Deming’s philosophy on management that was first published in the 1950s. His leadership fundamentals revolve around the concept of “Everything is a system, and we are part of it.” Below are the leadership competencies that are elaborated by Scholtes (The Leader’s Handbook: Making Things Happen, Getting Things Done) from Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge.

• The ability to think in terms of systems and knowing how to lead systems;
• The ability to understand variability of work in planning and problem solving;
• Understanding how we learn, develop, and improve, and leading true learning and improvement;
• Understanding people and why they behave as they do;
• Understanding the interdependence and interaction between systems, variation, learning, and human behavior. Knowing how each affects the others;
• Giving vision, meaning, direction, and focus to the organization.

Today, 50 years later, his vision of leadership is even more relevant in the global, complex, fast pace world we live in. Simply, we as leaders need to understand the system, as we need to be integrators, not insulators; team players, not team captains; communicators, not commanders.

I previously wrote how creativity, invention and knowledge are the key ingredients for innovation. Innovation thrives in environments that nurture new ideas, creativity and sharing as it is built on existing ideas, knowledge and inventions. As a system, innovation is collaborative, multidisciplinary and requires diverging viewpoints and experiences. It is also inclusive, and it is about bridging and extending linkages and interactions to build something that is greater than its parts.

On the other hand, organizational silos are barriers to innovation. As the name represents, they are highly-vertical, where the communication and collaboration outside of the organization is at best minimal. It seems, as a business matures, it becomes impossible to avoid becoming a victim of a silo mentality. This is mainly due to the nature of business and people: the essence of success strives to keep order and maintain the status-quo that created it in the first place. With that, it is a challenge and a requirement for businesses to reinvent themselves, as recently demonstrated by the Yahoo Memo: The ‘Peanut Butter Manifesto.

Organizational silos come in different shapes and sizes. Some are obvious as they bring out the worst in people: us vs. them attitude, playing schedule chicken, finger pointing, CYA (cover your a**) syndrome, political turf fighting, and power struggles are all common examples where the situation eventually leads to attrition of good people. Hopefully this does not describe your current workplace, however you have probably experienced some of the other types of organizational silos.

• Geographical silos — Globalization increases the urgency to break down geographical silos. Lack of customer information and understanding, disconnected systems, and inconsistent hand-offs between teams in different geographical locations often result in missed opportunities, unhappy customers and waste as everything gets duplicated at all locations.
• Functional silos — These tend to surface between departments where the authority rests with the functional managers, such as marketing, sales, R&D, etc. Although R&D and Marketing collaboration problems are frequently noted, you can experience silos forming within the same department where there are differing types of functional responsibilities. The QA team feeling like a 2nd class citizen compared to developers, or the usability team not feeling listened to are common complaints.
• Organizational silos — Organizational silos usually occur between business units. As a customer, we are the ultimate losers and we feel the impacts of the firm’s disfunction the most. Usually in the form of products that lack interoperability, different customer experiences, purchasing processes, usability, … Basically a lack of company brand.
• Project silos — Lack of best-practice sharing and the inexistence of organizational level project management processes and standards result in project silos. On the surface this might seem innocent, yet it results in inaccurate and inconsistent project status reports with major challenges for implementing an effective portfolio management process, not to mention lack of quality, usability and delayed project releases due to difficulty of managing resources and budgets between projects. This is why there is an increase in PMO (Project Management Office) creation and centralization of project management activities.
• Technology silos — Usually driven by NIH (not invented here) syndrome, needless technology silos result in interoperability issues between products from the same organization, wasted development and testing efforts, increased development costs and increased time to market.

In summary, organizational silos are bad for innovation, bad for the organization and bad for the firm. Fortunately, the symptoms of the illness caused by organizational silos are pretty obvious. So, you know you have a silo problem when:

• You cannot share knowledge or information for developing new ideas or resolving problems;
• You are sure that any information about your firm’s customers, markets or competitors is classified as top secret;
• You gave up on any hope of leveraging and building on your firm’s existing assets, such as IT infrastructure, manufacturing, operations for new ideas and products;
• For every forward step you take, you seem to take 2 steps back and you see its impact in decelerated cycle time of new product introductions;
• You have a culture that values personal expertise and knowledge creation over teamwork;
• Deja vu is your middle name. You feel like you are stuck in the twilight zone, wondering why the history repeats itself, and if you will ever escape;
• You are stuck with bureaucracy and endless pointless meetings even over simple problems, and you are certain that having a root canal would be less painful than this;
• You are stuck in a cycle of incremental improvements and about to suffocate as you are trapped in the confines of the capabilities of your organization;
• Everyone seems to completely lack awareness of who does what in the organization, resulting in duplication of efforts and more needless waste;
• You are convinced they were thinking of your organization when they defined brain drain;

Silos are generally the result of organizational structures, senior-management priorities and values, and the culture that is created through the existing reward system. Using a 5-prong approach, you can break through the silo mentality and bring down the walls.

Emphasise the appropriate values

Trust, respect, honesty, communication and collaboration are the needed values to build your organizational culture around. As you shift from top-down driven organizational dynamics, you need to promote values that will enhance your organizations communication and collaboration capability and enable your teams to resolve conflict and improve their decision making capability at their level.

Build a culture of collaboration

Cultural changes need to start at the top: leaders will need to consistently and constantly communicate and demonstrate the importance of sharing, leveraging and collaborating across the organizational silos. Certainly the reward system can kick start the needed transformation by focusing on making collaborative performance objectives part of the employee review process. Recognition of people who work across the organizational boundaries will also reduce the emphasis on individual achievement, and shift the focus to collaboration.

However, building a culture of collaboration is more than just encouraging better communication and sharing. It is focused on creating value by effectively and efficiently utilizing the available assets (knowledge, people, tools, …) and bridging the gaps regardless of job title, functional expertise or organizational belonging. This requires not only a sense of shared purpose, but also a greater understanding of how everyone contributes to the organization’s success. To create that understanding, invest in job rotations and international assignments, utilize cross-functional teams and invite others from different areas to your meetings.

Rally around a shared purpose

Rather than top-down direction setting, build a sense of shared vision and purpose, personal accountability and empowerment throughout the organization. Shared purpose allows everyone to connect to an idea that is bigger than them, and allows them to see how their day-to-day activities contribute to the bigger goal.

To further the cause, bring systems thinking to your organization by integrating your departments, and building in collaboration by utilizing cross-functional teams, ignoring org charts and focusing on innovation and customers. With that, increase the transparency in your organization, openly communicate decisions, priorities, financial challenges, competitive pressures, and strategic initiatives to all.

Make it easy to connect and share

Lets face it, developers are not the most outgoing kind, but they are curious and usually hungry. And, there are ample opportunities to connect and share. So, look at ways to bring people together in your firm through idea exchange days, open house days, best practices exchanges, internal seminars, brown bag discussions. But don’t stop there, find ways to extend your collaboration network outside of your firm by bringing speakers and scientists, tap into your customers and suppliers.

Also, utilize collaboration technology and social networks to connect your project members, experts, hobbyists, early adopters and visionaries. Make these tools and communities work for you.

Focus on the important stuff and measure accordingly

As I mentioned before, what gets measured gets done. So, focus on the important stuff like your customers and innovation. This further encourages cross-pollination of ideas and collaboration. Furthermore, set aggressive goals that require collaboration, such as the case with P&G where they expect 50% of the company’s new products to come from outside the P&G labs. This requires building a network of outside innovators, scientists, customers and suppliers to tap into new ideas and develop new products.

Also revisit your brand identity and make sure it emphasizes working-togetherness and having one-voice. The standardization of your brand image will not only improve your relationship with your customers, but will further promote a sense of one company, one organization and one team.

There is a right time for everything, including building silos

Though silos are bad, there are times when you do need them, but more clearly what they represent: an enclosed structure and/or a protective shelter.

• Prevent technology and idea contamination in situations where your competitor also becomes your partner. This is more common than you may think, especially in large organizations. It is crucial to limit interaction between your product development teams and teams that are working closely with your competitor to avoid any potential contaminations and lawsuits. It is also a good business behavior.
• Cultivating a new business within a mature organization requires tender care and protection from the big corporate mentality and culture.
• M&A process highlights the tension between staying in full compliance with government rules governing mergers and acquisitions, yet accelerating the integration process as the M&A finalizes. Utilizing the clean room concept, you can gather and analyze sensitive information from both companies, and in turn support the merger teams and accelerate the integration process.

These are certainly valid cases for building a silo and limiting communication to the outside world. However, in your organization, it is still important to maintain an awareness of why, what and how-long this silo will last. Basically, be transparent within a reason.

Technorati Tags: organizational silos, barriers to innovation, collaboration, silos, break through the silo, building a silo

The desire for growth is built into our DNA. Today, growth is not just expected but demanded from every company. Somewhere along the way, the definition of business growth skewed and became synonymous with an increase in size, number, value or strength. We have seen too many examples of bad growth driven by short-term focus on the wrong measures of performance. Classic examples are the dot-com bubble burst, Enron, implications of population growth on our natural resources, and even the growing pains felt by firms, including Google.

I found Robert M. Tomasko’s definition of growth refreshing: moving beyond your self-imposed boundaries and constraints to achieve your full potential and deliver unique value (Bigger Isn’t Always Better: The New Mindset for Real Business Growth). As he outlines, the growth process, as with purposeful change management, involves:

1. putting aside old ways of perceiving the situation;
2. leading change, first within yourself and then within the organization, towards this new perspective;
3. building capabilities to support this new perspective;
4. reorienting and readjusting your value delivery chain and ecosystem to align with this new perspective;

I previously wrote about creativity, invention and knowledge and how they are the foundation for innovation. Here, innovation, implementation of a new idea for the purpose of creating value, is the fuel for growth. And, innovation management is your control system. Combined, they will help achieve sustainable growth for your firm. So, here are the necessary conditions for sustainable growth.

• Offer clear value and benefit to the company, customers, suppliers, industry and the market through this change or new perspective. It is ultimately about people: it is a change of behavior, processes, how people work and produce work. If there is no clear and compelling benefit, it won’t stick. So build close linkages with your workforce, lead users, customers and suppliers. Strive to go beyond relationship building to achieve an emotional connection with them. As Guy Kawasaki stated, make evangelists, not sales (Rules For Revolutionaries: The Capitalist Manifesto for Creating and Marketing New Products and Services).
• Recognize that growth is not a destination, but a path and on-going process. It requires developing the needed capabilities and competencies in awareness, adaptability, and building a learning organization. It requires much mindfulness, being aware of the present moment to exploit opportunities so as to keep the bigger picture and vision in mind. At the same time, it requires effective risk management: understanding/recognizing possible uncertainties and unexpectedness’, adjusting and adapting as needed. It is about impermanence, understanding that everything changes and is in flux, and learning to let go and adapt.
• Be resilient. You’ll have plenty of failures, nay-sayers and set backs. So, build your capacity for change and dealing with change, even under negative and unexpected circumstances. I once heard that forgiveness is hoping for a better past. So, don’t dwell in your past failures. Failure is inevitable and it is part of your learning process. The key to success is to fail early, learn from it and move on with greater understanding. Just remember Guy’s coin phrase: churn, baby churn.
• Utilize both sides of your brain: don’t just be creative but also be analytical to successfully exploit the opportunity. Think out of the box, look for connections even seemingly unrelated, be open to and seek new experiences and ideas, be observative and keenly inquisitive. Know that the future is unwritten and full of opportunities. Be positive, hopeful and optimistic, regardless of the current situation. But, while dreaming big, start small, simple and with focus. Iteratively build on your previous successes, and create your future one step at a time.
• Build a culture of trust, commitment, accountability and focus on results. Commitment is key, and it should not be confused with consensus, as it is about having the courage and wisdom to move forward even when not everyone agrees. Accountability is about the personal ownership for delivering the agreed upon performance to the company and to the team. Focus on results is recognizing what really matters and what ultimately delivers value.
• Achieve the right balance between:
  • long-term and short-term;
  • leading and managing;
  • idea-generating and doing;
  • being supportive and driving the needed change, however uncomfortable;
  • providing resources/funding and placing constraints, even if they are artificial;

So, instead of pursuing the popular definition of growth, contemplate your unique value and how to further it. Whether it maybe building the next great product/service, or how you go about developing and delivering it. Whatever it is, keep the focus on achieving sustainable growth.

Technorati Tags: Robert M. Tomasko, Bigger Isn’t Always Better: The New Mindset for Real Business Growth, innovation, sustainable growth, conditions for sustainable growth

Word for Word of American Public Radio recently brought a conversation with Thomas Friedman and Dov Seidman from the National Press Club. The discussion includes Dov Seidman’s new book How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything…in Business (and in Life).

The interview revolves around how the business landscape is changing as the world gets flat and what it means to individuals and businesses. Dov emphasizes that in order to be successful in this connected world, it is not about what you know but how you do it, and how your values of trust, integrity and transparency will drive your profitability and business results.

You can listen the interview How to do business in the “flat world” at the Word for Word archives. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: Word for Word, Thomas Friedman, Dov Seidman, How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything…in Business (and in Life), How to do business in the “flat world”

The Wall Street Journal recently had an article on “Working Together… When Apart: As employees scatter around the globe, virtual teamwork has become crucial. Here are 10 rules for making it work” by Lynda Gratton (June 16-17, 2007). You can access the article on WSJ.com or Business Insight section of MITSloan Management Review.

After managing a large team of globally distributed developers, I also came up with my rules for making virtual teams work. So, if you have to play the hand that is already dealt, here are my rules for building high-performance virtual teams.

1. Align organizational values to support virtual teams — Just do it! might be a great slogan for encouraging employees to act, but not as effective when the goal is to improve teamwork and communication between your dispersed teams, especially at the early stages of team forming and storming (reference: Tuckman Model of Team Development). Along the same lines, e-mail might be your preferred mode of communication, but it can also be a challange for teams where English is their second language. You’ll be suprised to see how a simple phone call can improve team productivity, communication and morale.
2. Think local, act global — Not everyone can work productively in isolation, i.e. limited face-to-face contact, work is done mainly through e-mail, IM and some phone conferences. So, where possible look for ways to establish a small team working together at a given location. It will improve trust, build a sense of commitment and support the feeling of being part of a larger team. Also, support diversity by encouraging each of your locations to have their own culture. However, make sure they all share your common organizational values.
3. Practice transparency and objectivity — This is a good rule to follow regardless, but even more important if you are managing a virtual team. Remember, someone’s perception becomes another’s reality. Transparency enables interested parties to understand what and why, while objectivity brings facts, diverse perspectives and sense of fairness into the discussion.
4. Agree and enforce team processes — The last thing you need is an unexpected check-in right before a major build and release cycle. Make sure your team understand and follows the agreed upon procedures and tools.
5. Promote leaders with good facilitation skills — When bringing diverse teams and experiences into a new project, it helps to have a good facilitator that has everyone’s trust and respect. See my previous post on characteristics of a good facilitator.
6. Risk manage your project — Vacations, sick days, and unexpected issues are inevitable. However, these emergencies are ever more heightened when dealing with differences in time zones and communication gaps. With that, risk manage your project by identifying and assigning backup individuals to risky areas, or dividing up the work among different sites.
7. Rotate meeting times and locations — Working across different time zones and locations is disruptive to personal life. So, share the load by rotating meeting times and face-to-face meeting locations.
8. Mandate a day of silence — Although it is great to have a team that can virtually work 24×6, and maybe even 24×7, the overhead associated with working in a virtual environment can be wearying. So, depending on the intensity of the interactions, declare a day, such as every virtual Friday, as a quiet day. This will give everyone a break, and allow people to recharge their batteries.

So, what works for you?

Technorati Tags: Working Together… When Apart, virtual teams, building high-performance virtual teams

My recent post on Effective Strategies For Surviving Culture Tax, specifically the concept of utilizing emotional detachment got some attention. At Huffington Post, you can read Bob Sutton’s The Virtues of Emotional Detachment and how “learning when not [to] care, what not [to] care about, and how to not care” can be an effective carrier tactic in times of need. At Slow Leadership, I enjoyed reading Carmine Coyote’s insights on emotional detachment in Should you learn not to care — or just not to care so much?.

Enjoy!

A friend of mine brought up the question of dealing with organizational cultures where the process of getting things done is draining and demotivating. He refers to this as culture tax. I have seen many cases where misalignment of priorities, inadequate resources, complex organizational structures, lack of clear accountabilities, misguided values of the leaders and overwhelmed groups help create this culture tax.

If your work environment reminds you of one of the regions of Hades, read on and remember what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger. Otherwise, consider yourself one of the lucky ones, but file this blog away for later reference as your time might come.

Before I share my survival techniques for effectively sailing through rough waters while keeping sanity, it is quite important for you to do a personal assessment. Be honest and ask if the culture of your organization is right for you. If you do decide to stay, be clear on your motivation, purpose and goals.

If your challenge is dealing with jerks in the workplace then check out Bob Sutton’s blog as he has extensive information on the subject. Though I haven’t read his latest book, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t, I have enjoyed listening to his interview on Standford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lecture series. Once you recognize and accept the negative styles of the people you are working with, you are no longer the victim. With that, you can focus and direct your energy on how to effectively achieve your goal.

Next, take your time and revisit your organization’s decision making process, key influencers and decisions makers. I previously touched on the decision making process and decision quality chain. Reflect on your objectives and how your circle of influence (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey) helps/hinders the accomplishment of those objectives. As a side note, if you are a people manager, please find ways to isolate your team from all the politics and demotivational activities of your organization. You will be surprised how this will not only improve your team’s motivation, but also increase your productivity and effectiveness.

This exercise of understanding organizationally where you stand in regards to your objectives, recognizing how decisions are made and who the decision makers are will enable you to raise issues well. Here the goal is to translate your concerns and issues to purpose and objectives that others will not only relate to but also care about. Basically, look for ways to extend your circle of influence.

In addition, I recommend practicing the Zen discipline of emotional detachment. Unfortunately, this is often misinterpreted as not caring and being disengaged. However, emotional detachment merely directs you not to be attached to an outcome or to an expectation. This practice will help you objectively evaluate the situation and recognize new opportunities as they arrive. After all, when one door closes another will open, but only if you are listening.

Here are a few other tips that worked well for me in the past:

• Be a good observer, and focus on learning people’s styles: what motivates them, how they are influenced, how they listen and communicate, … And, adjust your style as needed.
• Be open to getting help, coaching and mentoring from others.
• Recognize and celebrate little accomplishments. This can be especially hard for high achievers, but especially important in situations where progress is slow to achieve.
• I can’t emphasize enough the importance of a healthy lifestyle, exercise and meditation for maintaining a positive attitude and outlook in life.

Keep on smiling. Remember, your smile is one thing that is under your control. And, please do share your experiences and survival techniques with us.

Technorati Tags: organizational cultures, culture tax

One time or another, every firm struggles with the answer to this deceitfully basic question: what business are we in? Those that are successful at figuring out the answer continue to evolve, the rest become extinct.

What business are we in is an important question as it guides an organization at ever facet of its decision making: who its customer is, what needs it meets, what benefits it provides, how it’s organized, how its organizational culture formed and what competencies it develops to deliver this value. Fundamentally, it orchestrates how the value is created and delivered, for the firm, its customers, employees and shareholders.

Knowing what business you are in, and more importantly not in, helps the firm focus on what to pay attention to, what to ignore and what to learn: customers, markets, competencies, technologies, trends… Ultimately, this all contributes to the firm’s profitability, its top line and/or bottom line growth.

It is also important to note that the industry, market and customer dynamics are constantly evolving and changing. Being aware of those changes is crucial for a firm’s ability to evolve, and to refine the answer to the question: what business are we in. At the same time, our thought models, our day to day context constrains and limits our thinking. Therefore, building awareness of the complex environment we operate in, and becoming mindful is a key to survival of the firm. Scenario planning, forecasting techniques and SWOT analysis are tools that can help break the boxed thinking and force us to look beyond what is obvious. The challenge for managers is how to design these agile organizations that can evolve and respond to the changing needs.

Railroads are a classic example from the pages of history books. Once the growth engines for the country, now mostly extinct. The ones that survived, like Union Pacific, redefined their business as transportation and not just railroads. Henry Ford introduced the concept of mass production to automobile industry: you can have any color, so long as its black. But, it was GM that recognized the changing trends in the customer desires and realized that semi-customized designs could be delivered at minimal cost to the customer: a car for every purse and purpose.

What started as a test and measurement business in the late 1930s for Hewlett Packard, became computing and peripherals in the 1990s, and today is moving “to integrate content across the home, whether it’s emanating from the Web, from satellites, from cable, or the PC, and bring that to the consumer’s touch.” (The Wall Street Journal, The Weekend Interview with Mark Hurd The Un-Carly by Michael S. Malone, April 14-15, 2007)

Amazon is not in the business of selling books or groceries for that matter. For Amazon to be successful, to be profitable, they built the needed competencies for logistics, warehousing, distribution and fulfillment: the shipping business. Starbucks is not a service provider, they are all about experience. Experience that brings us the “third place” beyond home or work, a place that has a feel of a friendly sidewalk cafe in Europe, and a place where you can order a double tall not fat extra dry cappuccino with a dense, caramel-like sweetness and smooth, satisfying finish consistently every time.

I mentioned that we recently visited LegoLand. Take a look at these shots I captured; what business do you think they are in: annual subscription? Park hours were 10am-6pm during our visit. On a positive note, with so many interesting things to look at, we were able to avoid most of the rides. Our son, like a kid in a candy store, was quite happy with just being there, and enjoyed every minute of the visit.

So, what business are you in?

Technorati Tags: what business are you in

Recently Motorola CEO, Ed Zander, commented on the challenges of building and executing to their strategy: “Today, this is about execution in the mobile-device area. It’s been more challenging to figure out the strategy than we initially thought.” I previously shared my observations on Motorola, specifically their single-minded focus on strategy and innovation. So, this blog is devoted to reminding us of the challenges surrounding successful execution of strategy.

The word strategy originates from the efforts of military leaders as they utilized their troops based on their own as well as their enemy’s resources and capabilities, examination of the external forces including the terrain, weather and the likelihood of uncertain events and developments, in order to triumph in combat. In the world of business, the battle is the effective utilization of a firm’s scarce resources to bring in profits in the face of fierce competition. This requires good understanding of the needs and wants of the potential customers, and the ability differentiate oneself so that customers would choose you over your competitors.

As strategy is a long term plan of action to achieve a particular goal and objective, it requires execution with fluidity, especially in the presence of uncertainty. Effective execution is a competitive business advantage: better execution = better performance. Creating a strategy is easy, but implementing it successfully is where the challenge lies.

The following are my personal experiences and challenges that I have encountered in building and implementing strategies successfully. Reviewing this against your current strategy and its implementation, and devising action plans to avoid these common pitfalls will help improve your chances of a successful outcome.

Strategy is about making tough choices and defining trade-offs; it is about what you are going to do, but more importantly what you are NOT going to do. This requires strong leadership, as successful strategy is about being different regardless off all the nay-sayers inside and outside of your firm. Unfortunately, on too many occasions a firm chooses to keep its options open, and provides an environment that enable its people to ignore the firm’s strategy. However, when things go wrong, the end result will be wasted effort, a disappointed and cynical workforce, and not to forget the loss of credibility of the leaders.

Many aspects of a firm’s strategy can be copied by its rivals, as in the case of fast followers. It’s incredibly arrogant for a company to believe that it can do what its rivals do, and do it better and longer. How well a firm can execute its strategy is determined by its assets and the core competencies. At the same time, immediate availability of market research and competitive intelligence data, continuos changes in customer buying habits, government regulations, convergence of technologies and globalization are making what once was a clear differentiation of the firm’s competencies a temporary competitive advantage.

Strategy is about the basic value you are delivering to your customers: who, what, and how. With this, strategy must have continuity; it can’t be constantly reinvented. Without continuity, your organization will be confused, and your customers won’t know what you stand for. At the same time, strategy formulation and implementation is an on-going process requiring continuous reassessment in the face of ever-changing marketplace and customer demands. Strategy will not need to change often, but will require periodic adjustments based on external circumstances. With that, it is important to keep your strategy flexible, and give your people the freedom and empowerment to respond and adjust as needed.

Strategy and its execution requires ownership at all levels, from the CEO on down. Executive leadership must embed strategy in the organization: from its people, to its processes, to its culture and values. Any strategy, however brilliant, will fail unless people are emotionally committed to its success. In order to achieve unwavering commitment, people need to be involved in the strategy process early, they need to understand and believe in the strategy, and they need to feel included. The organization’s culture, values, incentives, people, structure and processes all contribute to how the existing internal environment will support its strategy. Through establishment of performance targets and incentives, it is important to direct the existing behavior and culture. After all, what gets measured gets done.

Execution is a process, not an action or a step, and it requires time. Though strategy might be built by few, execution requires everyone. With that, it is about change and management of that change. If change is not managed effectively, it will generate internal resistance. Though speed of execution is important, you need a cohesive approach to communicate, align, motivate, focus and enable people to execute the strategy: self-supporting environment that will follow through even where the organizational structure and processes fails.

Strategy must be attainable. The executive management team needs to assure that the organization’s objectives, performance targets, and strategically critical business processes are all in alignment with its strategy: horizontally and vertically across the various departments. Each of the strategic initiatives identified needs to be budgeted and managed. Most importantly, there needs to be recognition of both the existing competencies and the required competencies for success, and a plan to bridge the knowledge-doing gap. Establishing tangible and practical steps, along with key milestones, will help achieve early victories that will generate momentum and excitement for the whole organization.

Technorati Tags: successful execution of strategy, strategy, implementing strategies

In a previous post, I mentioned using SWOT analysis for analyzing the forces impacting your innovation. SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) is a flexible and simple tool that can be used in many different contexts: strategic planning, organizational evaluation, career evaluation, technology competence analysis, product or service analysis, strategic partnership evaluation, and so on. There are numerous sites that cover the basics of SWOT analysis. As such, instead of going into the HOWTO of SWOT, this post will focus on best practices for SWOT.

In basic terms, SWOT is a great tool for structured brainstorming, with an intent to map out the landscape of the strategic question being evaluated, and determining the potential next steps that the organization should take action on. A successfully conducted SWOT will give insights on existing strengths to maintain, build and leverage on, weaknesses to minimize or remedy, potential threats to counter or minimize, and opportunities to prioritize and exploit.

Given the simplicity and the flexibility of SWOT process, it is quite easy to fall into traps that would result in inaccurate, incomplete and subjective analysis. However, by keeping a few best practices in mind, you can ensure that you have a comprehensive, methodical and objective study. Here are some of the practices that worked for me in the past; please add on to this list.

Emphasize Detail

The simplicity of the process can easily result in 2-3 word phrases that don’t mean anything:our technology platform is superior. Remember, the goal is to come away with insightful and actionable areas. One method to achieve that would be to ask the Why? question at least 5 times.

1. our technology platform is superior — why?
2. it is superior because we have a flexible platform architecture — why?
3. it is a flexible architecture because we had to implement some specific functionality for a few customers — why?
4. we needed to enable our customers to optimize their operations — why?
5. they needed to streamline the workflow and customize the starting point for improved job flow and they didn’t find any company or product to do what they needed, so we quickly did the work for them

With these 5 quick questions, you just identified your strength in building customized solutions, and opportunities to market the strength of your product architecture, to investigate new product extensions to support this existing need, and the potential of offering customized solutions.

Another method for getting to details is to do a further breakdown of the given statement and analyze each attribute separately. As an example, our product quality is poor could be further broken down to:

• Product quality — does the product meet the agreed upon specifications;
• Product specification — does the product specification reflect the customer needs, benefits and problems;
• Product usability — is the product easy to learn and use;
• Product performance — does the product performance meets the customer needs;
• Quality assurance (QA) process — is the QA process effective;
• …

The bottom line is that there are many things that could contribute to overall product quality, and some more important than others. Again, by focusing on the details, you have more accurate information for your decision making process.

Apply/Do Objectivity

Unfortunately, SWOT’s simplicity can also result in a biased analysis. However, even in the areas of high subjectivity, you can apply objective analysis by bringing in varying opinions. If you haven’t already done so, visit the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods, and check out potential tools that you can use for aiding on your objective data analysis, such as performance charting or radar charts. But, remember, quantitative is not automatically synonymous with being objective. As human beings we tend to be optimistic, even when we think otherwise.

Align With Organizational Strategy

The SWOT process does not have favorites; it just states the findings and observations. However, you can link the analysis results with your strategy, previous market and competitive analysis reports. This creates a personalized SWOT analysis that would better aid in your decision making process. After all, not every opportunity and threat is equal, and your strategy will highlight the necessary tradeoffs: what are we not doing. During your objective analysis, you can weight and rank each of the areas. This can be as simple as using a scale of 1-5, or percentage based evaluation.

Your strategy also will highlight the evaluation of important intangible resources: capabilities, competencies and reputation. Although these may not come up during your SWOT analysis, these intangible resources play into a firm’s competitive differentiation. Through this analysis, you can identify opportunities (ex. new application of existing technologies) as well as threats (ex. revamping of the workforce with new technologies).

Recognize The Moving Target

SWOT analysis captures the landscape at a given point in time. Today, everything moves at the speed of light. However, with some additional work, investigation and competitive intelligence gathering, you can distinguish between where your organization is today and where it can be in the future. This is where the gap analysis can help to identify potential strategic and tactical actions your firm can take.

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