Episode #558: Building Your Strategic Plan In Japan

The leader has a different role to that of the manager. The manager makes the business run on time, to quality and on budget. The leader does all of those things, plus sets the strategic direction for the business, crafts the culture and builds the people. If we want to control every aspect of the firm, then we have to micro-manage everything. Obviously, that is a choice, but as the leader we need to develop our people too and so we need to delegate work to them so that they can grow. In fact, as the leader, the ideal situation would be that we are only working on the most high-level things that only we can do.

If possible, we want to set the parameters of the business so that the team can self-manage themselves. Those parameters come in the form of some very useful tools called Vision, Mission and Values. Some people may think that Vision, Mission and Value are rather flowery, fluffy, flaky statements of little use, but they are denying themselves some important leverage points as the leader.

The Vision is a call out to what is the purpose of what we are doing. This is a fundamental thing, but in many companies the staff have an unclear idea of the purpose. We can recall the classic building the wall metaphor. Three stonemasons are asked what they are doing, and the first says, “building this wall”. The second one says, “I am building a new faculty building for the university”. The third one says, “I am building a facility to better educate future generation”. The metaphor makes the point that the understanding of purpose is different, even though each person was laying stone blocks to build a wall. We need to make sure that our team is clear on what is the purpose of why we are putting in all these long, hard hours.
The Mission is a clarification of what we do and, by definition, what we don’t do. Making the main thing the main thing sounds simple, but there are so many bright shiny objects and fashionable trends which can divert us. We need to make sure everyone understands what we need to concentrate on and not allow the business to be drawn off course.

The Values are the glue which bind us together. The leader’s job is to find out the common values of the team which will correspond with the values of the organisation and have everyone flying together in tight formation going in the same direction. The other important point is to make sure that the organisation lives the values and that the team lives the values. When the organisation rhetoric strays from the stated values, the cynicism becomes a cancer which eats away at the morale and teamwork of the firm.

Once we have set the guide rails, we can set the strategy to achieve the Vision. There will be a series of goals to be achieved to get us to where we want to be. Obviously, revenue and profit goals are going to be critical to the health and longevity of the firm. There will be quality considerations which relate to our brand and its positioning in the market. Cost of customer acquisition and the success of our marketing to help grow the business will bring their own sets of goals. Who we recruit and how we train them will have a major impact on the success of the company. Business is a one team against another team head-to-head struggle and the best team wins in the long term. Our sales team versus the opposition, our marketing prowess against that of so many rivals, our factory staff against the competition, our leadership bench strength against all comers in our industry sector.

We need to measure our progress and success in attaining our goals. There are activities and outcomes which we need to track. We break these down for each financial year and for longer term considerations and they must add up to attaining the Vision we have set. They must be objective and correct numbers, because incorrect data can hurt us and cause us to make poor decisions. Getting correct data is not always that easy and we must have systems to keep checking that what we think is happening is actually the case.

So think of this strategic plan as a funnel. The mouth of the funnel at the top is where we pour in the purpose, and gradually we keep refining the execution of the purpose by specifying more and more concrete details needed for its attainment.