Awesomely Simple

Essential Business Strategies for Turning Ideas Into Action

John Spence

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780470504505
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

The six core strategies to elevate any business-and how to implement them-made simple

What do the world's most successful companies and organization have in common? And what can you actually take away and use from their examples? Distilling the best fundamental business strategies, trusted advisor and strategist John Spence helps you take a hard look at your business and together develop specific plans and action steps that will allow you to dramatically improve the success of your company.

Delivered in Spence's approachable and straightforward manner, Awesomely Simple reveals the six key strategies that create a foundation for achieving business excellence: Vivid Vision, Best People, A Performance-Oriented Culture, Robust Communication, A Sense of Urgency, and Extreme Customer Focus.

• Filled with case studies and clear action items, includes easy-to-follow guidelines for implementing the strategies in any organization no matter its mission or size
• After concisely breaking down each strategy, Spence gives specific examples, tips, tools, discussion questions and exercises for how to execute them successfully

A perfect resource for business leaders, Awesomely Simple will help you turn ideas into positive action and achieve lasting business success.

CHAPTER 1

Vivid Vision

A COMPELLING VISION OF WHAT YOU ARE TRYING TO ACHIEVE THAT IS EXCEPTIONALLY WELL COMMUNICATED TO EVERYONE INVOLVED

Having a clear, vivid, and compelling vision, the first principle of business success, is without question an essential component in building a successful company. In fact, most organizations fall down not in creating the vision but in what they do with it. Before I get into that, I want to clarify some terminology and then delve into the fundamentals of how to create a vision and why having one is so important.

Basic Terminology

Vision, mission, purpose, core values, and guiding principles. What do these all mean?

I get asked this question a lot, and for good reason, because different people use completely different terms to talk about the same basic information. If you went to the Internet and pulled up the vision statements of a dozen companies, you’d quickly realize that what one company says is its vision, another one calls its mission and the third one its guiding principles. Although I have worked with hundreds of organizations in establishing mission, vision, and values statements, I try not to get too hung up on the precise definitions of these words. Nevertheless, some common definitions make these terms clear.

A mission statement describes what an organization is all about: its purpose and primary objectives. It answers three key questions:

• Whom do we serve?

• What is the benefit to our stakeholders, community, and the world?

• Why does this organization exist?

It should resonate with all members of the organization and help them feel proud and excited to be a part of something bigger than themselves. For example, Medtronic’s mission statement is ennobling and inspiring: “To contribute to human welfare by application of biomedical engineering in the research, design, manufacture, and sale of instruments or appliances that alleviate pain, restore health, and extend life.”

A vision statement is what the organization wants to become. It is a picture of the desired future, where leaders see the business twenty years from now.

A values statement outlines the core beliefs, behaviors, and commitments of an organization. Values are not created; they are discovered. They are codified from the value systems and behaviors of the leaders and employees in the organization.

To sum up, a mission statement gives the overall purpose of the organization, the vision statement describes how the future will look if the organization achieves its mission, and the values statement is a code of conduct. Here is an example of what the vision, mission, and values statement might look like for a hospital:

Our Mission

To provide exceptional patient care in a compassionate and nurturing environment supported by dedicated health care professionals who strive to advance the care and treatment of the sick through advanced medical research and discoveries

Our Vision

World-class patient care through clinical excellence

Our Core Values

Compassion

Safety

Professional excellence

Embracing diversity

Complete honesty and integrity

Innovation through knowledge sharing and teamwork

I have seen a lot of time and money wasted watching companies debate the definitions of these words. And many try to craft their mission/vision/values statements so perfectly, so all-inclusively, that they never get written. This is not a contest to see who gets an A+ from the teacher for writing a great haiku. If you have the skills to create a truly elegant vision and corporate values statement, fantastic. I applaud you. But if you just put a few simple words down on a piece of paper, and they are powerful and create strong meaning and motivation for you and your people, that’s fine too. The point is that the clarity of meaning and direction throughout the organization is driven by the clarity of the mission/vision/values statement. In far too many companies, these statements are ambiguous, uninspiring, and literally without meaning. The ultimate test of any statement of vision, mission, values, guiding principles, core beliefs, organizational credo—whatever you want to call it—is its effectiveness in mobilizing people to an inspiring purpose and shared direction.

The Fundamentals of Creating a Vision

A true vision is an exciting, focused, realistic, and inspiring picture of what you and everyone else in your organization are trying to accomplish together. It’s the reason you come to work every day, the impact you want to make on the world, the kind of company and products you aspire to build, the major strategies that make up the core focus of your business. Your vision does not have to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning literary masterpiece; it simply needs to be something that everyone can clearly understand and that people are honestly excited about pursuing.

I do not belong to the camp that says a vision must be specific, detailed, and measurable. I love visions that are highly detailed; they work well, and they give people a valuable idea of where they are going. But I have also seen some really successful businesses (often in high technology, in which the velocity of change is overwhelming) whose vision statements are more about how they do business and what is most important to drive success than they are about revenues or market share. I really like the way well-known business guru Guy Kawasaki approaches the idea of vision. He says that rather than creating a long and convoluted statement that nobody understands or can remember, a good vision should be like a mantra: a few words, a simple phrase that can be repeated over and over again to keep people focused on the goal. I have one client whose vision is focused on building a superior team that delivers real value through elegant solutions for its customers and looks for appropriate growth opportunities. These three ideas—team, solutions, and growth—have taken this firm from $50 million to $250 million in just a few years. That’s a successful vision.

So the goal is to create a vision statement that is straightforward and easy to remember. As the leader, you might sit down and, after long hours of thought and scribbling, develop the vision statement for your organization (whether it is a small team or multinational company) completely on your own. Or you might consider involving a number of your key people, maybe even your entire organization, in order to get as much buy-in and support for the vision as possible. But at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is that you have a vision that people believe and are committed to, a statement that keeps your employees focused and energized to move the company forward toward a destination they are all excited about reaching.

A vision is vital to giving people a sense of security and direction. With the flattening of organizations, it’s important that empowered people have a guiding destination to help them frame their decisions. Your people want to know what is most important. The vision says, in effect, Don’t worry. We know what we’re doing, and we know where we’re going. If we all go in this direction together, everything will turn out just fine. In organizations that do not have a clear vision or the vision is not well communicated, there is an overwhelming sense of anxiety because people are unsure of their future. Sure, employees come to work every day, but they’re not confident in exactly what they’re trying to accomplish with regard to the big picture. There is unease and tension because they have no common direction, no common purpose. If that’s not bad enough, lack of the well-communicated vision typically leads to a massive waste of time, money, talent, and motivation, a sure way to run any company into the ground.

Creating a vivid and compelling vision of the future is one of the most important ways for you to help your team work together toward a common goal. Another valuable tool is the creation of a set of corporate values: a list of the fundamental beliefs of your organization. They establish the rules of conduct: what is acceptable and what is not acceptable behavior within your company. If the vision is about why your organization is in business, the values are about how you will all do business together. Having a set of clear corporate values gives everyone in your organization a sense of dignity, a shared credo that reflects how they feel about themselves as professionals, about the organization they work for, and how they will interact with your stakeholders, your community, and the world.

Several years ago, I was invited to give a talk on vision and values to one of the leading financial service firms in the world. For two hours, I stood before the thirteen directors of this multibillion-dollar company and shared with them my thoughts on the importance of setting a clear direction for the firm that was solidly grounded in their corporate values, which revolved around professionalism, teamwork, respect, service, and client focus. At the end of my presentation, when I opened the floor for questions, an interesting debate ensued. One of the directors raised the issue of what to do about a top employee: he was a multimillion-dollar producer but treated other employees aggressively and rudely in his quest to deliver his stellar numbers. I turned and pointed to the wall where there was a huge brass plaque with the values of the organization written in foot-tall letters and said, “If this employee is not living your value of respect, if he is running roughshod over the rest of his team and causing significant internal strife, then regardless of how much money he generates for the firm, he either has to change his behavior or be terminated.” As those last few words came out of my mouth, one of the directors literally jumped out of his chair as if someone had hit him with a cattle prod. “You have got to be kidding me,” he said. “There is no way in the world I’m going to fire somebody who brings in $30 million a year.” I replied, “That’s fine, as long as you chisel respect off the values statement. But if this group of directors tells the employees that these are the values that the firm believes in yet allows people to violate them openly as long as they generate massive amounts of cash, then people will know that making money is much more important than living the values.”

Given the meltdown we’ve seen at companies like Enron, WorldCom, and across a broad swath of financial institutions in America, it is disappointing to realize that many of these companies met their demise because they said they valued one thing and did the opposite. Therefore, if you do create a set of organizational values, integrity to those values is paramount. The first time any employee sees you or someone else from the organization violate the values without negative ramifications, all trust is destroyed. As I’ve personally heard Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, say, “Make an honest mistake, screw up a project, lose a million dollars on a risky business bet . . . no problem, we can fix that. But violate the values, and you’re gone immediately.”

The vision tells people where you want to go. The values tell them how to behave along the way. It is essential to have a clear vision and compelling values in order to run a successful organization. Now let’s turn to where even companies that have a great vision and solid values often make a huge mistake.

Communicating the Vision

For a number of years, I’ve been doing work for an organization that brings together CEOs, presidents, and key employees at noncompetitive companies for a monthly roundtable meeting to help each other with their businesses. For the first few hours, a guest speaker addresses some critical area of business. In the afternoon, these high-level executives—most running companies between $2 million and $50 million—discuss how they will hold each other accountable for implementing the ideas they have learned. Through this work, I’ve had the great pleasure of presenting classes on strategic thinking and business excellence to almost nine hundred senior executives. At the end of each session, I always ask the group the same question: “What are the four biggest issues that you are dealing with right now in your company?” As they share their answers, I am always amazed because just about all of them say they are struggling with the same four basic issues. Here is the list, with an example of how they describe them to me. See if these sound familiar to you:

1. Communicating vision. “I have a clear vision of where I’m trying to take my organization. I think about it all the time and it’s always on my mind, but I bet if you went two levels down in my company and asked people what the vision of our organization is . . . they would not be able to tell you. I realize now that even though I focus on the vision and our key strategies constantly, I have not done a good enough job of clearly communicating them throughout my entire organization.”

2. Openly addressing challenges. “I realize now that we’re not having the tough conversations we need to have in our organization. There are issues, challenges, and problems that everyone knows about but no one wants to talk about. It’s the elephant in the middle of the room in every meeting. People sit and stare at each other but are unwilling to broach the subject, put it on the table, and talk about these major issues that need to be addressed. As a leader, I now understand that I’m going to have to be much more courageous in my communication and accept that it is my role to engage everyone in discussing the undiscussable.”

3. Enabling mediocrity. “I have a few mediocre people in key places in my organization. And I understand th...