Strategic Discipline Blog

Last blog we discussed how as your company grows and expands it seems harder and harder to communicate your vision.  People at the tactical level of your company often don’t know what the strategy for your business is.  In fact they don’t know a lot of things that are important for them to know about your business.  There’s often a huge gap on how they work with prospects and customers due to poor communication of your vision and strategy, let alone company policies.

Why is this?  Why don’t your people get it?  A couple of slides from the Three Barriers to Growth Presentation Positioning Systems developed illustrate how growth affects communication in your business.

Take a simple two-point relationship where the two points represent the number of employees, number of product lines, or number of offices within an organization.

When you grow 50%, the interrelationships dramatically increase from 2 to 6…

Or by a factor of 300%

If you’re a small business that’s pretty dramatic!  However imagine you’re larger, you’re growing faster.  Suppose you expand from 3 employees or product lines or offices to 4? 

The complexity increases even more dramatically as you add another point, jumping from 6 to 24 interactions.   This represents only a 25% increase yet this 25% growth actually increased complexity by 400%.

Are you beginning to see why the One Page Strategic Plan is such a solid strategic planning device for your business? It helps you become and remain competitive three ways:

1. Provides a framework that identifies the key elements of your strategy and supports these.

2. Provides a common language in which your strategy is expressed.  (Everyone is aware of the key elements of your strategy.  Example: There’s no confusion as to whether you have a mission statement or a core purpose.

3. Provides a well-developed habit to use this framework and language so you continually evaluate your strategic progress.

The well-developed habit is the tools Positioning Systems provides as Strategic Discipline (Priorities, Meeting Rhythms and Metrics).  They are the guts of your businesses ability to communicate, be accountable and focus on the right things. 

As your business grows, meeting rhythms provide critical communication vital to your business to become the ultimate professional force.  How these meetings are structured on a platform of clear priorities and accountability metrics makes the difference in achieving sustainable growth. 

Recall from Jim Collins, in Good to Great “A culture of discipline is not a principle of business; it is a principle of greatness.”

His research in Built to Last, Good to Great, Why the Mighty Fall, and most recently Great by Choice affirm the impact that choosing your priorities properly, measuring your progress and establishing a disciplined routine of meeting rhythms to evaluate and monitor your progress is the differentiator between mediocre and effective businesses. 

Struggling to identify your priorities?  Challenged to develop the proper metrics to drive results and determine an effective meeting rhythm for your business.  We promise to deliver this structured approach for your growing business at the Mastering the Rockefeller Habits Four Decisions Workshop.   For a clever video on what we do click here.

One of my clients is working on a strategy statement to improve the alignment of their business.  Expect to hear about this in an upcoming blog and newsletter.  Another reminded me of a free tool to help you determine how well your business is doing toward being ready to sell.  It’s from John Warrilow’s Built to Sell, and it can give you some very valuable insights on where your business needs to improve right now.  That’s our next blog. 

Click on the button to discover the method for aligning your team and transforming your company – in just one day!