SFO Blog - Helping You Build Your Company into a Strategy Focused Organization

Collaboration is the Foundation of Successful Business Transformation!

from April 13, 2010

Have you been watching the growing tidal wave of focus on social media and online communities? Think it’s just for teens, techno geeks, and sales sharks? You should take another look because this is an important revolution in relationship building and collaboration that has huge implications for business success.

Social networking tools are everywhere these days - Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, wikis….. the list seems endless! The bottom line is these new technology tools make it easier than ever for people to connect with others who: share feelings and ideas on certain topics; have common interests and objectives; want to create things with others; etc. While the use of social networking tools has its dark side, the positive results can include the creation of real social change and game changing collaborative innovation.

While the predominant uses of social networking tools and sites seem to be social networking and social media marketing, I believe that there are huge and untapped business applications, beyond the sales and marketing function, for social networking approaches and tools.

In fact, if your organization is actively looking for ways to keep your employees from using Twitter and Facebook at work, I urge you to seize a great opportunity and harness what they naturally want to do - collaborate and co-create - by actively building a business environment that encourages and supports collaboration and provides ALL employees with the tools to do it in a way that has mutual benefits for both the employee and the business. Online business communities are a great way to do this.

The fact is that communication, dialogue, and collaboration are the foundations of strategy execution and business transformation success. This is because nothing happens in any organization without people and to achieve great results, everyone inside (and outside) your organization must be engaged, involved, committed, and connected. Focused communication, meaningful two-way dialogue, and direct collaboration on: strategy formulation (and redesign); what it takes to successfully implement your strategy; solving business issues and challenges; learning from experiences and sharing best practices; and improvement activities; makes strategy execution and mission achievement PERSONAL for everyone involved. And making strategy execution and business success personal is the key to achieving breakthrough performance and sustained success for your organization.

Until now, a few (successful) organizations have found a way to engage, involve, and connect their employees and it has worked for them. Unfortunately, the majority of companies have struggled to do this WELL. Enter social networking tools. Online business communities give savvy organizations a way to achieve the levels of employee, customer, stakeholder, and business partner engagement, involvement, and connection they desire effectively and efficiently.

While there is a whole art and science to successfully implementing social media tools and online communities in organizations, I want you to consider taking a bold step TODAY by focusing on building greater collaboration in your organization. The benefits of doing so will include more focused strategy execution and improved business results for your company.

To find out more about social media tools and best practices in establishing a vibrant online business community, visit this great resource: "http://www.igloosoftware.com/playbook"

Are you Building your Strategy Management Community?

from July 6, 2009

To successfully achieve the mission and vision defined in its strategic plan, an organization is wise to implement a comprehensive strategy management tool known as the Integrated System for Breakthrough Performance. This suite of essential strategy management tools includes:

- A strategy map where a focused set of strategic objectives (usually 12 – 16 maximum) are placed over the traditional four balanced scorecard perspectives in order to clarify the business strategy and show the cause and effect relationships that exist among them,
- A set of indicators/balanced scorecard (usually 16 – 32 indicators maximum) that directly reflect or represent the strategy/strategic objectives. Their prime purpose is to measure that the desired change required by the strategic objectives, actually takes place. In short, strategic indicators allow you to measure and manage strategy execution and assess progress with strategy achievement,
- The aligned strategic processes and projects/initiatives that will drive or support the actual change required by the strategic objectives,
- The accountability and governance frameworks (including the roles/owners, duties, responsibilities, and processes) required to support the implementation and management of the strategic plan and facilitate the achievement of desired business performance results, and
- A connected strategy management community.

I have written fairly extensively about the first four strategy management tools so I thought that I would focus today on the last element of the suite – the strategy management community. I have just recently formally added this element to the integrated system for breakthrough performance suite though it has always been hovering in the background when I have discussed the system before now.

Let’s look at what the strategy management community is and why it is so important to strategic and organizational success.

An organization’s strategy management community participates, in real time, in an organic, dynamic, two-way, and collaborative strategy management process. It does this by providing information, enabling input and comments, and facilitating the creative and innovative insights that mold and shape business strategy.

A strategy management community can include employees, internal and external stakeholders, customers, business partners, suppliers – essentially anyone who has an interest in, and can contribute to, the success of an organization’s strategy and the achievement of its mission and vision. In addition, the strategy management community includes all of the business and communication processes and the technology infrastructure, such as social networking software, required to support the functioning of the community.

Until now, many organizations have neglected to focus on building their strategy management community. The result, despite investing time and dollars in an expertly facilitated strategic planning process and a state of the art balanced scorecard business performance measurement application, is often underperformance or a complete breakdown in their strategy management efforts.

So, why and how does this happen? Well, it usually happens because successful strategy management is really a huge change project with the biggest change required for strategic business success being culture change.

By culture change I mean that you need to get every one in your organization thinking, acting, and working differently every day. That is, you want every one (no matter where they are in the organization) to be: thinking about strategy and mission and vision achievement (the thinking differently part); understanding how what they do ever day contributes to strategy execution and then making local decisions accordingly (the working differently part); and sharing strategic insights, contributing to strategy-focused improvements, and participating in dynamic strategy revision when required (the acting differently part).  

The best way to facilitate such a culture change is to put your organization’s strategy front and center in every one’s every day work life, and to get every stakeholder inside and outside your organization connected around, and focused on, your strategy and the achievement of your mission and vision.

Until recently, building a robust strategy management community has been a bit of a challenge (however, many organizations have still successfully done it). This is because there haven’t been formalized (and widely discussed) business process models for the development, implementation, and management of a strategy management community. Also, the communication and networking technology required for the care and feeding of an integrated strategy management community just haven’t been out there.

That is, until now.

Think social networking and collaboration sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and, most recently, Twitter. Also think Wikopedia and YouTube where people can either work together to create new information or make original material (that wouldn’t have “seen daylight” in the old way of doing things) wildly popular. Basically, all of this technology allows people to connect, build groups, have focused discussions on various topics, and create new material in a collaborative way. And it happens quite organically within certain boundaries – often from the bottom up.

Basically, social networking technology just makes connecting people and building a more dynamic, and high functioning, strategy management community easier for organizations. To learn more about using this type of technology to build communities and social networks for business, visit <b>Igloo Software</b> – one of the leading-edge providers and thinkers on this topic (http://www.igloosoftware.com">www.igloosoftware.com). 

The bottom line is building your strategy management community is critical to making your strategy the way your organization works – the ultimate key to successful mission and vision achievement.

With this in mind, what are you doing today to build or nurture the strategy management community in your organization?