Strategic Discipline Blog

In Creating the Discipline of The Advantage Patrick Lencioni indicated the single greatest advantage any company can achieve is organizational health. He provides Four Disciplines that companies need to achieve organizational health. 

At the Growth Summit last week in Atlanta Jim Stengel, former Global Marketing Officer of Procter & Gamble and author of Grow - How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World's Greatest Companies mirrored Lencioni’s The Advantage with his observations based on collected data.  The data from a ten-year-growth study of more than 50,000 brands around the world show that companies with ideals of improving people’s lives at the center of all they do outperform the market by a huge margin.

Lencioni’s observations are from years consulting businesses.  Stengel’s, as you see from the graph here, are from actual research which point to the very same conclusion.  Maximum growth and high ideals are not incompatible. They’re inseparable.

What does the data say?  The central finding—businesses driven by a higher ideal, a higher purpose, outperform their competition by a wide margin, and frequently create both new businesses and entire new business sectors.  Stengel notes that the data “corroborated what I had implicitly believed and acted on throughout my career.”

One of the discoveries in Stengel’s Grow is how great leaders follow while following their own unique styles, do have common practices.  Stengel offers five common practices:

•        Discover a brand ideal of improving people’s lives in one of five fields of fundamental human values.

•        Build their organizational culture around the brand ideal.

•        Communicate the brand ideal to engage employees and customers.

•        Deliver a near-ideal customer experience.

•        Evaluate their progress and people against the brand ideal.

Gazelles One Page Strategic Plan has long been the Rockefeller Habits fundamental tool to gain companies alignment.   To become and remain competitive your Organization Needs Three Things:

1) Framework that identifies and supports your corporate strategy.

2) Common language in which to express that strategy and,

3) Well-developed habit of using this framework and language to continually evaluate your strategic progress.

Take a moment now to review the One Page Strategic Plan.   The One Page Strategic Plan provides the framework to develop the five common practices that Stengel’s great leaders provide. Core Values, Core Purpose and Actions provide the ideals to improve people’s lives and build your culture around.  The One Page Plan together with the Quarterly Plan and Theme communicate the brand ideal to engage customers and employees, and developing your Brand Promise and your Brand Promise KPI’s delivers the ideal customer experience and evaluates progress. 

How big of an advantage does this provide? According to Stengel’s research shown in the chart above, nearly 400%.  We’ll explore the four central findings of Stengel’s research as well as what the five fields of fundamental human values are in my blogs ahead.