From Impossible to Possible

Two Simple Rules to Assure Exceptional Public Value

Andrew Hollo

• Publisher: Grammar Factory
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780648137238
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Are you a public sector or non-profit leader who is having trouble getting alignment - of ideas and people?

Do you feel your mission is diluted by pressures to perform, to compete, or to make budget?

Are you surrounded by opportunities, but can't easily decide which to go for, and which to let go?

And, even more frustratingly, are you invisible, unknown or misunderstood by your customers?

Over two decades of consulting to all types of public sector agencies, Andrew has developed an impressive framework and strategic process that overcomes many of the common hurdles that stop government agencies and non-profits from doing their best work.

From Impossible to Possible is the first definitive, step-by-step guide for public value leaders who need to lead change to deal with new, complex realities. Andrew shares his knowledge and experience unreservedly to help you create dramatic impact in turbulent times - and be seen by others as credible and effective.

Stop working the way you are, read this book, and discuss at least one of the chapters with your boss, your team or you partners. And then see what happens next.

Part 1: Know what your everyday impact should be

The problem: In the twenty-first century, public value organisations cannot behave like charities or like professionalised bureaucracies. If they do, funders will not support them, and their constituents won’t find them relevant. Instead, they must behave more and more like businesses, yet with a laser-sharp focus on their mission. But strategy is overcomplicated by an entire industry that exists to develop it. Organisations take far too long to form it, and far too little attention is paid to strategy internalisation (making sure everyone understands their part in it). Consequently, more than half of all CEOs say they have little confidence in their strategy.

The solution: Thriving in the world of impact investing requires discipline. That discipline is partly in the execution of your mission, but initially in its formation. As a C-level executive or senior operational leader, you should be able to clearly and consistently state five things:

1.Why you are in business.

2.What service you provide.

3.Where the organisation is heading.

4.How you measure success.

5.What makes your organisation special or unique.

In chapters one to five, I’ll show you how to determine and articulate all five of those things. Each chapter title is framed as a question to help you reflect on the content and generate discussions with your colleagues. Then in Chapter 6, I’ll show you how to internalise your strategy, using the insights you’ve gained in the previous chapters. By the end of Part 1, you and your team should have what it takes to reach a very clear agreement on the everyday impact you are seeking to create.

CHAPTER 1 :

What is your purpose?

ANDREW’S OBSERVATION: About half of all non-profits and government agencies don’t have a clear value proposition that describes their ultimate ‘prize’ or benefit. They know their product, but not their value.

If you don’t know your value, you’ll struggle to make a long-lasting impact. After all, why should customers care about your organisation if even you, or your frontline staff, are not 100 per cent sure what makes it relevant and even irreplaceable to your customers?

It is no coincidence that the most sustainable public value organisations are those which can define their purpose within a very clear niche. In this chapter, I’ll show you how to define your ‘raison d’être’ (the most important reason or purpose for your existence), and explain the significance of the ‘aha’ moment.

Defining your raison d’être

Can you name half-a-dozen businesses or organisations that you’d care about if they disappeared tomorrow? Apart from the obvious ones (like utility or energy companies), whose presence would you miss on a day-to-day basis? My list would look something like this:

1.Apple. This company pretty much runs my business for me, from a hardware, software and data-storage perspective.

2.Archie’s All Day and The Kettle Black. These are two local cafes (one near my office, the other near my son’s school), where the staff know me by name. Each is a place where I can think, work, and even meet clients.

3.5th Element Wellness. This is where I do twice-weekly personal training sessions, occasional yoga classes, and sweat in the sauna. Without these few hours, I’d feel lethargic, unfocused and unhealthy.

4.Qantas. I advise organisations all around Australia, and have colleagues and peers all around the world, which means I spend a lot of time travelling. A good, solid airline, which is safe and reliable, is gold in my view.

5.Queen Victoria Market. A Melbourne institution, which my family and I treat as our local supermarket.

6.Amazon. I still remember the first time I ordered a book from Amazon. I put in my credit card details and my shipping address, and they promised delivery within a week. It arrived in three days, for a third less than what I would have paid at my local bookshop. To this day, I continue to buy books, video content and stationery from them.

Which businesses are on your list? And why did they make it there? Most of mine are about ease and convenience (Apple, Qantas, Amazon) and the quality of the experience (Apple, QVM, 5EW). While Apple, 5EW and QVM certainly have competitors, they offer a distinctive (and they’d argue unique) value proposition that is irreplaceable. There is a secret sauce, a raison d’être, a complex assembly of capabilities that represents a very high barrier to entry for other businesses.

How is this created and captured? The best public value organisations, like the best brands, do this superbly. How? By developing and implementing a clearly defined strategy. Some of my clients misunderstand strategy – they think it’s a plan. Others think it’s a list of prioritised actions. Still others believe strategy is a marketing slogan or tagline. In reality, it’s none of these. Instead, this is what I tell my clients: Strategy is a collection of insights that compellingly explain why you do what you do, and for whom, and that provides a framework for decisions to be made.

The starting point for all strategic insights is being able to articulate a single business objective. If we were Amazon executives, for example, we might say something like, ‘We are in business to be the dominant online retailer in a variety of product categories.’ Or, if we were being extremely candid, we might even say, ‘We are in business to eliminate bricks-and-mortar retailing.’ If someone asked, ‘What’s wrong with bricks-and-mortar retailers?’, Amazon could identify a number of problems, including:

1.Lack of choice. When I shop at a physical store, I am limited to what makes economic and logistical sense for the retailer to stock, which means stock is always limited.

2.Lack of convenience. When I shop at a physical store, I have to locate it, travel there, find my way around the store, ask for help if I’m confused, queue up, pay, and travel home. There are many steps involved.

3.Uncompetitive prices. When I shop at a physical store, I pay a price that factors in the cost of the store’s overheads, including rent, staff, and so on. This means I pay more than I need to.

Think for a moment about your own organisation. Can you clearly articulate an overarching goal or objective? To do this, think about who your ideal customer or beneficiary is. Amazon’s is very broad – literally any consumer with internet access. The World Wildlife Fund’s beneficiaries are animals living in threatened wilderness areas. Doctors Without Borders’ customers are sick and injured people in war zones. Who are yours?

Once you have an ideal customer in your sights, ask: What is the biggest problem they need solved? Amazon recognised very early that our reliance on bricks-and-mortar stores creates problems of availability, value and ease. Doctors Without Borders realised that war zones, or epidemics, create demand for First World healthcare, precisely at times and in places when it’s unlikely to be found. WWF helps solve problems of human encroachment on migratory patterns, problems of climate change on ecological systems, and problems of economic development on species’ habitats. What are the problems that your ideal customer wants solved?

Finally, you can distil these problems into a single purpose statement, or raison d’être. Doctors Without Borders’ purpose statement is: ‘To help people anywhere in the world who can’t get healthcare and where need is greatest, because of conflict, disasters or epidemics.’ WWF’s purpose statement is: ‘To stop the degradation of the planet’s natural environment and to build a future in which humans live in harmony with nature’. Use the smallest number of words to come up with your own purpose statement, without resorting to generic or ‘motherhood’ statements.

If this isn’t obvious to you, or you get tangled up in large numbers of problems, it might be worth waiting for an ‘aha’ moment.

The ‘aha’ moment

Every single successful enterprise that delivers public value, be it for-profit or non-profit, can be tracked back to some sort of ‘aha’ moment. In the late 1960s, the US deregulated its airline industry on a state basis. Jets and fuel were becoming significantly cheaper, and people were becoming more mobile. A Texan lawyer named Herb Kelleher had an ‘aha’ moment: A short-haul flight should be as cheap as driving. And just like that, Southwest Airlines was born. In Kelleher’s words, ‘We’re not competing with other airlines. We’re competing with ground transportation.’ Southwest Airlines is now the world’s largest and most profitable low-cost carrier, offering more than 3,000 flights per day, with the purpose of ‘connecting people to what’s important in their lives through friendly, reliable, and low-cost air travel’.

While Amazon and Southwest Airlines offer private, not public, value, they have a clear purpose because they solve recognised, and long-intractable, problems. Let’s look at a non-profit example, to make my case applicable to every type of organisation.

In 2008, two Australian university students, Daniel Flynn and his then girlfriend Justine (who is now his wife), and another friend, Jarryd, watched a documentary about the lack of clean water in disadvantaged countries. Specifically, how 600 million people simply can’t get daily access to reliable, clean water. Yet in Australia alone, people spend $600 million a year on bottled water – even though the tap water is perfectly safe to drink. This insight led to a profound ‘aha’ moment: What if we could turn bottled water for those who don’t need it into clean water for those who really do need it? This led to the creation of the social enterprise Thankyou, which has a clear purpose: ‘By the simple act of buying a bottle of water, every Australian can be a micro-philanthropist.’ Or, to put it another way: ‘Empowering humanity to choose a world without poverty.’ In addition to water, the business now sells cereals and snack bars, body care products and baby products. All profits are given to those in need. To date, Thankyou has helped 150,000 people access clean water, and 190,000 people access hygiene and sanitation.

If, like Southwest Airlines and Thankyou Water, your purpose statement stems from some sort of ‘aha’ moment, it’s important to remember that a purpose statement is beneficial because it is unambiguous. Most organisations operate in complex environments where many decisions have to be made routinely. Therefore, any...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Introduction: Making the impossible possible
• Part 1: Know What Your Everyday Impact Should Be
• Part 2: Create Everyday Impact, Every Day
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• Discover Your Alignment Score