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Doing It Right: Your Game Plan
Your Game Plan: A Platform For Focused Action
Many companies lack a tight, fully developed and universally understood game plan. What is a game plan?
The purpose of the game plan is to help you line up and conduct your business in a way that enables you to play to your strengths, add unique value and create a bond between you and your customers that excludes your competition.
This can only be done by ensuring that the value you add is what the customer really wants, versus doing something that is easy for you to do, while thinking that the customer should value it.
When everyone understands the game plan, it tells everyone how:
- You define yourselves---your purpose---your shared identity.
- You need to interrelate with each other---how your people need to play off of each other---in order to execute what you promise dependably.
- To avoid being so self-absorbed that customer or competitor changes and adaptations fail to be noticed.
- You need to share information in order to execute extraordinary results.
Everyone understands your game plan best, if they have a hand in developing it.
That doesn’t mean that everyone has to sit at the table drawing it up. It doesn’t mean that everyone should have a vote.
Rather, it means that everyone who plays in the game should have the ability to offer insights, suggestions and modifications to be considered as the game plays out, for it will probably play out over time in ways that differ from what you originally anticipated.
If they are to offer relevant input, they need to be coached to understand the business idea and its underlying assumptions, as well as the brand promises you are holding out to your customers.
The basics of a game plan are discussed more fully in sections 5, 7 and 8.
Broadcasting Your Brand Promise:
The external version of your value proposition tells the story of what happens, and what your customers can expect from how you execute your game plan. ,p>
The brand promise is discussed in depth in section 8. For this discussion, there are several things you will want to accomplish with your brand promise. You’ll want to ensure that it:
- Speaks to your customers about your particular, unique value-added features or qualities.
- Positions your company as a vital partner with them, in the pursuit of their goals and objectives.
- Creates ongoing conversations with your customers about their expectations and/or requirements.
- Creates ongoing conversations with your suppliers about how they can continue to help you deliver on your promises.
- Sets the stage for you to have conversations with potential allies and partners (anyone or any business with whom you may consider joining forces to enhance your ability to deliver on your brand promise).
The fourth element makes the story of your brand promise something more than advertising. Advertising talks at people. The story of your brand promise should be designed to generate conversations between you and your suppliers about how they can help you fulfill your company’s promises.
Your brand promise should help you have discussions with your customers about their needs in generating the outcomes they seek. It should also enable you to have conversations about how your offerings contrast against those of your competitors.
Finally, it should enable potential allies and partners to recognize the value that can be obtained through collaboration with you.
Is Your Value Proposition Dying Or Blossoming?
Over time two things happen. The first is that you evolve the business idea. You modify it. You observe and then consider your results. You get feedback from your customers. You watch your competition. Then you tweak, develop and evolve your business idea. You try to sweeten the value proposition. You don’t stand still.
The second thing that happens is that you take your assumptions more and more for granted. This is human nature.
Those basic assumptions are like the code that gets written into software. They become less visible over time. They are obscured by the complexity of the developed ideas, by the evolving ideas. Since you’ve organized everything around those assumptions, it takes a lot of work to revalidate their current efficacy.
As a result, people often don’t take the step of revalidating their assumptions over time. In the business world this leads companies to:
- Cling to aging or obsolete processes.
- Try to improve efficiencies by working outdated processes harder and with more urgency.
- Cut costs in areas that foster growth and innovation, to continue to fund efforts to keep old processes afloat.
The tendency to cling to familiar assumptions is very human. It takes a great deal of discipline for people to continue to challenge and revalidate their operating principles. Human beings like for the world to feel stable, and to behave predictably. People like the sense of control and security they get from their confidence in the power of their assumptions.
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Rule of Thumb: The familiar way of operating is often the best way for you as long as the conditions that made it your preferred way of operating don’t change. Once those conditions have changed, the familiar can become a trap that ensnares you in the past.
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Throughout history, social conditions generally have changed slowly enough that this rule of thumb didn’t cause people too many problems, and the sense of security derived from their assumptions helped them to adapt. However, that leisurely pace of change will never be the same again, particularly in business.
Change will occur more and more quickly, and the shelf life of our business assumptions will continue to decrease dramatically.
Moving into the 21st century, business people must expect that the assumptions underlying their business ideas, and therefore their strategies, need to be revalidated more frequently to keep pace with the ongoing increases in the rate of change.
As it stands, in most companies, people work within the old processes even when they have become outdated or obsolete.
People make adjustments at their workstations to keep the process working, but the individual modifications only add layers of complexity and inefficiency.
Over time, the accumulation of these sorts of individual modifications, which are rarely documented, result in situations in which your company is not able to deliver on its brand promise when the keepers of the knowledge are out sick, or otherwise away from work.
The problem with these personal adaptations is that organizational efficiencies are lost. Synergies don’t materialize, as they should.
Day-to-day functions are not as well aligned, as they should be, with the evolved business idea. As a result the team is eventually working individual versions of the game plan. They become misaligned for collaborative work. Additionally, the game plan loses alignment with the brand promise, and delivery becomes spotty and problematic.
1. Turn Your Business Idea Into A Catalyst For Extraordinary Results
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Tool Preview: A worksheet for making your value proposition clear to all concerned.
Use this guide to lead a conversation among your key people to forge a shared understanding of your business idea, internally (game plan) and externally (brand promise). [Read Now]
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2. Stretch The CEO’s Thinking
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Tool Preview: This tool helps the leader/leadership team create opportunities by shifting the frame of reference used in the operating assumptions made about the business.
How would you structure the business if you started it today? This is a good way to challenge outdated assumptions and create opportunities for growth. [Read Now]
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The E.P. Henry Company Story: This story is excerpted verbatim from a profile of this family business that was featured in the Family Business Strategies newsletter.
The E.P. Henry Company was included because of the clever evolution of their business idea and how they used that to create competitive advantage. [Read Now]
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Recommended Readings For Section One:
- Christensen, C.M., & Overdorf, M., “Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change,” Harvard Business Review, March – April 2000.
- Christensen, C.M., The Innovator’s Dilemma: when New Technologies Cause Great Firms To Fail, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA, 1997.
- Collins, J.C., & Porras, J.I., Building Your Company’s Vision, The Harvard Business Review, September – October 1996.
- Labovitz, G., & Rosansky, V., The Power Of Alignment: How Great Companies Stay Centered and Accomplish Great Things, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, New York, 1997.
- Lynn, G.S., Et Al, “Marketing and Discontinuous Innovation: The Probe and Learn Process,” The California Management Review, Vol. 38, No. 3, 1996.
- O’Reilly, C.A., & Pfeffer, J., Hidden Value, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA, 2000.
- Tichy, N.M., & Cohen, E., The Leadership Engine: How Winning Companies Build Leaders At Every Level, Harper Business, New York, New York, 1997.
- Ulrich, D., & Lake D., Organizational Capability: Competing From The Inside Out, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, New York, 1990.
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