All Posts Tagged With: "strategic challenges"
Sustainability Forces Wheel
In strategic planning, the quality of the plan depends on the quality of the information collected and analyzed to guide the plan. The Baldrige Criteria ask how you collect and analyze information about your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats; early indications of major shifts in technology, markets, products, customer preferences, competition, or the regulatory environment; long-term organizational sustainability; and your ability to execute your strategic plan.
The goal is to build a sustainable organization that can survive change in whatever form it takes. Andrew Winston has created a tool to help navigate the forces that may affect your organization’s survival. He calls it the Sustainability Forces Wheel.
In “A New Tool for Understanding Sustainability Drivers” (HBR, July 13, 2010), Winston describes the three rings that make up his wheel and his idea to “spin” the wheel to line up different forces on each ring, which could then spur discussion among leaders about what that combination might mean for their organization. For example, he looks at the issues that currently line up at 9:00: “Consumers increasingly want to know what’s in products and where they come from; technology is enabling more data on a product’s origins; and there’s no denying the rising concerns about chemicals and toxics in our bodies and our children’s bodies. If your company operates in the consumer products world, how are you handling this trifecta of concerns?”
From a Baldrige standpoint, your strategic planning process should include a systematic approach to identifying the factors that are likely to impact your short-term…
13Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedRevolutionary Thinking
The ability to disrupt your industry is something you want to possess but fear someone else may already have. The Baldrige Criteria address disruptive change indirectly in several places by asking about any changes taking place that affect your competitive situation, what your key strategic challenges and advantages are, how you identify potential blind spots, and how your planning process detects early indications of major shifts in technology, markets, products, etc.
Having systematic processes in place to answer these questions may help you spot a disruptive change in time to counteract it but none of the questions really explores your processes for developing your own disruptive change. A recent post by Umair Haque on HBR provides an interesting perspective on this subject, using Apple as an example, by explaining “How to Challenge Your Industry Dogma”:
- Challenge products. Offer an alternative that gets people to rethink what such a product can be used for, as Apple has done with the iPad.
- Challenge strategy: Find an area that your competitors are ignoring and become the best at it, as Apple has done with the design of electronic gadgets.
- Challenge distribution. Look for innovative new ways to distribute your products or services, as Apple did with iTunes.
- Challenge business models. Companies protected how their products are used until Apple introduced a new business model: The App Store gives software developers a huge market for their new products, making Apple’s products more valuable as a result.
- Challenge sales and service. At the Apple Store, “the act of exchange became personal,…
Planning for 2035
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), which is the statistical agency of the U.S. Department of Energy, reported today that world energy consumption is expected to increase by nearly 50% by 2035. Asia in general and China and India in particular will account for most of the increase. Together, they accounted for 20% of total world energy consumption in 2007. Their combined energy use more than doubles by 2035 while world energy consumption by the U.S. would decline from 21% in 2007 to 16% in 2035, although actual consumption would increase.
Where is that energy going to come from? Who will control the sources? How much will it cost? How will it affect your organization? How will it affect consumer needs, governments, healthcare, and education? Since the increase will be steady for the next 25 years, the impact will be felt along the way and not just in 2035. Your strategic planning process should consider that impact.
Of course, any increase in energy usage means an increase in carbon dioxide emissions, which is a key cause of global warming. The EIA predicts such emissions will jump by 43%.
How will global warming affect your organization? How will it affect your customers, employees, and suppliers? Your strategic planning process should consider this, too.
The EIA’s report is based on the assumption that current policies are unchanged. That seems to be a safe bet, at least until we’re faced with an end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario. Based on its recent history, the U.S. government will drag its heels until…
26May2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedCEOs Look Ahead
A new study by IBM features one-on-one interviews with 1,500 corporate and public sector leaders in 60 countries and 33 industries. Asked what they think the top business strategy will be for the next five years, 88% believe that getting closer to the customer is most important, 81% said people skills, and 76% listed insight and intelligence. (“The Most Important Leadership Quality for CEOs? Creativity,” Austin Carr, FastCompany, May 18, 2010)
The CEOs identified the most important leadership qualities over the next five years as creativity (60%), integrity (52%), and global thinking (35%). American CEOs ranked integrity higher than CEOs in other parts of the world by 65% compared to 29-48%. Nearly double the number of CEOs in China listed global thinking as a top leadership quality compared to European and North American CEOs.
Here at Baldrige.com we have talked quite a bit about the need to get closer to your customers and approaches for doing so. In “Stakeholder Mapping” we looked at a new approach to identifying stakeholders and their requirements and organizing the information for planning and action. In “Be Careful How You Measure Customer Satisfaction,” we exposed some of the weaknesses of traditional measures and offered new alternatives. In “Walk in Your Customer’s Body Armor” we focused on how USAA excels at understanding and meetings its customers’ requirements. And in “9 Ways to Get Closer to Customers,” we listed nine proven approaches for listening to the Voice of the Customer.
People skills can be taught through leadership development programs, which is another area of focus…
20May2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhere to Play and How to Win
What makes a good strategy? According to Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and author of The Design of Business, it is two fundamental, reinforcing choices: where and on what basis you will compete.
In “Why Most CEOs Are Bad at Strategy” (Harvard Business Review, January 6, 2010), Martin argues that most executives and strategy consultants are good at strategic analysis but not at strategy, which requires creative insight. “Strategy is a creative act,” he writes, “and the way to produce good strategy is to go beyond basic analysis to creatively integrate your choices concerning where you play and how you propose to win.”
The Baldrige Criteria ask a number of questions to guide your strategic choices including:
- How do you identify potential blind spots in your planning?
- How do you address long-term sustainability?
- How do you determine your strategic challenges and advantages and your core competencies?
- How do your strategic objectives address them?
- How do your strategic objectives address your opportunities for innovation?
The focus of the Criteria leans more toward analysis than creative insight. That’s not to say that Baldrige Award recipients haven’t excelled at figuring out where to play and how to win, but integrating these choices creatively to plan the most promising course of action is not something the Criteria specifically request. The Customer Focus category comes close with questions about how you identify current and future customer groups and markets, how you determine which customer groups and markets to pursue, how you identify and anticipate key…
21Jan2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedAnother Sign That Green Is Mainstream
The 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) just ended. Huffington Post did one of its quick polls of the coolest new gadgets at the show. See a photo, read a one-sentence description, and rank it 1 (fine) to 10 (fantastic!). Number One may surprise you.
It wasn’t Samsung’s laptop with a semitransparent screen, which got a 5.3 rating.
Two slate tablets by Que and HP didn’t even rate as high as the Samsung laptop.
My favorite, a mini-helicopter with a video camera that you control with your iPhone, only came in at 5.3.
Two new TV products scored a little higher at 6.1: 3-D TV and mobile DTV that you can play on your smart phone. Very cool, but well below the #1-rated gizmo, which is: Horizon’s HydroFill, which converts water into hydrogen and stores it in a fuel cell that can power your gadgets. It rated 9 out of 10.
As if to prove such a ranking wasn’t a fluke, #3 went to portable solar panels that fit on a backpack or lunchbox. (8 out of 10)
You have to see the photos, which you can view and rate here, to understand how much cooler almost every other gadget is than these two. The solar panel on the backpack looks absolutely nerdy, which leads to this conclusion: They’re getting the votes because they’re green.
Polls like this confirm that the desire to “go green” has reached a tipping point. Organizations used to be able to tout the paper they saved or the containers they recycled as…
11Jan2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedToyota’s Strategic Challenge
The automotive industry is a great example of what happens when a few competitors gain a strategic advantage by setting a high standard in a critical area. Toyota and Honda have been the quality leaders for more than two decades, attracting car buyers who had been Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler customers but who wanted better reliability in their vehicles. Toyota rode its quality wave to worldwide leadership in car sales, only to slip at the same time competitors’ quality matched and even surpassed it.
The Economist recently described the problems Toyota faces and how it is addressing them (“Losing Its Shine,” December 10, 2009). While the company seems to have fixed its quality issues—Toyota had 18 of the 48 leading vehicles in the recent Consumer Reports reliability study—quality is no longer a big differentiator in the automobile industry. Instead, Toyota’s “vehicles will inevitably be judged increasingly on more emotional criteria, such as styling, ride, handling, and cabin design.”
Akio Toyoda, grandson of the company’s founder and its president since June, recognizes the need for innovative design. He recently said, “I want to see Toyota build cars that are fun and exciting to drive.”
That may be a challenge. Toyota’s value proposition has been built upon quality and reliability. Its culture, defined by the Toyota Production System, completely supports that value proposition. Steering in a new direction using a system developed for a different purpose will prove difficult.
That’s the strategic challenge Toyota faces. It has set the standard for quality and reliability in its industry and…
17Dec2009 | Steve George | 1 comment | Continued
