Author Archives: markgriffen

What’s the Point of a SWOT Analysis?

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We’ve all completed SWOT analyses in our time. But why?

Well, the idea is that the strategic plan is actually affected by what the SWOT analysis uncovers. It’s really simple. I’ve read a lot of plans that include a SWOT analysis that highlight all sorts of interesting looking opportunities and threats, and then the strategy seems to completely ignore them.

The idea of the SWOT analysis is that it identifies:

  • Strengths – that the strategic plan then builds upon in an identifiable way.
  • Weaknesses – that the strategic plan then corrects or circumvents in an identifiable way.
  • Opportunities – that the strategic plan recognizes in an identifiable way, and then shows upon how they are capitalized.
  • Threats – that the strategic plan circumvents or mitigates in a recognizable manner.

Let’s look a couple of examples.

  1. If the SWOT analysis identifies that “lack of staff”  is a major weakness, then the strategic plan should include a line item that makes direct reference to how staff will be recruited, or how additional staff are not needed. I would certainly expect there to be a direct reference to the word “staff” and it’s level in the plan.
  2. If the SWOT analysis shows that an upcoming conference is a major opportunity, then the strategic plan should refer to that conference by name, and explain (albeit in one or two sentences possibly) how that conference would be used to achieve the maximum amount of progress towards the goal of the organization.

If a SWOT analysis is not directly used to influence the strategic plan, then don’t waste the time to generate it. Instead of having a one hour brainstorming meeting of your 6 most valuable team members, have them go do something else that will directly contribute to the goal of the organization – you’ll be 6 man hours of good stewardship ahead. However, if you use those 6 man hours to identify ways to create thousands of man hours move value, and you actually do something with those ideas then you will be leading strategically.

Review Plans During The Year

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I was impressed by the strategic plan for the coming year from my colleagues in Ghana. The plan included a summary of the objectives from last year’s plan and a summary of the achievements of this past year.

What was impressive was that what the team said a year ago that they would do is exactly what they did. Incredible!! I asked how this happened. The team leader explained matter of factly that they reviewed their progress against the original plan during the year. Again, incredible!!

The results spoke for themselves. We know the theory. Do we practice it? They did in Ghana last year. This is not rocket science is it?

‘nuf said.

Strategic vs. Tactical 80/20 Rule

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“Does this mean that I won’t be able to do….?” is a question I frequently get when I discuss strategy with people. They are usually worried about not doing what they have found interesting. When someone has to follow a new strategy they often mourn the loss of the familiar, that they have grown to love doing.

This need not be a major issue for two reasons:

  1. Most people recognize that the strategy is really the best thing to do, despite the fact that they have been putting off doing it. Most people also get a lot of job satisfaction from knowing that they are doing the best job that they can do. If people start to do the best thing (in alignment with a new strategy) over time they will appreciate this and grow to love doing it the way that they loved doing what they used to do.
  2. There is always room for non-strategic work, otherwise called tactical work. Personally, I’ve always viewed there to be a 80 / 20 rule for strategic vs. tactical.

As an example of the latter point, my job is to lead a certain area of work. We have well over a 1000 people who actually implement one of the things that I lead. It would not be the best use of my time to try and do what they do because I am only one person, and they are 1000. The strategic part of my job is to figure out the best way of these 1000 people being led to provide the optimal end result. The trouble is that the reason I have ended up leading this team is because I have a passion for doing what they do, not for figuring out how to run a team. However, because I love to do what they do, I spend some time doing it personally as a single unit contributor. The important thing is that I still spend 80% of my time developing leadership of the 1000 people, and less than 20% trying to do their work myself.

Strategy does not mean that we stop everything. Strategy means that we spend the large majority of our effort pursuing the most important goal in the optimal fashion. This does leave room for doing something else for which you have a passion, or for learning to love doing what is most important in the best way 🙂

Want to attend yet another meeting?

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Want another meeting? I’m sorry to day that is exactly what the 4th of the 4 Disciplines of Execution is.

So, is this optional?

No. This is not just another meeting. This is THE meeting each week to ensure that progress is being made on the single most important issue for the team. The Wildly Important Goal of which this meeting is the subject is the thing that, at the end of the year is THE one thing that must happen, even if all other things don’t happen. If anything is to be achieved this year, then the subject of this meeting is it.

Why would anything else be more important than the most important thing that needs to be achieved by the team? Of all of the meetings that you could attend or host this week, this is the ONE meeting that is the MUST.

Could these meetings be monthly? Yes, they could. However, if this WIG is the one thing that must happen this year, why would you want to wait a month before finding out that nothing had happened on this goal for the last month?

What Is Your Main Goal?

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This week we used the 4 Disciplines of Execution tool to develop a laser like focus over the coming year on the single biggest goal that teams have to achieve.

However, coming up with the right goals for teams was not easy. When I worked in the commercial world the target was clear and constantly reinforced: maximize return on the investment of the shareholder. Everything that we did had to be traceable back to that point.

If you have leadership responsibility for a team or organization here are a few questions that you can use to see if you are setting yourself the best Wildly Important Goals:

  • What is the one thing that, at the end of the year we have to have seen happen, even if all the other things don’t happen as we might hope?
  • What is the raison d’etre for your team? Does your Wildly Important Goal relate directly to the reason for existence of the team or the part of the organization for which the team is directly responsible?
  • What is the Vision for the organization as it directly relates to me or my team?

This was not an easy exercise this week, but I hope that these questions help you identify the most important goals for your team.

Focus, Focus, Focus

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There are always more good things that we could do than we have the capacity to do.

Strategy is the difference between doing things and doing the best things to do – and then doing them optimally.

I had the opportunity to try and help some of my colleagues over the last few weeks as they reviewed and further developed their strategies. The biggest things that hit me during the discussions were:

  1. Everyone wanted to do a lot of things, all of which are good and have great justifications.
  2. It is easy to draw up lists of things to do, and never to be worried that they get done.

Do you have a long list of things that you think that you will do?

What is your main objective? Which of the things on your list will most directly help you make progress towards your main objective?

Are you tracking your progress with those most important things, and are you doing them INSTEAD of some of the other things that you have on your list?

Remember, strategy can be defined as:

“the intelligent allocation of limited resources through a unique system of activities to outperform the competition in serving customers.”

Strategy is about recognition that there are limited resources, and maximizing what you have to achieve your objective. This means that non critical things will be dropped. This is OK. Don’t worry about dropping some things. Really. No, I mean really, don’t worry about that.

How Many Things Can You Measure?

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They say that you get what you measure in an organization. You can also measure just about everything. So, how many measurements should we focus on?

When putting together business cases as a product manager, we could include a hundred metrics: from sales by customer to material costs. However, only two things mattered in deciding if it was a go or a no go: Internal Rate of Return (IRR) and Net Present Value (NPV). It was easy to compare investment opportunities when you only had to compare 2 metrics, as opposed to the 100 or so things that contributed to those metrics.

In the 4 Disciplines of Execution (http://vimeo.com/46230250) Chris McChesney says that there are diminishing returns when an organization focuses on more than three goals. I don’t know if McChesney’s research is scientifically valid, but it aligns with my personal experience.

So, how many goals do you have? Do you have too many goals upon which to practically focus?

If you have too many goals for practical pursuit at the moment, which are the most important ones? Can some of the less important goals be the subject of focus after having achieved the most important goals?

Ownership of a Strategy

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A while back I was sitting in a meeting with a team of managers who had some of the best looking strategic plans that I had seen. The plans consisted of a thorough analysis of the situation, a clear SWOT analysis, well-defined goals and a set of actions that looked like they were (at least) a pretty good way to get from the current situation to the goals while avoiding identified pitfalls.

I asked two authors of the plans if they are following them.

They answered that they were not following them, and that they only provided the plans because their supervisors had asked for them. Ooops. The supervisors were in the room with the authors. A point was communicated to all of us.

Which would result in better use of planning time:

  1. a plan that has one line item that is critically important to achieving the Vision, that people subsequently work to implement over the planning period, or
  2. a perfect looking plan with all the right analysis, objectives and action steps that is subsequently not implemented?

How can we ensure ownership of plans by the people who are due to implement them? Please feel free to comment with answers to this question.

Strategic vs. Important

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Many things can be important, but only one thing can be strategic.

The word “strategic” seems to have become a euphemism for “the thing that I want to do and I want you to consider as important so that we can agree that I can go ahead and do it”. An example of this is “attending this conference is strategic”. Another might be “we had a strategic meeting”.

Strategy is the path forward that is identified as being the best thing to do to get from where we are now to where we want to go after all of the alternative have been considered. While attending a conference or having had a really productive meeting might have been determined to be the best way to achieve your end goal, would the best way to describe them be “strategic”.

The only way that I bring this up is because, if the word “strategic” is diluted by improper use, then our ability to help field teams truly lead strategically (as defined earlier in this blog) is just going to be harder.

I’d love to get your comments on this, unless you are one of those spammers who seem to think that my posts are very insightful.

Keeping The Strategy Simple

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I received a strategy plan by e-mail today from a colleague who I met last year. The plan is for the next 12 months. I like what I see. The reasons that I like what I see in this plan are:

  • It all starts with the Vision of what we are trying to achieve as an organization.
  • It has one objective for the team of 5 people – to make a clearly defined amount of progress directly towards the Vision in the time-frame of the plan.
  • The objective looks achievable, but focused on stretching the team to the next level of implementation.
  • They appear to have abandoned doing what they were doing for the last 10 years that did not lead towards the Vision. Yippee!!
  • The plan seems realistic as to what resources it will have available. There are not wild assumptions about availability of people or money to execute the plan.
  • The plan has specific actions by specific people during the year to do specific things that seem simple but important. Again, no wild “faith” assumptions.
  • The whole thing was three pages – and that includes lots of white space. I think that each of the 5 team members who are due to execute the plan could read this and remember what they are supposed to do by when.

All in all, I think that this plan is not a barrier to its completion in its own right. This is good in my opinion.

I will meet the authors of the plan next month. I think that the key question that I will ask them is: What could stop this plan from being implemented as the next 12 months unfold?