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All,

I’m trying to get a good handle on the characteristics of a well defined company priority. To me, priorities such as increase sales, reduce costs, improve customer satisfaction are too high level, difficult to action at the departmental levels and therefore ineffective.
The solution may be to simply use the MT (measureable and time based) goal format but in the context of an overall company priority.
Ideally some fellow members could share examples of a company priority that you’ve found to be effective in driving organizational alignment and effective execution.  A brief explanation of why you found the example effective would be helpful.
Thanks

David

bflynn's picture

From a strategy standpoint, setting priorities isn't something anyone else can do for you. It will depend on your company and your (unique?) situation. You're correct in thinking that "increase sales / reduce costs" are not priorities. They are outcomes and everyone wants to do them. To get to your stategy of how, you've got to think very clearly about your business. So, an example: I'll imagine a services business, which in general means that a lot of our future sales comes from our reputation. If we want to increase sales, we need to have a better reputation and make sure that reputation is known to our customers. How can get improve? We know that there's value chain for a services business than goes Better Employees -> Better Engagements -> Happy Customers -> Repeat Business/Referrals/References -> Higher Revenues. From that, we can conclude that we need to focus on better employees 1) Improve quality of employees. - Hire better people? - Train? - Trim the bottom 10% and replace them? 2) Simplify our service offering so it's something our existing employees can do better. 3) Better marketing that tells our customers about our success stories while not minimizing our non-success stories. How about reducing costs? - Hire out of college and train people vs hiring superstars - Simplify our service offering - Trim the bottom 10% and - - replace - - have everyone else pick up the slack. So which onese of these combinations should be our priority? Get out excel and start building some models that are specific to your company. Make your best guess when you don't have the data you want, your educated guess is probably pretty good. I would emphasize long term value with an eye toward a sustainable process. Ultimately it's probably something that only you can do because your company's situation is not like anyone else's.

bflynn's picture

 

From a strategy standpoint, setting priorities isn't something anyone else can do for you. It will depend on your company and your (unique?) situation.
You're correct in thinking that "increase sales / reduce costs" are not priorities. They are outcomes and everyone wants to do them. To get to your stategy of how, you've got to think very clearly about your business.
An example: I'll imagine a services business, which in general means that a lot of our future sales comes from our reputation. If we want to increase sales, we need to have a better reputation and make sure that reputation is known to our customers.
How can get improve? We know that there's value chain for a services business than goes Better Employees -> Better Engagements -> Happy Customers -> Repeat Business/Referrals/References -> Higher Revenues. From that, we can conclude that we need to focus on better employees
 Improve quality of employees.

    1. Hire better people?
    2. Train?
    3. Trim the bottom 10% and replace them?
  1. Simplify our service offering so it's something our existing employees can do better.
  2. Better marketing that tells our customers about our success stories while not minimizing our non-success stories.

How about reducing costs?
1.     Hire out of college and train people vs hiring superstars
4.     Simplify our service offering
5.     Trim the bottom 10% and
1.     replace
2.     have everyone else pick up the slack.
So which ones of these combinations should be our priority? Get out excel and start building some models that are specific to your company. Make your best guess when you don't have the data you want, your educated guess is probably pretty good. I would emphasize long term value with an eye toward a sustainable process. Ultimately it's probably something that only you can do because your company's situation is not like anyone else's.