Do You Want to Be a Ninja Innovator? Here’s How…
Every company wants to be successful in this worldwide downturn. But to achieve lofty goals, certainly innovation is the key in our new economy.
To become an innovative leader and to participate in turbo-charging the economy, it’s vital to continually evaluating your organization and strategizing for success. It takes involvement by members of your entire operation, and in most cases cultivating a new culture.
That means identifying your company’s assets, processes, resources and skills.
In a nutshell, here are the main points to consider in your analysis:
Human Resources – Completely review your capabilities in human resources with a focus on your competencies and weaknesses. Determine your abilities to achieve a competitive advantage.
Consider your recruitment process, training and development, and compensation systems.
Assess the strengths and weaknesses of your organizational culture, especially your leadership capabilities.
Products and services – Evaluate your offerings in terms of breadth and mix, quality and reliability.
Marketing – Take a hard look at your image, research, development, distribution channels, brand equity, sales personnel, customer-service quotient and market share.
Query your customers. What are their viewpoints? Evaluate your customer base to see if they meet your goals for growth.
Examine your potential marketplace with a focus on socio-culture – demographic trends and tastes, economic trends from interest rates to inflation.
Operations – Evaluate your productivity, quality controls, facilities, supply chain, technology, information systems, and management strengths and weaknesses.
Financial performance – Keep an eye on profitability. Forecast your revenue growth. Assess your asset utilization, debt-leverage position, liquidity and equity position.
Competition – Compare the missions, strategies, and competitive advantages of the competitors?
Following your analysis, there are six steps to take.
Here’s a checklist:
- Using your analysis, develop a big-picture strategic action plan.
- Make sure you have a comprehensive human resources program that encourages collaboration among teams. That means maximum delegation, empowerment, training and succession planning.
- Encourage blue sky planning sessions.
- Continually evolve. Leverage the insights of your devil advocates with an eye on your company’s potential. Ask the right open-ended questions for optimal creativity.
- Practice the “Principle of Contrary Action” to keep an open mind. Dare to be bold. Consider all alternatives.
- Keep chipping away.
From the Coach’s Corner, here are related resource links:
Developing Trends, and Solutions for Manufacturing Success
Study: Why Lean Manufacturing Principles Often Don’t Work
Link between Financial Performance and Succession Planning
Management Strategies for a Successful Turnaround
“When planning for a year, plant corn. When planning for a decade, plant trees. When planning for life, train and educate people.”
-Chinese proverb
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Terry Corbell is a business-performance consultant and profit professional. Click here to see his management services (many are available online). For a complementary chat about your business situation or to schedule Terry Corbell as a speaker, why don’t you contact him today?
Sports Offers Lessons on Strategic Management and Planning
Lessons from sports – strategies by legendary Yankee manager Casey Stengel and outstanding football coach Bill Walsh – serve as great metaphors for business success via innovation and strategic management.
Stengel was quite the innovator and taught us wonderful lessons about human resources, especially the tactic known as platooning in baseball when he managed the Yankees for three decades starting in the 1940s. He is the only Major League manager to win five consecutive World Series and he won seven championships from1949 to 1958. Stengel and his influence were as well-known as his legendary players, including slugger Mickey Mantle.
Stengel said it best: “Finding good players is easy. Getting them to play as a team is another story.”
Stengel, perhaps unknowingly, provided another insight about management strategy: “If we’re going to win the pennant, we’ve got to start thinking we’re not as good as we think we are.”
Innovation is also a lesson from Walsh, the visionary Hall of Fame football coach, who guided the San Francisco 49ers to three Super Bowl titles.
Two of Walsh’s keys to success:
- Daily, he relentlessly assessed his team and personal-coaching performances.
- He knew talent and he was close with his players, but he was clinically objective. Walsh knew when his players were through in their careers. For the overall good of the 49ers, he’d rather see a player retire too early instead of waiting too long to hang up the uniform.
There was a motivational benefit to his innovative approach: His players were aware of his philosophy and played more efficiently to keep their jobs.
Innovation in Business
Troubled companies need strategic solutions:
- Changing their risk-averse culture
- Developing a more efficient HR program
- Implementing strategies to get-to-know their customers
- Establishing benchmarks and tying them to salesperson/sales management performance
- Developing a leadership program
- Hiring better communicators and innovators
That means hiring a Casey Stengel or a Bill Walsh for strategic thinking, a state-of-the-art human resources program, and strong marketing focus.
Textbook on Strategic Management
Executives might read a college textbook, “Strategic Management: An Integrated Approach,” by University of Washington’s Dr. Charles W. L. Hill and Texas A&M University’s Dr. Gareth R. Jones.
Just as consumers like one-stop shopping at Costco or Fred Meyer, the book is a good source for learning a host of business solutions.
Its 647-pages are full of case studies of well-known businesses on customer satisfaction, efficiency, innovation and quality. In fact, dozens of authors have cited the book for solutions. They range from developing trends in performance and competitive advantage to business strategy and technology.
For example, the authors wrote:
“The major components of the strategic management process are defining the mission and major goals of the organization; analyzing the external and internal environments of the organization; choosing a business model and strategies that align or fit an organization’s strengths and weaknesses with external environmental opportunities and threats; and adopting organizational structures and control systems to implement the organization’s chosen strategy.”
Do you capitalize on your organizational wisdom where your proverbial tires meet the road? If not, talk with your customers and lower-level workers.
“A revision of the concept suggests that strategy can emerge from deep within an organization in the absence of formal plans as lower-level managers respond to unpredicted situations,” wrote the authors.
“Strategic planning often fails because executives do not plan for uncertainty and because ivory tower planners lose touch with operating realities,” they pointed out.
Key question for management
My sense is that strategic management often fails because companies fail to successfully answer one basic question: Are the right managers in place?
Many organizations fail to reach their potential because they’re guilty of ignoring The Peter Principle. That’s the theory first introduced by Lawrence Peter, who received his doctorate from Washington State University in 1963.
In 1968, Dr. Peter wrote his book, “The Peter Principle,” in which he theorizes: “In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”
Consider your own career: How many times have you worked for incompetent bosses?
Just because an employee is adequate in one capacity, does not mean the person is competent at a higher level. Often, companies will promote salespeople into management without adequate education or training.
In essence, violation of The Peter Principle leads to the downfall of organizations.
As Biz Coach, I regularly hear complaints about poor management. As a business-performance consultant, I’ve seen it many times in both the private and public sector.
The temporary solution in medium to large organizations is what Peter calls “lateral arabesque.” That means moving the incompetent employee laterally to another position to prevent further damage to the organization.
The long-term solution is two-fold: Hire the right people and conduct tactical performance reviews to lay a foundation for up-to-date strategic management.
Stengel and Walsh would be impressed.
From the Coach’s Corner, here are related resource links:
Overcoming Obstacles for Business Turnaround — 13 Steps
9 Dos and Don’ts for Best Decision-making
RIM Provides 9 Lessons in Best Turnaround Strategies
“If you don’t know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.”
-Yogi Bera
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Columnist Terry Corbell is also a business-performance consultant and profit professional. Click here to see his management services (many are available online). For a complimentary chat about your business situation or to schedule Terry Corbell as a speaker, why don’t you contact him today?
