Strategy

When it comes to answering the all-important strategic question of “What is our value proposition?” I’ve always believed any private, public sector or nonprofit organization should choose one of three possibilities: operational excellence (resulting in low costs), product leadership (best product, often achieved through constant innovation), or customer intimacy (best service/best relationship). This rationale, one shared by many experts, is that focusing on more than one at the same time will lead to contradictory investment choices, misaligned processes, and ultimately produce a fog of confusion over your employees and customers who don’t know what the company stands for.

I’ve been asked by the editor of Qualtiyworld to write a short piece on how you develop a company’s vision and mission. Here is a quick summary:

In my mind there are two pre-requisites to problem solving: (1) first frame the problem or opportunity, and (2) then perform the analysis.

Here is a vision statement to help sell your performance management initiative to your executives:
“Within 12 months, every employee will be able to check their email, calendar and their personal top 10 KPIs at the breakfast table using their smartphone or tablet.”

Vision and mission statements these days have reduced to a pedestrian, cliched, insipid product of jumping through strategic planning hoops. They've lost the ability to unite masses of people for a shared cause and imbued more cynicism into workforces. Ironically, the main reason that people will refuse to measure their vision or mission is the claim that they are deliberately broad for aspirational purposes and deliberately vague so everyone can find their own meaning in them. Being broad and vague means being immeasurable. Can you even tell which type of company the following mission statements belong to, let alone how to measure them?

Last night, around 2 am, my wife and I were awakened from our slumber by a beeping sound. It probably took two or three beeps to register, then we were both awake, and irritated enough, to realize it was repeating in a pattern. This wasn’t some rogue electronic device chirping out a random message, but an annoying and consistent message, requiring attention. Groggy as we were, we soon realized the culprit: a smoke detector battery that needed, no it demanded, to be changed. Have you ever noticed these things always decide to go off in the middle of the night?