When you look at successful companies today, companies which are either young born-digital wonders or older born-analog top-performers, they all share the same common trait. They all have pushed their own boundaries towards new, uncharted business territories where they have fulfilled new and unserved customer needs.
What made their dream “scary” and what made their journey a “leap of faith” is this: they did not have a clear end-state in mind, they did not know exactly what they would find. What they were sure of was that they had to take this journey to become the market leaders they aspired to be. As Jeff Bezos puts it, “It is always Day 1”: the journey never ends, and you never know what is ahead.
So how can your organization and your company take the same “leap of faith”? This is a critical part of your company’s journey, and we have identified three important steps that will help you finding the keys to your company’s inner power and kick-start your journey towards your vision.
Well applied, these steps will not only help you define your company’s strategy but will also be relevant for you to launch business development initiatives, or even agile transformation sprints.
Step 1 – Build your common insights platform
The first step is to align your whole organization on a common platform that will allow it to jump into its transformation journey. This platform should be built on facts and insights.
By combining facts, insights with your organization’s market sense and customer knowledge, you will build a strong and stable platform to start your journey from. A platform that will be very difficult to undermine or to weaken.
Of course, gathering of facts and insights is not only about the obvious market analysis, trend outlooks and competitor benchmarks. It must also include much more valuable, customer centric insights, gathered through customer data analysis, customer surveys, customer focus groups, customer interviews or mystery shopping.
However, one key success factor is to avoid the trap of using this as being the answer to your company’s future. Like Steve Jobs, we acknowledge the fact that customers cannot want something they have never seen. But what we know is that this platform will align your forces and bring together the inner transformation power of your company.
Gathering these facts and insights will be the foundation of your transformation journey.
Step 2 – Articulate your ambition
The second step to prepare for your journey is to articulate your ambition. The starting point will be your company’s purpose. But this will never be enough. You need to put your ambition into words.
This is the scary part. And this is where your business acumen, completed with some data analysis and scenario-based discussions, will be key. Your intuition will guide you, and the goals you define must first seem unachievable. Well-articulated, they will stretch and motivate your organization to achieve great results.
Because you cannot predict where your journey will take you, you need to define measurable goals that focus on your intentions. Goals such as “in 3 years, 50% of our business will come from products we do not sell today” or “in 2 years, our customers will see us as their most innovative partner” or “our employees’ engagement and leadership will improve every year” or “we always act on customer feedback”.
With your intuition and business acumen, identify the levers that will make your business successful and translate them into your ambition. You should use data analysis, what-if scenarios, cross-functional workshops and inspirational interactions to achieve it. This step 2 is the toughest of all three, but we know that it is key to your organization leaving its comfort zone, and pushing towards big enough dreams.
Step 3 - Turn your ambition into concrete and tangible strategic shifts
Now that you have built a strong and stable platform and that you have defined your ambition, you need to make it concrete and tangible for your organization.
What we have learned, partnering with our customers, is that strategic shifts describing a “From state” and a “To state” are often very good ways to describe what you aim to achieve. They put the scary, seemingly unattainable ambition within much closer reach. They set the priorities straight and show in a very simple way what is expected from everyone.
The best strategic shifts are the ones that turn your company from a silo, inside-out company to a customer-centric company. Simple examples are “From Product focused to Solution provider” or “From Price driven to Value driven”.
Of course, these strategic shifts need to be explained and described. But you will find it an easy exercise when everyone has become aligned through your common platform and ambition.
And now, let the journey begin!
Finally, based on facts, insights, a clear ambition and explicit strategic shifts, your organization is now ready to take its “leap of faith”. Let the transformation begin! We recognize that 95% of the job is still to be done, starting with a strong business plan... But with these initial, well established 5%, we know your journey will be so much more efficient and successful!
If you want to know more about how we helped our customers define their strategy and supported their business development, please contact me.
