Start with Fresh Facts About Your Environment

Are you ever in a conference room with your colleagues, and it seems like everyone around the table has a different view of what you need to do? You may agree on your general goals. You may have a shared financial target. You may even be able to agree on small improvements in your business model that will give you boosts in revenues or profits. But beyond the incremental, it gets a lot harder.

If you are looking to make significant improvements in your business, you need something more than a few tweaks to your current practices. How do you break through to the next level of performance? Start with fresh information.

This is often the strategy step that gets the least attention. It is easy to assume that you know everything you need to know about your business and its environment. After all, you spend your corporate life in your market; why would you need to study it more? The truth is that you know everything about yesterday—but what about tomorrow? Most challenges come from a surprise or a change that starts outside your core market. The only way we know to avoid a surprise is to have a disciplined (but not complicated) process for generating fresh information.

By the way, fresh information also gives you a neutral starting point for your planning discussions. Remember the many differing views around the table? Start with a discussion about objective facts, not opinions. What are the market trends, customer needs, and technological opportunities for your business? An agreement about the reality—just the facts—surrounding your market opportunity and risks will lay a good foundation for planning the future. The discussion will no longer be about what individuals think, but rather what the facts tell you that you need to do. From there, it is much easier to work through to the action plans that make it all happen. Starting with the external makes it a lot easier to avoid sliding into an internally-focused discussion that only gives you incremental improvements—it will help you come up with new solutions, new opportunities, and breakthrough performance. Tips on gathering fresh information are covered in Michael’s Strategic Action column below.

-Mary Adams   2004