Wallet Alignment…Life’s Perspective

6 12 2010

We hear and often bemoan comments in many professions, as the judgements often seem settled from the outset. For example, while reviewing an x-ray he took on my first appointment, my chiropractor remarked succinctly, “You are an ideal candidate for chiropractic therapy.”

Surgeons see operations, lawyers see risks, dentists see cavities, policemen see crimes, and consultants see problems.  When you are a hammer, life looks like nails.

One of the core reasons strategy management consulting works well is it trains companies to let strategies align wallets.  All too often we take the advice of the squeaky wheel, or allow personal politics to drive decision making.  Strategy management is about a consistent process geared to drive decisions, fund initiatives, and find those that no longer serve their purpose.

    • How often do you hear employees complain about certain initiatives?
    • How often do feel your organizations fund pet projects?
    • How consistently are decisions based upon closing strategic gaps?
    • What is the process of funding new initiatives?
    • Could you improve on any of these?
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      Categories : Communication, Process Improvement, Strategy Management

      Is Strategy top of Mind

      10 05 2009

      I recently read a few blogs from Jonathan D. Becher and it reminded me of a couple of stories.  I did a couple of webinars a year or so ago with the lead in being a question about how well do you know your corporate strategies.  What I consistently found was that 80%+ of the respondants could not cite the strategy off the top of their head.  This is clearly not new research as their are a number of people/companies that cite very similar numbers.  

      I think there are a number of factors at play here:

      • Corporate Strategy has no lasting communication vehicle.  It is often discussed in conference calls and writen on walls, but we have no effective, living tool.  We need to build a communication plan around articulating strategy.  Here is a reference to an older blog of mine on Strategy Maps that touches on this subject.
      • We often lack a consistent framework for Strategy (or a single version of the truth), so we end up with a number of different frameworks for defining strategic objectives.  Corporate uses one framework, the business units another, and then each department creates something new as well.  What we end up with is too many messages and no clarity into priorities.  All of this becomes to difficult for anyone person to understand, so they just go about their day doing the things that want to do or that are easy to do.
      • We also have unstated strategic objectives, or as Oski refers to them in a comment on this blog post, “shadow strategies” where the organization says one thing, but actually does another. 
      • There is also personal politics and empire building that is probably more widely used than anyone would care to admit.  I have seen too many examples where people talk more about how big their team is than provide the value their team creates.  If this is what is top of mind, it is probably an indicator of their motivation.  
      • We don’t have a strategy management process.  Strategy is done independently from budget, or we hire some consulting firm to develop it and then the binders and reports are placed in an archive.

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      Categories : Operational Performance Management, Performance Management, Strategy Management