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In Pursuit of Growth

The current KJR Newsletter by Bob Lewis caused me to go back to "Optimize" Magazine's September 2005 issue. This issue has an interesting interview with Michael Treacy (formerly of MIT's Sloan School) in their Business Leadership section. His observation is that the traditional lengthy strategy planning followed by execution is not the approach that produces continued growth in a company.

Treacy feels that the strategy is oftened flawed and out of date when done this way and it leads to execution that is slow and incomplete. The epitomy of this approach is the enormous IT projects that are going to change everything. By the time the years of planning and implementation are complete, the goals of the project are no longer useful.

Lewis talks about how consultants like to have Mission and Vision Statements because they describe the present and the future. Lews says "Big solutions that work great generally start as small solutions that work acceptably."

Without knowing the present and the future direction you can't expect your staff to make decisions that grow your organization. I'm afraid that I have seen companies that fail to articulate the vision and the strategy to their employees and only specify a narrow view of what is to be done by that employee/department/etc. These companies have little growth but lots of excuses why they don't grow.

According to Treacy, companies that sustain growth have a portfolio of initiatives that correspond to the vision, but are small and short timewise. This allows for evaluation and adjustment of the initiative or creating more intiatives.

The glue that holds this approach together is being able to measure these initiatives against the vision. Without measurement you can't make any evaluations.

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