Accountability is frequently cited as a strategic initiative success factor. As Kaplan and Norton (authors of the Balanced Score Card and Execution Premium) say, “without clear responsibility and accountability, execution programs will go nowhere.”

In the abstract, “assigning accountability” or to “holding people accountable” seems commonsense. I often ask people in my seminars, “Is accountability is a good thing or a bad thing?” Usually people say that it is a good thing (although the enthusiasm for that conclusion is weak).  In practice, accountability commonly equates to blame assignment and punishment.

In my experience, accountability is a reflection of the organization’s culture.  It seems to be a positive attribute when the culture values transparency about roles, responsibilities, and promises. It also seems to be more valued and productive when the organization has a strong performance appraisal system for individuals.

How to Instill Accountability in Your Strategic Initiative

Strategic initiatives reflect and are constrained by the culture, but a leader and create a “micro-culture” for the team. With that idea in mind, I offer this definition,

Accountability is the willingness to have your performance measured.

The discipline of accounting is perhaps the most well-developed and highly institutionalized function in any large organization.  Its standards and principles provide simplicity and reassurance that the organization can define and measure performance. It is from this idea of accounting that we derive the word accountability. Since accounting is the practice of measurement, this definition of accountability is consistent and sensible. It is neutral with respect to punishment.

Consider these practical implications:

• Performance outcomes must be known.  I have previously writing about performance gaps, vision, and metrics.  The trick is to take the initiative’s outcomes and to create metrics for the individual.
• Consequences should be discussed.  Most companies view strategic initiatives as an element on the career path. It is better to make the consequences (both good and bad) clear to individuals.
• Transparency is valued in the initiative.  We want team members to surface risks and issues.
• Sponsor and program roles become clearer.
• Integrity becomes thought of as the alignment of thought, words, and actions.
• Trust is improved.

Another Suggestion

I recommend that organizations drop the phrase “hold people accountable” from their discussions. Think about it this way: How would you react if someone with coercive power said to you, “I’m going to hold you hostage.”  You would feel threatened and defensive. There are better ways to motivate people.

Clarifying Responsibility versus Accountability

Responsibility is the “ability to make a response” and is a choice that individuals make. A person can choose to respond, or not.  Accountability now becomes a more neutral concept: a person choses to be part of a strategic initiative and that person further chooses to have his/her performance measured.

Accountability is an attribute of organizational culture related to integrity and transparency. Do you agree?

If you like my ideas in this blog, you should check out (and subscribe to) my Strategic Thinking blog.  The latest article there is:

• How to Improve Your Ability to Imagine the Future (strategicthinkingcoach.wordpress.com)

A Strategic Alliance is a relationship between two or more parties where they collaborate to capture an opportunity or extend their reach into complementary areas.  The entities maintain their independence, so the term strategic alliance does not refer to mergers and acquisitions. For example, as part of its Renew Blue strategic initiative, the retailer Best Buy has partnered with Samsung to open the Samsung Experience making it possible for shoppers to get specialized attention on Samsung products.

The life cycle of a strategic alliance involves several phases: plan the alliance, negotiate the terms, invest in the alliance, operate the alliance to realize benefits, and restructuring the alliance (includes termination).  Especially for the early parts of the lifecyle we see a role for strategic initiatives and program management:

• The setup of a strategic alliance meets the tests of the definition of a strategic alliance: they span boundaries (markets, organizational structures, product lines, technologies), provide benefits to strategic stakeholders (are a pooling of risk and rewards), and transform the organization.
• Program management is a tool for aligning efforts with strategies.  The 5 BARED domains are typically present: benefits realization, strategic alignment, road mapping, stakeholder engagement, and decision governance.

I have participated in many strategic alliances, both as a leader and as a consultant. Here are three tips that will increase the probability of meeting your goals.

Tip #1 – Meet in Person, Frequently

Strategic alliances are tricky because the underlying organizational cultures can be quite different, and you need to be sensitive to those differences. It should surprise no one that culture can undo the best of strategic intentions. Unlike corporate acquisitions, there is not going to be a winning culture. In my experience, there is no substitute for traveling to the alliance partner’s facilities and meeting with your counterparts.  I recall well the differences that I experience when representing my employer, a NYSE-traded fast growing company that was partnering with a much larger, older, private company.  Our aggressiveness was not a good fit with their conservatism, but we developed personal relationships that helped us recognize the mitigate friction.

It’s commonsense leadership: be respectful of others but open to discussing differences and be prepared to adapt to maintain harmony that supports the strategic aims.

Tip #2 – Find and Articulate Strategic Insights

Often strategic alliances come about by top-level executives who meet and say…. “It would be a good idea to get together.” The next thing you know, you’ve been tapped on the shoulder to lead this strategic initiative.

Where’s the strategic insight?  Often there isn’t one readily evident.  Further, few executives would want to have their judgment challenged by implying that strategic insights are missing.

While this is a cause for concern, it is not a deal breaker. My best advice is to activate your strategic thinking capabilities and encourage the same on your counterparts. I have written extensively about how to find insights and opportunities in the linked articles. Too, I have gotten good results from identifying customers and probing for value propositions. A great question is what is interesting about this?

Tip #3 – Explicitly discuss risks, risk tolerances and risk response strategies

If you’ve stayed with me to this point, you can see that strategic alliances involve a lot of complexity and potential for things to go wrong.  One of the best things that you can do is to schedule a meeting where the parties can freely identify, analyze, and plan responses to risk.  I call it a risk clinic, and it is best done with the help of a facilitator. You might want to consider the techniques of the “What about” list and prospective hindsight (see the links for the how-to details).  You want to find out the risk tolerances of the parties: what kinds of threats are most bothersome and how much of that risk can they tolerate. For example, some organizations will never sacrifice quality to meet a launch date, while other organizations routinely de-scope in order to hit the date.

Interestingly, the discussion of risk tends to build trust in the relationship. It gets the concerns out into the open, and stimulates some creating conversation. The discussion of the four response strategies for threats also creates a sense of confidence, empowerment, and determination in the alliance team members (the four threat response strategies are avoidance, mitigation, transfer, and acceptance/contingency).

Also, the discussion of risk makes it naturally easy to build an opportunity recognition framework into the discussion.

Strategic alliances offer many opportunities for growth. They are strategic initiatives with unique complexity and issues. In addition to the three tips, what other advice do you have?

Related articles

• Launching a Strategic Initiative? Here are Three Good Practices (leadingstrategicinitiatives.com)

Many project managers ask this question early in any discussion, “What is the dead line?” It is sensible habit, as time helps us to establish priorities and logically schedule activities.

However, I would NOT ask that question for a strategic initiative. As I’ll explain, dead lines are an idiomatic phrase and often simply hollow rhetoric. More importantly, I’ll describe a superior approach.

Dead Line is an Idiomatic Phrase

On a recent strategic initiative, a person translated the phrase dead line as “Death Line” and took it as a literal idea (not understanding that it is an idiomatic figure of speech.) He was puzzled why a software project involved death! Because strategic initiatives often cross national and cultural boundaries, we have to be especially careful about use of the English language.

This brings up an interesting bit of trivia for you history buffs. The word deadline entered the American lexicon in 1864 during its Civil War. If a prisoner crossed the deadline they were shot dead, no questions asked. Now THAT’s a dead line.

Take a look at the graphic on this page and notice the stakes in this drawing: that is the deadline.  The graphic is from the book, The Capture, The Prison Pen, and the Escape, by Captain William Worcester Glazier, published in 1870.  Thanks to John Bodner of Monroe, Michigan USA for sharing this with me.

The Dead Line is a Hollow Rhetorical Phrase

Many times people are told there are severe consequences of not meeting dates, or at least this is implied.  However, most people recognize the truth of this story:

A project team worked heroically – late nights and weekends – to meet a date for its deliverable. The submitted the deliverable, and nothing was done with it; it literally sat on the executive’s desk.  I had the opportunity to ask the executive about the imposed due date. This was his answer, “Oh, that date is my wife’s birthday.  I needed a date that I could remember.”  He was unaware of the efforts of the team to meet his arbitrary date.

So note this important learning,

most projects have due dates and not deadlines.

A Better Way to Discover Timing Expectations

Here is how an IT consulting company gained a rethinking about time. The company had a typical practice: its direct sales force would ask, “What the due date?” The customer would give an answer and the sales person would that date back to the project staff. Not surprisingly, the sales person explained that the client immediate results. However, the resources were not available and often the discussions became adversarial.

The strategic initiative involved building a better relationship with clients. Part of the effort included a training to think about dates and urgency differently, focused on approaching the client with a more collaborative perspective, asking these three questions:

• What are your preferences for timing?  This is a good question that sets stakeholder expectations. The word preference suggests some degree of tradeoff. This helps to avoid giving the customer a false promise.
• What is your sense of urgency?  This question is to determine how mission critical the project is to them to help us plan accordingly, if necessary, versus making any assumptions ourselves.
• If there is a due date, how did you arrive at the due date?  This question helps to establish the strategic context from the client perspective.

These questions – along with probing for benefits – allowed the IT Company to gain a better working relationship with its clients.

Remember: Time is But One of Many Tradeoffs

I’m all for having a sense of urgency, as people do pay attention to the calendar and increase work efforts as near commitment dates. However, we need to remember that there are a number of variables that influence the delivery date. These variables include the following: amount and quality of resources applied, risk, decision quality, amount of functionality in the solution, performance of the solution. It is better to think of a project (or a program) as a design, where the optimal design involves tradeoffs.

The better approach is to start with the strategic objectives, identify your contributors, build buy in and understanding, and then gradually introduce the always-important subject of timing. For a deeper understanding of how to structure the roadmap, see this article on the Four Driving Questions for Strategic Initiatives.

Do you agree that it is better to gently probe about timing expectations? What are the advantages and disadvantages?

[Readers: I now have a new blog dedicated to strategic and strong-minded thinking competency. See: www.StrategicThinkingCoach.wordpress.com]

Strategy involves ambiguity, which has to do with multiple interpretations of concepts and roles.  Different languages and cultures contribute to the ambiguity, and leaders need to engage with their stakeholders to resolve the ambiguity.

This article describes three practical ideas that I observed during the launch of a strategic initiative that involved facilities and teams in Europe, North America, and Asia. The strategic initiative had the purpose of developing a major product platform that included a core technology that would be tailored for local markets.

Practice #1 – Travel the World & Get In Front of Stakeholders

The company established a core team led by a program manager. The program team traveled to each of the major production sites and research site.  One of the core team members started in Paris and traveled eastward to facilities in Japan and Asia, then continued east to North America, and finished her round-the-globe trip by one final leg from the USA back to Paris.

Strategic initiative cross many boundaries and it is important for the leader to see the “ground game” at the local facilities, and to be seen by the local operations so that they have some evidence that this endeavor is truly important to the firm’s strategy.

Practice #2 – Identify Key Contributors & Help Them Step Up

The next two ideas explain what happened when the team reached the production facility in Mexico. I was there, and was lucky to observe the activities involved in the kickoff meeting.

Amy was the strategic initiative’s program manager.  She was joined by several project managers and a representative of the company’s strategic marketing staff. First, Amy and the core team toured the production facility and met some of the key managers and engineers. Next, they assembled in a hotel ballroom, the core team (representatives from the US and France) stood in front of the audience of Mexicans.

Amy’s could not be sure over which of the 40 locals would have involvement. She asked the audience “Who will be involved?” She got no reaction.  So she turned to, Miguel and said this, “Miguel, based on our tour and earlier discussions today, I am pretty sure you are going to be involved with supporting this program.  Could you explain to everyone what tasks you think you will be performing, and what are the major issues you foresee?”

Miguel spoke for a few minutes and answered her questions. Amy then thanked him and made this request: “Miguel, can you indicate another person in this room who you feel will have an important role in achieving this vision?”  Miguel, pointed to Rodrigo, and the process continued.

I thought this worked out quite well in clarifying the emerging roles that each individual would play, and in dealing with the challenges of working in a second language.

Practice #3 – Initial Milestones Are Guidelines; Not Millstones Around Your Neck

The second thing that Amy did quite well had to do with the overall schedule.  She projected a Gantt Chart showing about 5 milestones, and turned to the audience saying:

“This is schedule is the senior management team wishes for a launch date.  Now, it is my job to manage their expectations. What I need from you is your realistic schedule. I don’t want you to try to force a schedule to meet these dates. If your schedule pushes the dates out, we’ll talk and I’ll go back to senior management and reset expectations. Please make sure that you account for risks, and put forth a schedule that you can believe in.”

How can you apply these ideas?

Related articles

• Strategy Execution Priority #1: Effectively Communicate Strategic Decision(s) (leadingstrategicinitiatives.com)

Often professional specializations present their discipline with cumbersome conceptual models and jargon.  Their sophistication often gets in the way of communication, and even is counterproductive when the non-specialist comes to view the knowledge as unapproachable or impractical.

Because all strategic initiatives are programs, it is useful for the leader to possess professional-level knowledge of program management. Program management knowledge has been codified by the Project Management Institute in its recently released Program Management Standard – Third Edition.  The book notes five performance domains, which are Strategic Alignment, Stakeholder Engagement, Benefits Management, Governance, and Life Cycle.  Now, do you really want to memorize those five domains?

Leaders find ways to communicate in ways that are easier for non-specialists to absorb, yet maintain the essential characteristics.  My purpose in this article is to give you a memorable way keep five program management performance factors in mind. Here they are:

B – Benefits

A benefit can be either economic or emotive in nature, and should be mapped to stakeholders and the delivery of specific elements of the solution.  They key thing to remember is that benefits are things that are important and motivate stakeholders to support the strategic initiative.

A – Alignment

Here, I simplified strategic alignment to its essence: alignment. Here, the leader take various inputs such as values, mission, vision, strategy and so forth and translates it into the projects and communications that will create and deliver a solution.

As I have discussed in other articles, metrics are the best tool for assuring alignment.

R – Road mapping

I took some liberties with PMI’s use of Program Life Cycle concept.  The life cycle concept is essentially one of laying out a high-level view of the sequencing of decision flows, work flows, and information flows.  In simple term, develop and present a road map so that stakeholder can understand your direction.

E – Engagement

This is a simplification of PMI’s domain of Stakeholder Engagement. In practical terms, the strategic initiative leader needs to understand and attend to stakeholders’ wants, needs, and expectations.  Stakeholders are the ultimate judges of whether a strategic initiative has succeeded.

D – Decisions

PMI calls this domain governance, but most of us find that to be a ponderous term that implies bureaucracy.  In my experience, the key operational factor is decision making; and I have written several articles on how to make fast and effective decisions in this blog.

An Example of Application of the Five B.A.R.E.D. Domains

In 2005, Wal-Mart launched a strategic initiative to transform itself into a worldwide leader in environmentally sustainable operations, and it chose China as a focal point. CEO Lee Scott believed that the program was vital to Wal-Mart’s future success (domain = strategic alignment). The program would touch thousands of suppliers and employees who would need to understand the new business model (domain = stakeholder engagement). An earlier effort to manage five “strategic value networks” had yielded hundreds of ideas for projects, and now they needed to be culled (domain = governance/decisions) into a logical and phased approach (domain = roadmapping/life cycle) that would deliver the benefits that would cause stakeholder buy in (domain = benefits management).

How else can you assure that the strategic initiative applies contemporary knowledge of program management principles?

Related articles

• The Business Value Proposition (leadingstrategicinitiatives.com)

Effectively communicate the decision(s) made as part of the strategy

Let’s face it: strategies are abstract. Statements of vision and strategic intent are descriptions of future states of the organization. The future is ambiguous. This makes it tough for the front line employees, customers, and other stakeholders to mentally grasp. It is hard to predict their response, but it cynicism and indifference are common reactions.

Here are three examples of where I have seen strategic decisions communicated in thoughtful ways.

• West Ohio Gas, a distributor of natural gas, decided to make its work force more agile by moving to self-managed teams. The leadership team carefully thought through the decision, hired consultants to teach new skills, and stood in front of small groups of employees to answer each question and concern.  By the time they were done with this process, each employee had the information necessary to decide to support the new strategy, or look elsewhere (several chose to retire.)
• Domino’s Pizza senior management team needed to convince its franchisees that a new strategy was their support. The strategy involved the Pizza Turnaround, and is described in detail here. The new pizza would take slightly longer to make, use more important ingredients, and had a spicier taste.  Franchisees were skeptical, but Domino’s executives had a strong statistical case about customer preferences, and also provided a blind taste test in the back of the room.  Facts, especially when supported by other experiences, can help stakeholders get on board with the strategy.
• A CEO of an agri-business counseled his strategic initiative team to develop a message that the team’s actions were part of a back-office process improvement effort. He knew, though, that when the strategy started to “go live” it would set in place a chain of events that would cause some fundamental changes to the business model. He also knew that several powerful executives would fight the initiative if they understood the changes that would come (this large company was controlled by an extended family with cousins battling each other over ego needs). The messages needed to be consistent with existing values.

What’s the “program road map” for the strategic initiative?

Truly strategic decisions cause a cascade of other decisions. For example, if a company decides to enter a new market, it should cause a rethinking of the business value proposition.

My advice is commonsense: think through the consequences of the decision and how that decision impacts the stakeholders. Identify your stakeholders and understand how they will be affected. Communicate to them using benefits statements, and stories.

Be Cautious with Press Releases and Glossy Brochures

Hype can be good and effective. However, there is often a tendency for executives to overdo the PR with with slick messages. There’s a name for this: “cheap talk strategies.”  They often create cynicism, so my advice is to test your messages out on small sample audiences and, again, think it through.

How have you seen strategic decisions communicated? What worked and what didn’t?

Related articles

• A Simple Idea that Every Good Strategist Knows (leadingstrategicinitiatives.com)

Only the coming months will tell if Renew Blue is successful.

As I always, my purpose is to describe useful insights and tools that will benefit strategic initiative leaders.

The Renew Blue Initiative

The color blue is central to BBY’s brand image. It is a common color in the stores and is the color of associate’s sport shirts; hence, the appellation, “Renew Blue.”

BBY announced Renew Blue to the public in an investor’s 55-slide presentation on November of 2012. The reader should note that presentations have the purpose of providing “forward looking” information to investors. It also has a rhetorical purpose of reassuring and building confidence in this group of stakeholders. The Renew Blue presentation is not a management plan.

Turnaround efforts have been underway for some time, so Renew Blue may not be so much of an initiative (the start of something new) as a branding device intended to organize past and ongoing actions into a more coherent and recognizable set of policies.

The Renew Blue Vision

According to the Renew Blue presentation, BBY’s vision is this: “To be the preferred authority and destination for technology products and services.” See the graphic for the strategic pillars for that vision in the context of the business model (this is my interpretation).

Is Renew Blue an Executable Strategy or a Public Relations Spin?

I continually see corporate announcements that purport to be strategic or a strategy, but often these are simply “cheap talk” announcements.  Using Richard Rumelt’s criteria, I find that Renew Blue is a strategy. Here’s my reasoning:

• There is a competitive diagnosis of the situation.  BBY provides data on its performance versus competitors (warts and all) and arrives at a problem statement, “we have two main problems to solve,” which it states as “declining comps” and “declining operating margin.”
• Renew Blue has guiding policies to address the challenges it has identified.  Two of them are the intentions to reinvigorate the in-store shopping experience and to reinvigorate the on-line shopping experience.  The company also is addressing its cost structure, moving away from the traditional big box business model (especially for its low-performing stores) and toward a market and store footprint that is more in line with market needs.
• Resources are being applied and action is being taken. The evidence to support the in-store reinvigoration is visible in the redesign of the retail outlet. The on-line reinvigoration has evidence by the mention of “Renew Blue” in three Director-level job postings on its web site.

Is Blue Renew a Good Strategy?

Given that Renew Blue is an executable strategy, the logical follow-on question is, “Is Renew Blue a good strategy or one that is correct for the situation?”  Here the answer is debatable, and the debate starts with whether BBY has accurately defined the challenges it faces.  Could the stated challenge of “declining comps” and “declining operating margins” be symptomatic of something deeper? Many industry observers are pessimistic about BBY’s prospects.  Consider Standard and Poors’ opinion on BBY in a January 14 analysis,

“We think the consumer electronics retail landscape has too much physical space devoted to a category that is increasingly moving online. We believe BBY will need to make significant changes to its cost structure in order to compete profitably with Internet retailers.”

In a prior article on the Business Value Proposition, I presented a simple evaluation of Renew Blue and its efforts to alter the cost structure. BBY is making progress, but is it quick enough? Megan McArdle’s article in Newsweek provides this rather disturbing-but-vivid image:

“Best Buy’s challenge is like that of a trapped animal:
it needs to gnaw off its limbs quickly before all hope is lost.”

A valid question is this, “Is there a chance that BBY has mis-framed the competitive situation?” The answer is “possibly.”  First, Renew Blue’s lists as its premise #1 in its “investment thesis” that it was market leader in a fragmented and growing market. The growing part of the market is the online space, where Amazon dominates. BBY is the market leader in the shrinking space of big-box electronic retailing. Further, BBY is trapped by fixed costs (real estate leases for its big-box stores), which is the trap that McArdle was referring to in the prior quotation.

Second, BBY benchmarks itself against Lowes, Sears, and Starbucks for customer satisfaction and loyalty; but Lowes and Starbucks are not seeing their basic business model being destroyed by Amazon. (Again, note the caveat that the Renew Blue document has an audience of investors and is not a management plan.)

One final point: The Renew Blue document includes a page titled “Develop a wining online strategy.” Frankly, it is just fluff. Clearly BBY has to execute better than Amazon, but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that they have a strength to apply over Amazon that they can leverage.  BBY’s on-line weakness is its price; I compared four items and Amazon had lower prices than BBY on three items and the same price on the fourth. If BBY has a winning online strategy, they are keeping it to themselves.

Is Renew Blue a Defensive Action to Gain Time for a Developing New Strategy?

It may well be that Renew Blue is a holding action to stabilize the situation until a new strategy and business model can emerge. After all, the company is has been dealing with turnover in the senior management ranks, and competitive responses are still emerging.

It will be interesting to follow this story. The 2012 holiday season was unremarkable for BBY. Time continues to slipping away, and stakeholders seem to be impatient. BBY needs to get Renew Blue right. If Renew Blue can’t defend against the many strategic headwinds, we may see this mighty and proud organization go private or bankrupt.

As the situation develops, I will update readers on the status of Renew Blue.

Personally, I hope Best Buy is successful with its turnaround. And consistent with the mission of this blog, I will report and analyze the presence or absence of leadership practices within the initiative itself.

Lessons for Strategic Initiative Leaders

Here are some lessons and insights that you might find from this tentative analysis of Renew Blue:

• Strategy is more than a set of goals; it is a problem solving process designed to produce meaningful advantage on a key competitive dimension
• Understand the business value proposition
• Avoid fluff in strategy presentations
• The vision for a strategic initiative rests upon strategic pillars
• Develop a brand for the strategic initiative
• Communications about strategies have different audiences; for example, an investor presentation is different than a management plan
• In critical situations, sometimes the best you can hope a “holding action” until you can formulate a better strategy

What are your opinions on BBY’s Renew Blue initiative?

The term “value proposition” is a bit abstract, and borders on jargon. That probably explains why many managers  shy away from developing them.  As one research study explains,

“Value propositions can be intimidating because they strive to combine small size — often 10 words or less — with a lot of substance. After all, those 10 words are supposed to convey the unique qualities of your company and/or products and services.”

This article identifies two approaches for describing the value proposition, using elements of the Renew Blue strategic initiative at Best Buy as an example.

Business Model Canvas Perspective

Osterwalder and Pigneur’s business model canvas is a useful tool for understanding business models. You can understand the value proposition as the answers to (and optimization of) these two questions:

• Where does the money come from? What are the revenue streams?  What customers are sought, and how much are they willing to pay?
• Where does the money go?  What is the cost structure?  What does it cost to serve that customer?

The nearby graphic shows how I interpret Best Buy’s value proposition in its short-term rejuvenation objectives based on the company’s presentation in November 2012.  The data and model are from their communications.

The VALiD Methodology

The VALiD methodology (Value in Design) originated with a group of people at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom as a tool for building architects to help project teams understand the issues that are important to their stakeholders. First, you need to understand the values of the stakeholders, then define value in terms of criteria and targets, and then assess the value proposition in terms of benefits, sacrifices, and resources.   See the nearby figure for a generic formula, which is described in the VALiD framework:

Best Buy is redesigning most of its big box stores as part of Renew Blue and this redesign and associated merchandising hopes to create a better shopping experience.  See the following figure to examine the VALiD framework for the new value proposition. VALiD helps stakeholders express the “get” and the “give” of their value as the benefits they seek from the project, the sacrifices they are willing to make to get those benefits, and the resources then consume in doing so.

The point of this article is to stress that the value proposition is the key results area of competitive performance and provide you with two differing-but-complementary approaches. I provide the examples from Best Buy’s Renew Blue initiative to help illustrate the helpfulness of the tools in generating strategic insight.

Best Buy certainly has a huge business turnaround challenge ahead of it. I will provide more analysis of their approach (from a strategic initiative leadership perspective) in future articles.

Do you agree that value propositions are important? How have you developed them and what do you include in your statements?

Major milestones – such as New Year’s – prompt people to reflect on their current situation, and to look ahead. With that spirit, I recently shared seven questions with several professional friends. It’s a good message, worth considering by a wider audience…..

….As we transition to a new calendar year, it’s time to ask,

“Am I applying strategic thinking to
my career, and to my organization?”

What’s Your Personal Brand? Brands are statements that imply performance and trust. The concept of personal branding consistently resonates with attendees of my workshop Leading Strategic Initiatives (Program Management). You need to proactively get your implied and real promises established in the minds of your audience.  If you don’t establish your brand, others will do it for you (and you might not like the result!) Test your branding out. My brand is: Greg Githens helps executives turn vision into results through strategic initiatives.  What’s your feedback on my branding?

Are you thinking strategically?  Strategic thinkers are tolerant of ambiguity. The very word strategy itself is ambiguous (has many subjective meanings). Do you keep – top of mind –  YOUR DEFINITION of SUCCESS?  Are you looking for small wins to move you toward that vision….. and away from failure?

Are you anticipating opportunity?  I think that 2013 will be a good year for the world economy and for economic growth. I think that there are going to be many new opportunities open up for leaders to take charge of strategic initiatives.

Have you taken the time to reflect on your lessons learned for the year? As I reflect back on 2012, I’m grateful for all of the opportunities given to me for improvement.  I’ve met a lot of really smart, wonderful people; and I’ve grown through the vigorous exchange of ideas.  I’ve coached executives and program managers on several strategic programs, and have gained more perspective on the tools that work.

Do you have stretch goals? My favorite definition of youth is when you think the best is still ahead of you. Old people believe that the best is behind them.

Do you carry a mentality of abundance or a mentality of scarcity? We are lucky to live in this time. While Earth and our societies has many challenges, we are blessed with intelligent and creative people who  are looking to collaborate.

Are you paying forward?  Have you looked into the community for those in need? One of the best things you can do for your career is to get involved in charitable and community leadership positions. It’s probably one of the best ways to learn more about influencing others and positive politics. If you know of a charitable organizations that needs help in formulating and executing strategy, put them in contact with me.

I wish the best of success, however you chose to define it!

Do you agree that strategic thinking is a key to personal and organizational success?

Find allies to support your strategic initiative

Organizations often use strategic initiatives as a tool for improving operations. The deployed solution typically includes new toolsets and processes that change the flow of work, decisions, and information.

The success rate for these process-improvement initiatives is about 1 in 3. In prior articles, I have described examples of success in product development, healthcare quality, and hospitality. Often the failures are done clumsily, as described in the first change effort in this article describing a tale of two initiatives at Intel.

I find it best to think of tool and process deployment as a social process of adopting an innovation. How do you get employees to adopt the a new toolset or culture? One approach is to invoke top management authority. However, this requires them to apply sustained effort of sponsoring and leading. Because they are busy and easily distracted by urgent business problems, this approach typically leads to floundering.

The bottoms-up  approach of small wins is a useful alternative. A small win, defined by Karl Weick, is a “series of concrete, complete outcomes of moderate importance that build a pattern that attracts allies and deters opponents.” (See Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems). This article will help you learn how to attract allies to create small wins, and how to characterize your “opponent” so you can effectively apply deterrence.

Example of Small Wins: Deploying a Risk Management Toolset

I saw a product development organization effectively use a small wins strategy recently.  The organization wanted its product developers to identify and analyze risk better, and it developed tools and training to make this happen. However, many of the engineers and managers were skeptical. They opined that the tools and process were bureaucratic and added little value. Regardless of their opinion, they were willing to attend an awareness-level presentation (one must always show the willingness to try new ideas, right?)

People who liked the tools and ideas had the opportunity to continue learning and practice them.  Those who didn’t have their opinion change were allowed to go their own way. The small win was each individual who returned to deepen their skill and try out the tools. Slowly, the tools and culture adopted the tools, incrementally reaped the benefits of the tools and got the economic outcomes required by its strategy.

The skeptics freely ignored the change, but gradually adopted most of the ideas simply because everyone else was using the language.

How the Strategic Initiative Leader Attracted Allies

The leader attracted allies to gently build a community of risk-management practitioners:

• He defined the benefits offered to the individuals as well as to the organization. He created simple messages that explained the benefits in both organizational and personal terms.
• He was authentic in his approach, and that helped him generate trust. Small wins often come from high-quality relationships between individuals. Authenticity and trust are “attractors” of high-quality relationships that create their own positive energy!
• He encouraged experimentation, so that the tools could be adapted to the organization’s culture.

How the Strategic Initiative Leader Deterred Opponents

His response to the skeptics was simple: don’t force them to do anything, answer questions, and be patient.  An interesting learning is this:

The opponent is not a person, it is a ill-defined ideology.

The word “opponent” is a bit of an overstatement for most internal change efforts.

I spoke with many of the managers who were the late adopters of the tools and process. In this case (and others like it), their resistance was ideological and ill-defined. Usually, people are ambivalent if the change affects others and only oppose those things that they think will affect them personally. These two statements summarize their mental model:

• “I don’t like the idea of bureaucracy.”
• “As an individual, I like the idea following my own muse and doing things idiosyncratically.”

This next example reinforces the argument that the opponent is an ill-defined ideology.

F.E.A.R. is False Evidence Appearing Real

Here is another example of how you need to work with opponents on internal-process strategic initiatives…

During an early-state planning meeting, one of the team members declared that fear was a major obstacle.  None of his colleagues challenged or asked for clarification, so I let the statement pass.  A few minutes later he repeated the statement, so I jumped in with a request, “You’ve said twice now that fear is a big issue.  Can you clarify or provide an example of how that affects this strategic initiative?”

He explained that the many of the top executive equated “process” with bureaucracy. Although he didn’t explicitly state that bureaucracy equated to “adds no value and creates burdens,” that was clearly the implication.

I interrupted him with the statement, “F.E.A.R. means  false expectations appearing real.”  That drew a big tension-releasing laugh and one of the other team members said, “That’s good. I’m going to write that down.”

In this example, “fear” really represents a conclusion that the good intentions of the strategic initiative team would result in non-value added activities and unwelcomed self discipline. Here are a few lessons:

• Fear is a strong word and probably overstates the legitimate anxiety found around any organizational change effort. Base your conclusions on good evidence, not gut feelings!
• The idea that bureaucracy is non-value added is a half truth.  Don’t let half-truths go unchallenged; over time they become accepted truth!

How have you attracted allies and deterred opponents? Do you agree that the opponent more often an ill-defined ideology, not a person?