If you are like me, you get an extra energy boost anytime you think about innovation, entrepreneurship or the idea of running a business. Since you are reading this, i am assuming you ARE the kind I just described! When you do get an opportunity to do something new, innovative and something that feels right, you will find yourself asking, “how do I judge if I am successful as a leader and doing the right thing”? My suggestion, read on.
Creating a strategy is the million $$ question you would have heard me and everyone talk about numerous times. The famous executives claim that they are strategists or visionaries, when in reality they are just experts at people management. There are very few people,however, who I would really consider as genuine entrepreneurs. To name a few, Jeff Bezoz, Steve Jobs, Bre Pettis, Thomas Edison and Benjamin Franklin. What makes these entrepreneurs special? Can you, me or anyone be as gifted as the individuals I just mentioned? I’ll be honest – probably not. However a majority of us can still execute well on a strategy or the needs of our business. The three recommended steps for this are:
- Know the Why: Before you start formulating your strategy, make sure you answer a question for yourself, “why are you doing what you are doing”? sounds familiar? If not, watch this first
- Determine the business goal: If you have answered the why, you also need to know what impact will the change you want to bring about will have. Keep in mind that this impact will sometimes be a monetary gain for your business but in other cases it may not be something as obvious and something that you need to make more tangible. For e.g. in 1971 Howard Schultz wanted to bring the experience of drinking coffee in a cafe in France to America. He ensured that every employee in a Starbucks store knew what this meant. When you walk in a Starbucks store, it would sometime mean that you have a special note on your coffee cup. Another time, it may mean that someone asks you about what music you want to listen to in the store. Once you’ve determine the measurement of success, make sure you break it into tangible measurable results. For Starbucks, this meant serving coffee for individuals in the flavors they liked, in a location close to where a customer may visit and be able to provide a great coffee drinking experience in a cozy familiar ambience. On the business side, this strategy meant the ability to set-up stores in easy publicly accessible locations, hire and train people to make good coffee quickly, be able to maintain a great ambience and be able to provide a great, consistent coffee drinking experience to its customers. Break it down one more level and you, like Howard Schultz would be able to estimate what it takes to open a store, how much would it cost and how much money you can make if you sell a cup of great coffee drinking experience.
- Execute, execute and execute: Sometime execution can be tricky, especially when you don’t know what is the next step. Here is a quick tip about where to start – identify the key aspects of your strategy you want to execute and put together a team of experts for each of them. From my past professional experiences, strategy and execution go hand-in-hand. If you create a good business strategy and don’t have a good team to execute, you are more than likely to fail. The most astute entrepreneurs and VC’s will always tell you, “An average idea with a great team has a better probability of success than a brilliant idea with an average team”. So, hiring the best people for your team is the first best step you can take. Moreover hire those who are passionate about why they do what they do and this why aligns with the goals of your organization.
So, you now have a strategy and you have put a great team together, how do you track your progress? This is where data comes in handy. The challenge with data however is to know what data to use. I call this the, “needle in the haystack” problem. Your team will invariably track tons of data. Its your responsibility as a leader to guide them towards meaningful data and how best to interpret it. Here you will not only need to act as the orchestrator of data collection but also the storyteller. Being able to tell a data driven story to report the progress of execution will come in very handy. Want to know more about data driven decision making, visit my previous blog
At the end, to answer the million $$ question I asked in the beginning about ways a leader can know he/she is doing the right thing – once he/she has done everything I mentioned above, the easiest way to know that they are on the right track is to look around carefully within their organization. If he/she sees incremental positive changes in the organization that help meet the business strategy and the leader did not have anything to do with directly, he/she owes themselves a cold beverage and a cheer for the evening!
Strategy? 
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