Mission Statements ... that don't suck

We regularly start OGSP sessions with a Mission Statement exercise. It's not unusual for participants to greet this news with a passive groan. Mission Statements have gotten a bad rap and often, deservedly so. They can be a waste of time and get the entire strategy process off on the wrong foot.

The problem Is triggered by the definition of the Mission Statement. If the Mission Statement is an exercise in "what we want to be ... someday when we grow up" then it becomes an exercise in creative writing. It may gain inspiration but it sacrifices focus, which is the reason for a business strategy in the first place.

A good example of the pitfalls of Mission Statement as a creative writing exercise is illustrated in Chip Heath's video clip below. Take a look (and tell me, do you really like J&J's Mission Statement?)

We think it's best to separate the Mission Statement from the Vision Statement. See John's discussion of 5Q/1P in the "OGSP for New Ventures" off the home page. The Vision Statement is about "what we want to be" while the Mission Statement is about "the business we are in today.". The decision is not trivial.

The Mission Statement works well upfront in the OGSP process when it answers the question, "what business are we in?". This gets to the heart of how the business will succeed but also leads to a productive discussion of "is that enough to succeed." It's the classic question for a railroad company, "are we in the railroad business or the transportation business?"

We find that starting the OGSP discussion around "what business are we in?" is more productive than starting with "what do we want to be 10 years from now?"

If you are looking for an example of a good Mission Statement consider Google. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin named the search engine they built "Google," a play on the word "googol," the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The name reflects the immense volume of information that exists, and the scope of Google's mission: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Yes, Google's business model is all about selling ads. However, if they fail at organizing the world's information then no one will use Google and they will be out of business. Their mission, the "business they are in," is information organization, not ad sales.

And never once do they use the word "solutions."

Doubling New Product Success: Focus

Many of our clients are looking for growth through new products, and write that into their OGSP work.  New research from McKinsey & Company suggests that's a winning behavior.

Authors Mike Gordon, Chris Musso, Eric Rebentisch, and Nisheeth Gupta from the consulting firm McKinsey & Company surveyed more than 300 employees at 28 companies across North America and Europe on their new product development practices. 

They found that companies who successfully launched new products did three things different or better than unsuccessful companies. It all about focus, focus and focus.

Focus on Deliverables:

New product success depends on a clear and focused set of project requirements communicated to teams before kickoff.  According to the authors, "teams with a clear understanding of project requirements appeared better able to make trade-offs between product performance and things like cost, time to market, and project risk. Only 19 percent of poor performers said they had the necessary information to make those decisions."

Focus on Priorities:

The top-performing companies make product development a priority. They made more of an effort than the laggards - 39 percent versus 12 percent - to minimize staffing disruptions due to external demands and to staff projects adequately. As the authors conclude, "When people with critical skills become overburdened, they often decide on their own which of their many projects is the most important, a decision best made at the management level."

Focus on the Customer:

The successful innovators kept in close contact with customers throughout the development process. More than 80 percent of the top performers said they periodically tested and validated customer preferences during the development process, compared with just 43 percent of bottom performers. They were also twice as likely as the laggards to research what, exactly, customers wanted. That made them better able to identify and fix design concerns early on, minimizing project delays.

The Results: The teams in the study that practiced this kind of focus were 17 times as likely as the laggards to have projects come in on time, five times as likely to be on budget, and twice as likely to meet their company’s return-on-investment targets.

Miles’ Law and Six Other Maxims of Management

Rufus E. Miles, Jr. (1910-1996) was an assistant secretary under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and six H.E.W. secretaries. He developed from “memorable encounters with reality,” Miles’ Law and Six Other Maxims of Management. The law states: Where you stand depends on where you sit. He codified that which we should know intuitively. We see things and form judgments of things from our own perspective. We need to discipline ourselves to see things from other’s vantage point. To his law he added six maxims:

• Maxim 1: The responsibility of every manager exceeds his authority, and if he tries to increase his authority to equal his responsibility, he is likely to diminish both.

• Maxim 2: Managers at any level think they can make better decisions than either their superiors or their subordinates; most managers therefore seek maximum delegations from their superiors and make minimum delegations to their subordinates.

• Maxim 3: Serving more than one master is neither improper nor unusually difficult if the servant can get a prompt resolution when the masters disagree.

• Maxim 4: Since managers are usually better talkers than listeners, subordinates need courage and tenacity to make their bosses hear what they do not want to hear.

• Maxim 5: Being two-faced—one face for superiors and one for subordinates—is not a vice but a virtue for a program manager if he or she presents his or her two faces open and candidly.

• Maxim 6: Dissatisfaction with services tends to rise rapidly when the provider of the services becomes bureaucratically bigger, more remote, and less flexible, even if costs are somewhat lower.

These laws were originally published in September 1978. "The Origin and Meaning of Miles' Law," Public Administration Review, September – October 1978. 

CCChange Leadership

"When all is said and done, more is said than done."

Aesop, Greek philosopher, 530 BCE

This is certainly true on the subject of "change leadership."  Mountains of books have been written and yet effective organizational change remains one of the most daunting tasks facing a manager. 

After an organization completes the OGSP process, often change is required.  "Desired Change" is a one-page exercise we use as the last step in the OGSP process and it often results in a lot more "saying" than "doing" to borrow from our friend Aesop.

I recently completed a course at Stanford University taught by Rich Shavelson called Human Cognitive Abilities, and it was a life changing experience.  Rich was the previous Dean of the School of Education at Stanford and a world expert in "cognition" or how people think. Understanding how people think is the first step toward understanding how to change the way people think.

After studying the work of cognitive scientists like Robert Sternberg, Richard Nisbett, Howard Gardner and others the inescapable conclusion is that many models of "meta-cognition" exist ... and there is no absolutely one-right way people think.  However, within this survey of approaches to cognition, certain broad areas of influence emerge that provide clues to the key influences on thinking and how best to change thinking styles.

I call my model "CCChange Leadership"  To change the way an organization does work, a leader must change the way an organization collectively thinks. The key levers of change are:

Cognition - Every person brings unique thinking skills to their work.  This is a function of their individual cognitive capabilities and experiences.  The first step toward cognition change is recognizing that we are all unique thinkers and then committing to embracing these differences - growth through diversity of thought. 

This does not mean "intellectual anarchy."  Choices must be made to successfully run any business. Soliciting divergent opinions and evaluating them in a robust manner encourages everyone to think to the best of their ability, which means the organization thinks to the best of its collective ability.

Conation - This is a relatively new concept in psychometric research and it refers to an individual's motivation, will or drive to think. Curiosity, inquisitiveness, ambition, prudence are all indicator types of a person's conative skills.  The state of the art in conative measurement, at one point,  was Myers-Briggs (MBTI), a Jungian construct which places individuals on four scales (Extroversion/Introversion, Sensing/Intuition, Thinking/Feeling and Judgment/Perception).  There has been a modern revival of the five factor model proposed by the psychometrician L. L. Thurstone in the 1930's, called The "Big Five Personality Traits" (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism).

Personality traits, just as cognitive skill, are malleable and can change with appropriate stimulation.  Leaders directly affect conation by rewarding desired behaviors like curiosity, openness and interpersonal sensitivity.

Context - Environment is important.  People absorb their environment and play it back in their work product.  From inner city elementary schools to corporate board rooms, the context in which we think shapes our thinking.  Even something as simple as the color of the walls makes a difference - red walls encourage focus on details, while blue walls stimulate creativity.

Leaders can have a direct impact on context; they create the context while the organization creates the content.  Dev Patnaik, the principal at Jump Associates (an ideation and change management firm) and author of Wired to Care, says it quite succinctly - space matters.

Cognition, Conation and Context - three areas of high leverage which can lead to substantial change for an organization. And as Winston Churchill put it:

“To improve is to change. To be perfect is to have changed a lot.”

Don't Begin With the End in Mind

Stephen Covey - 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, one of the best selling self-help books of all time.

Habit #2 - Begin with the end in mind      As Covey's website puts it ...

Habit 2 is based on imagination--the ability to envision in your mind what you cannot at present see with your eyes. It is based on the principle that all things are created twice. There is a mental (first) creation, and a physical (second) creation. The physical creation follows the mental, just as a building follows a blueprint. If you don't make a conscious effort to visualize who you are and what you want in life, then you empower other people and circumstances to shape you and your life by default.

Good advice for planning your life.  Not such good advice for developing a Strategy.

Consider this Non-Sequitur cartoon from February 28, 2009: 

Deciding on the answer before you do the research makes for bad science and bad strategy.  Yes, sometimes you will be guided by activities which you know "must be done" but if this drive strategy you will never step back and take a broad view of the options and opportunities.

Strategy is about "How to Win" and often this demands a different approach to solving the problems than what has been tried (and failed) in the past.  In OGSP, beginning with the end in mind (the Plans) can only lead to more of the same.