All Posts Tagged With: "strategic challenges"
CEOs 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 | ContinuedBeing Good at the Right Things
The questions in the Organizational Profile of the Baldrige Criteria ask you to describe your organization’s characteristics and competitive environment. This includes the key requirements of three groups: employees, customers, and your supply chain. It also asks about key strategic challenges and advantages that relate to creating a sustainable organization.
The strategic planning category picks up this thread by asking how you determine your core competencies and strategic challenges and advantages. It also asks how your strategy development process identifies potential blind spots and your ability to execute the plan.
Some organizations use simple priority quadrant diagrams to help identify blind spots and assess capabilities. Here’s an example that matches organizational capabilities to customer requirements.
The diagram may be simple but the data, information, and analysis behind it is not. First, you need a profound knowledge of who your customers are and what they require. You can read articles about this here and here. If you assume you know what these requirements are, the decisions you base on your assumptions can lead you in the wrong direction.
Second, you need a profound knowledge of what your organization’s capabilities are. Again, if you assume you know what they are without doing a reality check, your assumptions can lead you astray.
Once you know what your customers require and how well your organization can meet those requirements, you can complete the priority quadrants. You can also use this process with employee and supply chain requirements. You can use it with any key work process since each process has…
18Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhat Are Your Critical Success Factors?
The Baldrige Criteria ask: “What are the principal factors that determine your success relative to your competitors?”
With a little thought, most leadership teams can answer the question fairly easily. As with all things Baldrige, however, a quick response misses the underlying process question: How do you determine what those critical success factors (CSFs) are? Just because leaders brainstorm CSF candidates and agree on the final list doesn’t mean it’s the right list, any more than assuming you know what your customers expect is actually what they expect. You need a process for identifying your organization’s critical success factors because so much of what you do—strategic planning, performance measurement, process management—is aligned with those factors.
In “Finding your organization’s critical success factors—the missing link in performance management” (pdf), David Parmenter describes such a process whose goal is to define five to eight relatively specific CSFs. Some organizations, including some Baldrige Award recipients, use broad terms to describe their CSFs. For example, North Mississippi Medical Center (NMMC), which won the Award in 2006, has five CSFs: People, Service, Quality, Financial, and Growth. Parmenter argues that a CSF should clarify what is expected of all employees, and he gives a few examples:
- Delivering in full, on time, all the time, to our key customers
- Finding better ways to do the things we do everyday
- Maintaining a safe, happy, and healthy workplace
- Implementing innovative ideas from staff quickly
- Increasing repeat business from key customers
- Attracting quality staff to the organization
NMMC makes its CSFs more specific by defining the strategic challenges for each:
People: Maintain and…
13Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued10 Critical Questions: Strategic Planning
In previous articles we listed 10 critical questions you can ask about your organization’s leadership and its key strengths and opportunities for improvement. As we noted, the best way to evaluate your management system is through a Baldrige assessment using the Baldrige Criteria. You can find out how to do that here.
The Criteria consist of powerful questions, rarely asked, about how an organization functions. If you cannot do a full assessment but want insight into how to improve strategic planning, here are 10 questions to ask and answer about your strategic planning process:
- How do you conduct strategic planning including the key strategic planning process steps and participants in the process?
- How do you identify potential blind spots during this process?
- How do you ensure that strategic planning addresses: (a) your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT); (b) potential major shifts in technology, markets, products, customer preferences, competition, or the regulatory environment; (c) long-term organizational sustainability; and (d) your ability to execute the strategic plan?
- What are your current strategic objectives, the goals for each, and the timetable for achieving them?
- How do these objectives address your strategic challenges and advantages, opportunities for innovation, core competencies, and the needs of all stakeholders?
- How do you develop and deploy action plans to achieve your strategic objectives?
- How do you ensure that financial, human, and other resources are available to support the accomplishment of your action plans?
- How do you establish and deploy modified action plans as circumstances change?
- What are your key human resource plans to accomplish your strategic…
