Make Your Strategy a Part of Everyday Life

I’m a Dilbert fan.  In general, Scott Adams gets it.  I must admit I can get a little defensive when he writes strips that lampoon the organization effectiveness work I do.  However, he is usually right on – with his depiction of some of the absurdities of life in corporate America.

Yesterday’s strip really hit the nail on the head.  If you missed it, here are the words.

Boss: Is your plan consistent with our corporate strategy?

Dilbert: How would I know?

Boss: Don’t you know our strategy?

Dilbert: No.  Do you?

Boss: Of course I do.  It’s something about leveraging our platforms.  Does your plan leverage our platforms?

Dilbert: No.  But I can rewrite my plan so it seems as if it does.

Boss: Good.  Go back and do that.  There’s no point in having a strategy is you aren’t going to pretend to follow it.

This strip gets at one of my pet peeves when it comes to lack of common sense in corporate America.

As you’ll recall, in my book 4 Secrets of High Performing Organizations, I point out that all successful businesses have four things in common.

• Successful businesses develop and communicate a clarity of purpose and direction.
• Successful businesses engage their employees, enlisting their sincere commitment.
• Successful businesses skillfully execute the things that matter.
• Successful businesses build long term, mutually beneficial relationships with important outside constituencies.

Yesterday’s Dilbert strip hit on the first three – but it made some especially telling points about clarity of purpose and direction.  Clarity works like this:

1. Decide why you are in business (your mission).
2. Develop a vision of where you want to be in three to five years.
3. Develop a multi year strategy for achieving how you are going to accomplish your vision.
4. Develop an annual business plan that specifies what part of the strategy you will accomplish in the coming year.
5. Build departmental objectives based on the business plan.
6. Cascade the strategy, annual business plan and departmental objectives down through the organization – until every employee knows how his or her personal objectives fit with the department’s objectives, annual business plan and company strategy.

I admit that this is easier said than done.  However, the Dilbert strip bears more resemblance to reality in most companies than do the six points above.  Let’s see how.

• Dilbert didn’t know the strategy. 
• Dilbert’s boss had a fuzzy (at best) understanding of the strategy.
• The strategy itself was jargon laden (if “leveraging our platform” isn’t jargon at it’s finest, I don’t know what is).

Does this sound like your company?  I hope not.

Strategy should make a company’s clarity of purpose come alive for its people.  It should be the point for moving forward.  Strategy should be shared with everyone in an organization – so everyone can contribute to making it happen.

By the way, strategy also helps with commitment and execution.  If people know and understand their company’s strategy – and how they can contribute, they are more likely to commit to it.  Also, a clearly disseminated strategy helps execution – because it helps employees understand what is truly important.

The common sense point here – a well designed and communicated strategy can be a great asset for any company.  Unfortunately, Sunday’s Dilbert cartoon is an all too accurate a depiction of how strategy doesn’t work in too many companies.

That’s it for today.  Thanks for reading.  Log on to my website www.BudBilanich.com for more common sense.  Check out my other blog: www.SuccessCommonSense.com for common sense advice on becoming the career and life success you are meant to be.

I’ll see you around the web, and at Alex’s Lemonade Stand.

Bud

PS: Speaking of Alex’s Lemonade Stand – my fundraising page is still open.  Please go to www.FirstGiving.com/TheCommonSenseGuy to read Alex’s inspiring story and to donate if you can.

Comments

[steve]

i got recvd your email on Tuesday, not Monday, but it was so good i had to comment. I've read about 3 books so far about developing a strategy. the current one i'm reading is the 80/20 principle, which says you'll get 80% of your results from 20% of your efforts, which is what I need because I am so short on time (i have no staff yet).

Bud you seem to be superman. You are always reading and flying in planes, how do you get so much done so fast?

[steve]

here is the cartoon strip on dilbert.com website: http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20070610.html