October 21, 2009

Importance of a Strong Foundation...We have a place in the mountains and, for some time now, part of our deck had been in imminent danger of collapse. This past weekend, our son John offered to repair the damaged portion. It quickly became apparent that much of the trouble was due to the foundation having been poorly constructed when the deck was originally built. After carefully considering how the weight should be distributed, John built a substantial sub-structure that will support the newly laid decking for years to come.

As I watched him work, while schlepping boards to and fro, it occurred to me that success in most endeavors requires a firm foundation. High school students who are having trouble with math often did not learn the basic building blocks of computation – addition, subtraction, and times tables. Ask a struggling freshman what 9x8 is.. and you will probably see what I mean.

Or the adult who cannot read. Were phonics taught? Can he or she sound out words? Most likely, the answer is “no.”

A strong foundation is especially important in today’s uncertain business environment. Whether you are the owner of a small start-up company or an executive in an established enterprise, nothing is more important than strategic business planning to both build and maintain the structure of your organization.

A strategic business plan is a disciplined effort to produce fundamental decisions and actions that guide:

• What an organization is
• What it does
• Why and how it does it

Strategic planning is about having the right people in the room, working on the right (often difficult) issues. Planning is not something you do every 5 years. It should be a continuous process that you update every year. And, there is no time more important for planning than when times are tough.

I believe that strategic planning should be collaborative and iterative. Typical steps involve:

• Planning to plan - identifying a core planning team, the length of the plan (3 years, 5 years) and determining how decisions will be made (consensus, other)
• Creating the future state - developing core values, vision and mission statements
• Defining the roadmap for how the vision and mission will be achieved - the goals and strategies
• Developing critical success indicators (or key performance indicators) - quantifiable measures of success in achieving the organization's vision, mission, and values on a year-by-year basis, and the dashboard that will report progress

These critical success indicators should be translated into the performance metrics for every employee in the organization. Without employees understanding exactly how they contribute to the strength and health of the enterprise, the results are likely to mirror those of my previously constructed deck – imminently subject to collapse. Construct a strong foundation and you’ll have the building blocks of success.

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