a complimentary consultation to determine if you are ready for strategic planning and our program is right for you.

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Smartphones, iPads, multitasking and not really “being there”

Posted on April 27, 2012 by John.Myrna

When I was ten, I asked my dad why we didn’t have a telephone like all the other kids’ families had. I remember his answer to this day. “If we had a phone, people would just call us.” My dad also didn’t believe in car radios. When I asked him why our car didn’t have a radio, he said: “It would be a distraction.”

Time and culture moved on and we did get a telephone and every car came with a radio whether you wanted one or not. I felt, like most children, that my dad must have been clueless, and I delighted in the laughter generated whenever I related the telephone story.

But as I think about it now, our new phone had a profound effect on our lives. Within a year, it had trained us to suspend WHATEVER we were doing to immediately respond to its ring. Without conscious thought, answering the phone became the most important thing in our lives. Just like Pavlov’s famous dog, we interrupted dinner, family discussions and homework to respond to the telephone’s bell.

This conditioning continued in the workplace. It didn’t matter what I was working on or who I was talking to — when the phone rang it became the most important thing. If I had someone in my office when the phone rang, they had to wait until I finished. Worse yet, even if I was making a presentation to a customer or reviewing a sensitive issue with my boss, when their office phone rang, I had to wait and then attempt to re-establish momentum when they hung up.

We ALL had been conditioned to believe that it was disrespectful to not respond immediately to that ring. I remember thinking about how disrespectful it was to the people who were forced to wait for me to get off the phone. How much time was wasted on re-establishing focus and flow on whatever was interrupted? That was the price we paid for being responsible, responsive and ring-centric. This behavior was what society demanded, what business etiquette required and what everyone expected, no matter what the costs.

Today, after over forty years of business experience (twenty of which have been devoted to facilitating team communication, focus and implementation), my eyes have been opened to the damage that such conditioning can cause. Distracted driving can lead to accidents. Distracted management can crash your company. Thanks to technological advances, the distractions are legion: smartphones, iPads, laptop computers and pagers, to name but a few.

Putting all devices into “airplane mode” is one the first rules I establish in any strategic planning meeting I facilitate. It isn’t good enough to put a phone on “vibrate,” since we are all conditioned to respond when the device “buzzes” us.

As the sales guru Tom Searcy wrote in one of his newsletters, “I watch 20-somethings thumbing texts, half-processing in a meeting, missing the critical issues, inflections and side-glances that tell all of the context to a comment or silence. Instant Messaging, FaceBook and constant access kill the awareness of nuance necessary for winning when selling. Pros listen at the cell-level, down to their DNA.”

Distraction is the enemy of successful selling, thinking … and strategic planning. Focus is essential to having a successful strategic planning meeting and to creating a meaningful, actionable strategic plan. (You may find that not everyone CAN turn their devices off. Their jobs may have been engineered to be so “hands-on” that their department can’t function without their real-time availability. Fixing that issue is a subject for a future blog.)

If you’re interested in having a facilitated strategic planning meeting that moves you from concept to tangible implementation, check out our service offerings online, contact us or better yet, give us a call at (800) 207-8192 to arrange for a complimentary consultation to determine if you are ready for strategic planning and our program is right for you.

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