Finding the Corporate Soul

As an initial discussion of methodology, lets begin with the first five blocks of the business strategy process flow as seen in Exhibit I.

Early within a strategy effort it's important to review and understand the corporate soul, as can been seen from the vision, mission, values and brand image.

If any of the mission, vision and values don't exist (that really does happen), then the strategy effort should be paused until at least a draft of those entities can be created. By the way, even if they do exist, what you often find is there is no uniform understanding of them throughout the management and professionals of the company. As you interview the management and professionals during the strategy development process, test the quality and consistency of their understanding. If it is good, great. If quality and consistency are absent, address this issue early within the recommendations developed during the strategy development effort.

If the brand image does not exist, make a team decision whether the omission is critical enough to pause the strategy process to create it or if it is functionally desirable to make its creation a high priority recommendation. As you can see from the arrow pointers of Exhibit II above, the mission, vision and values must exist at least in draft prior to the development of a business strategy or the brand image. However, when it comes to the business strategy verses the brand image, either can come first depending upon the nature of the company and its products/services and the maturity of the company within the marketplace. For emerging companies the brand identity is a defining factor and should be in place at least in concept prior to business strategy development.

With respect to products and services (the fifth block of Exhibit I above), document and understand the companies products and services and, at a summary level, the processes which support those products and services. In conjunction with this analysis, understand and document the market segments, values, needs and lifestyle problems of the target customers, as well as the competitors active within the target market and their core product/service offerings. If these data do not exist, a judgement must be made with respect to the sufficiency of what does exist to support the ongoing strategy effort. Remedial work might be required.

The goal of this initial project phase (the first five blocks of the project flow) is to build a comprehensive strategy team understanding of the company, customers, customer segments served, products and services delivered, and where possible the competitors and competitive offerings within the selected market place. Yet, a strategy is useless unless the customers want the lifestyle impact of the products/services which your company is offering. Customers do not directly perceive products and services, they see status, solutions to problems and lifestyle convenience, so be sure that you view the products/services this way too.

The mechanics behind this process of building understanding are:

• Team understanding of the goals and desired outcomes of the strategy project



• Set of hypotheses of what the team is likely to find, conclude or disprove during the project phases -- hypotheses which the team is willing to verify or disprove
  


• Set of analyses to be conducted to prove or disprove the initial hypotheses



• Data collection forms and templates as well as targeted interview guides to discover and document the collected information in a structured way
  


• Collection and analysis of existing data and information



• Set of comprehensive interviews of company professionals, managers, and selected customers to augment and drive understanding of the collected information and data
  

Something that is good to do during this phase of a strategy project is to outline the entire final report for the project within the first one to three weeks of the project. Within the outline show a table of contents for the chapters, the chapters themselves with corresponding hypotheses, and graphical outlines of the quantitative and qualitative analyses to be conducted as well as the resultant graphics to be built. This outline basically contains the team thoughts on what they expect to find, not find or disprove during the discovery phase of the project and what conclusions and recommendations they are likely to draw based upon those findings. This outline is then placed on a common server for all team members to access and update on a daily basis as each progresses and completes their part of the work. The trick is not to become attached to the initial hypotheses. The goal of the analysis is to prove or disprove the initial hypotheses based upon actual project findings and to create new/additional hypotheses as the data dictate. Egos must be set aside.

You would be surprised how much focus the team achieves by creating this draft report very early within the project and how much insight with respect to project methodological issues and potential or actual omissions is gained through seeing the final report grow in content on a daily basis. One of the biggest threats to a successful strategy effort is the collection and manipulation of way too much data to be useful. The draft report focuses the data collection and analysis efforts on just what is necessary to achieve project goals and to prove or disprove project hypotheses.

Strategy efforts contain significant mass and therefor inertia. They require significant physical effort to move forward along with the tremendous input of intellectual capital. So, it is good to keep them focused and as short as possible. A good rule of thumb is three to five months. Creating the draft hypotheses early and placing the draft report on a common server both help to provide level of effort containment, but the project scope must also be intelligently controlled.

Take a close look at the scope prior to starting the project and at the same time assess the skills and potential time commitments of the available professional staff. By the way, professional staff who have been "selected" always have less actual quality time available than they believe. A rule of thumb is the following

• A 25% commitment is useless for day to day work but may prove useful as an advisor on where to find the right people and focused information



• A 50% commitment might produce an actual 25% of quality time and can be useful for limited project deliverables.



• A 100% commitment as an investment in the experience and personal intellectual capital of a young professional is desirable and essential for the core professional staff

From the scope and commitment assessment, build an initial project plan. If that plan indicates a project longer than three to five months, either limit the scope of the initial effort or augment the staff skills and/or commitment. Be careful here, adding endless physical staff to a project that is badly scoped or managed will not improve quality or decrease elapsed time, as many software programming projects have proved in the past. It is much more useful to limit the scope of a project up front to a viable and achievable physical and intellectual level of effort. It's better to succeed with an initial effort to define strategic direction and build team morale and experience and then drive a second effort from that foundation of success than to fail in a discouraging and endless initial effort.