Posts Taged value-creation

Would you be disappointed if 2020 looked exactly like 2019?

September 13, 2019 Tags: , , , , , , , Mike Chirveno

I’ve been asking myself that question. And now is the right time to ask it. The time between now and mid-December has been called the “100 day sprint” or “the most important 100 days of the year”. Why? Because everyone is back in the office after summer, back in the routine and hunkered down for a busy three and a half months. For some companies, it’s the run-up to a busy holiday season. For others, it’s time to prepare 2020 strategic plans and operating budgets.

In a very real way, the foundation for your organization’s 2020 is going to be laid in the next 100 days. Do it well and 2020 could be your best year yet. Do it poorly or don’t do it at all and 2020 might be just a carbon copy of 2019.

So, what should you be looking at right now? I have a longer list, but if you can’t swing a full-blown strategic planning exercise (which, in my opinion, you should commit to), I’d turn my attention to these four items first –

  • Ask hard talent questions – Do you have the right people in the organization who can take you where you want to go in the next 2-3 years? If not, can you develop existing staff or do you need additional talent? Do you have chronic personnel problems you’ve been reluctant to deal with – people who are poisoning the culture or who are consistently under-performing? If so, what are you going to do about it? Are there one, two or three people, who, if they left, would put your organization at risk? If so, what have you done to mitigate that risk?
  • Gauge organizational health – Is the company culture healthy? For example, is there clear and complete communication up and down the org chart? Is there transparency so that people have the information they need to make good decisions? Are you and are the other leaders in the organization setting a good example in your approach to work and in your interactions with every stakeholder group?
  • Reexamine value creation activities – Do you know the key drivers of the value surplus for your customers? When was the last time you examined your entire value creation chain looking for opportunities to improve vendor performance, inventory management, cross-department collaboration, processes, quality and logistics?
  • Measure what matters – When was the last time you revisited the metrics on your balanced scorecard? Are they really indicative of organizational health? Are your systems providing data quickly enough and to the right people so your field decision-making is data-driven and your longer-term decision-making is data-supported?

Inertia is strong. The pull of ordinary daily days will drag you right into the holiday season before you’ve taken any time to plan for 2020.

I’ve rewritten this last paragraph several times. Originally it said that you’re busy and looking at just these four things is better than doing nothing at all – that’s true. But, I want to encourage you to do the hard thing and take a much deeper dive into your organization. Don’t make 2020 slightly better than 2019. Make it much better by critically and accurately evaluating the current state of your organization, thoughtfully envisioning what you want 2020 to look like and deliberately crafting a plan to get you from the former to the latter.

Flywheel and V-REEL

June 9, 2019 Tags: , , , , , Mike Chirveno

I recently read Jim Collins newest book, Turning the Flywheel, in which he drills down on the Flywheel concept introduced in Good to Great. For a quick refresher, the flywheel for an organization is a virtuous cycle of actions, each building on the previous, that, when executed consistently and with excellence, build self-sustaining momentum for the organization. To illustrate, I’ve included the flywheel for my company below.

ClearVision Consulting Flywheel

You can see how each action propels the organization into the next. As intensity and depth of effort increase on every rotation, velocity also increases, accelerating the growth of the organization and making it healthier with each turn. As the flywheel turns faster and faster, the weight of the flywheel, which early on seemed to work against you as you struggled to execute each action, now begins to work for you and the flywheel becomes almost unstoppable.

I was introduced to the flywheel several years ago when I first read Good to Great. Like a lot of Jim Collins’ material, it’s an enduring bit of business genius. But when I revisited the topic this time through the new book, I couldn’t help but think of how well it paired with the V-REEL framework from David Flint’s excellent 2018 Book Think Beyond Value.

In Think Beyond Value, Flint introduces the V-REEL framework – a tool that helps business owners and managers think through their organization’s value creation activities using fives lenses –

  • How do you create value?
  • How rare is that value?
  • What factors erode that value?
  • What factors enable that value?
  • How long can the value be sustained?

It didn’t take long to make the connection between the two tools. The flywheel is a virtuous cycle of value creation activities (Flint’s first question). Those activities only remain valuable as they differentiate the organization and make their product or service unique or desirable in the marketplace (Flint’s second question). Stewards of the organization must constantly be vigilant for those factors, both internal and external, that impede or diminish the effectiveness of the flywheel activities (Flint’s third question). At the very same time, they need to infuse those flywheel activities with resources that make them more effective and efficient (Flint’s fourth question). And finally, stewards of the organization must ensure that the flywheel activities continue to build sustained competitive advantage for the organization – that is, they still have meaning in the current competitive environment (Flint’s fifth question).

There are only a handful of business activities that approach “holy grail” status and value creation is one of them. I hope introducing these two tools helps you step back and take a fresh look at your value creation chain. A 500-word post doesn’t come close to doing justice to either of these two books, so I hope I’ve sufficiently whetted your appetite to hit your favorite bookstore (brick and mortar or online) and pick them up. Here they are on Amazon:

Turning the Flywheel

Think Beyond Value