The Visioning Process

The next step is to map on this same chart all of the company’s activities, according to which ones are currently satisfying clients (Area 1); which are not (Area 2); which ones we have not yet found a market for); and which are unknown (Area 4). In doing this exercise, organizations in the GoGo phase of the lifecycle will find that they are literally all over the map, with activities, investments, and Joint Ventures even in Area 4! Organizations that are becoming bureaucratized will be able to see that their regular market (Area 1) is very small. So this part of the process can also be used as a diagnostic tool.

Now the visioning process starts: Which of these activities should we keep, which should we drop and which should we develop and nurture?

In order to make those decisions, we must first analyze the changing environment – physical, legal, political, technological, social, economic, and cultural. How they are changing? What does that mean for the future of our products or services? In light of that predicted future, what should we do or not do?

Every company has some part of the environment that critically affects it. For a bank it is the economic and political environment, for the fashion industry it is the social, for the transportation industry it is the physical. But by and large my experience shows that all aspects of the environment should be analyzed, because they are interdependent and interactive.

Assess the Competition

Next, analyze what you believe your competition is going to do to respond to this changing environment.

Choose Your Future

Choose Your Future It is time to put the pieces of the puzzle together and analyze what all these facts and educated guesses mean for your company.

These discussions should include what activities the company should continue; what it should undertake; what it should drop; what it should develop. The discussions also should determine marketing efforts, changes in organizational structure, allocation of budgets, changes in staffing decisions – and, perhaps, changes in values.

Now, I said earlier in this chapter that values are a belief structure that guides behavior. But sometimes that belief structure has no logic behind it.

Those values could be past decisions that worked out well and became policies by default. If their validity and effectiveness are not reviewed periodically, they can become pointless obstacles to growth.

Here is an example: Twenty years ago, when I worked with Northrop Aviation, I found out that Northrop was not selling much, if anything, to the United States Air Force. This puzzled me, because the Air Force was a natural client for Northrop, and could have been its biggest.

I started to ask questions, and here is what I eventually found out: Jack Northrop, who built the first fighter plane and founded the company in 1938, would only build two-engine fighter planes because he believed one engine was not reliable enough. With time and advances in technology this assumption was not true anymore but the original assumption did not change. It became the “policy” of the company: We produce two engine fighter planes. So who was buying them now? The planes were mostly purchased by developing nations, which did not have the budget or trained personnel necessary to maintain a single-engine plane. However, the U.S. Air Force went on buying single-engine planes from other companies.

The two-engine plane policy may have been an engineering decision originally; but by the time I consulted with the company, it was no longer an engineering decision or even a marketing decision. It was a value statement, and it urgently needed to be reviewed.

Here is another, example from my experience: One of a retail company’s market strengths is that it is selling on credit. This company buys another retail company – one which grew by working on very low margins but offering no credit. The buying company installs credit in its new acquisition; after all, that is its modus vivendi.

What happens? The first company loses its shirt. Why? Because it kept the second company’s low margins while installing credit. A system of low margins that sells on credit cannot afford any bad debt – however, bad debt is a predictable cost of doing business with credit.

I could offer endless other examples of how value systems help or hinder the development of an organization. But I think you can already see my point, which is that these belief systems need to be articulated so that they can be periodically evaluated and addressed.

The Assesment Team

How is this done?

When I consult to a company, I put together a team of the organization’s so-called “black sheep,” or enfant terribles – the people who are always very loudly disagreeing with the company’s policies and arguing against them. I consider them to be the most conscious.

I assign them two tasks. The first is to identify which values should be kept, which should be dropped, and which must be adapted because of changes in the marketplace. The second is to identify changes that must be implemented in the market product scope.

When all the homework is done and one team presents the market product scope, the other one presents what changes we need to do due to the changing environment and the competitive predictable moves, and the values team presents which values need to change, be dropped or developed, we have a discussion: What should we do in light of all the above. The discussion is very structured and follows a road map. At the end, each member of the team is given an assignment:

Imagine that it is three years into the future. It is the end of the year and you are writing a report to the stockholders.

And you must sum up in writing what changes the company has done and what those changes accomplished, what the company stands for and why.. Write this report in the past tense: “We did this, and the results were …” “We did that, and the results were…”

They read to each other their reports and start integrating the reports until a common report emerges.

Slowly, through this road map for discussion, there emerges a vision of the company’s identity today, and what it needs to be in the future to adapt to the changing environment.

The important result is not so much that there was a discussion. The important result is that there is a common vision and an agreement on the values the company should adopt, nurture or drop.

What follows this discussion is another session on the structural repercussions of this vision and values: What do we need to change structurally in the organization so that this vision can become a reality. But that is material for a totally new book.

Summing Up

Characteristics of good managers

1. Self-aware

2. Conscious

3. Well-rounded: No zeros in (PAEI) code

4. Knows strengths and weaknesses; knows his uniqueness

5. Accepts strengths, weaknesses, and uniqueness

6. Can identify excellence and weaknesses in others

7. Can accept and appreciate differences in others

8. Knows how to slow down and relax in times of adversity

9. Creates a learning environment in which conflicts can be resolved, by both commanding and granting mutual trust and respect

A Shared Vision of Success

Successful leaders know that they cannot be right on every decision all the time and forever. They need to seek out the wisdom, expertise and points of view of those around them with different styles and perspectives.

Complementary teams hold the answers to most of the problems an organization will face. However, they also have the potential for frustration, gridlock, and dysfunction. How the team’s interactions and communications are handled can spell the difference between success and failure.

Successful leaders know that to convert destructive, dysfunctional conflict, to be constructive and do it by integrating the complementary team to have shared values and a shared vision to work with. They should have the right process of decision making so they can work and understand each other and the company must have people who command and grant respect and trust and they should be assigned responsibilities that match their style in a structure of responsibilities that enables all (PAEI) roles to be fulfilled.

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