Last month I told you that research shows that only a handful of components make up the strategic drivers of most corporations. I used Growth as an example of a strategic driver and showed the impact when everyone in an organization understands the goal the same way and commits to achieving it. This month, I want to discuss two other strategic drivers, internal Focus and Pace, and how your organization’s position on each impacts its performance.
The discussion purpose remains the same as in last month’s discussion of growth. How can you align your company for greater performance? How can you improve on an already good, even excellent, effort?
Focus describes your firm’s approach to how it solves problems, develops new products, or operates day-to-day. Just as I described Growth as being on a continuum with profits at one end and market share at the other, Focus is a continuum between an analytic approach on the one hand and an experimental approach on the other, to the challenges that any organization faces. It comes down to my favorite question about experience: What do you do when you don’t know what to do?
Do you sit down and analyze what data you do have that may relate? Do you look for answers from similar challenges from your collective past? Do you jump into investigation mode to research a response or direction? Are you in problem-solving mode, looking for root causes that may make finding the right solution easier?
Or do you routinely take a completely different approach and go immediately into “What if” mode, to try to come up with something completely new? Do you and your team get excited about new possibilities or going in new directions?
Perhaps the simplest way to explain the opposite ends of our Focus spectrum is to ask another question. When confronted with a challenge, do you think “problem to be solved” or do you think “opportunity to do something different”? Again, as with the Growth driver, we discussed last month, there is no correct answer. Of course, most organizations, like most people, are somewhere between the two extremes. But we are rarely sitting in the exact middle of any continuum; any person and any organization leans to one side or the other, and it is important to know where your organization leans. Among other things, it may determine who you want to hire to fill critical positions.
Individuals who know where they are will gravitate towards those organizations that value their approach. An engineer who likes to work on creating the next breakthrough app for our phones would probably not be comfortable with project managing an upgrade to the Space Shuttle’s safety systems, while a NASA engineer might be very uncomfortable working in a firm racing to get the next i-phone iteration ready to beat Samsung to market. (Though maybe Samsung should have had such an engineer working on a new battery….)
As an owner, GM, or senior executive, you want to know that everyone in your organization knows exactly where you have positioned your strategic drivers on the continuum.
The same is also true for Pace. Does your strategy call for a rapid pace or a deliberate one? Are you concerned with things happening rapidly or do you maintain a thorough, logical, methodical approach to the things you want done as an organization? Either way, you want to be sure everyone in the organization understands the strategic goals and buys into that point on the continuum which you and any other senior planners have chosen as your specific strategy.
And as with Growth and Focus, you want to ensure that everyone in the organization is on the same page and pulling together. Remember the statistic cited in the January article: aligned organizations will see performance improvement up to 30% more than similar but unaligned firms.