I talked to a student from one of our classes over a year after the class to see how things were going, and she told me a long story about how they were still debating the exact wording of objective number 9.  I asked her if they had reached their targets on any key measures and she said that they were still tweaking the measurement data definition.  So a year after the class, they were still just thinking about how to get started! In our recent webinar, we named this as one of our Top Eight Strategic Management Horrors, dubbing it the Wheel of Doom.  This horror is where the strategic management team begins the strategy formulation and planning process and is never heard from again.  They wordsmith the mission and vision statements for weeks.  They argue for months about the SWOT analysis.  They change strategic themes four times.  They refine the strategy map for months and months, and so on, without ever moving on. So what is the solution?  How do you get the hamster off that wheel? My first recommendation is to set a deadline.  In other words, if you start your strategic planning effort on September 1, set a deadline of, say, October 31.  On that date, everyone should agree that we will no longer wordsmith strategy but will instead discuss our performance results.  We won’t have to have the entire system done, but we will have at least a couple of important measures in place so that we can discuss how we are performing versus our strategic objectives. The second thing that is critical to always remember the old saying that perfect is the enemy of good. None of this is written in stone.  Strategic planning is an iterative process and so implementing an 80% solution quickly is better than drawing out the process trying to create the perfect system.  It’s easier to maintain momentum if you can maintain high energy and move on quickly. The third recommendation is to keep it simple.  Remember you can’t do everything for everyone.  Be a brutal minimalist at each step of the way to keep the number of objectives and measures down.  Then when you start executing strategy, focus on just a few key focus areas to start. Focus on improving 1-3 key processes that will drive the highest priority gaps in performance. Finally, it seems like common sense for people that are good with action items, but some folks are intimidated by long term projects and so they never get going.  They literally don’t know where to start. For those of you that struggle with that, the first step is to take those long-term, complex initiatives and break them down into shorter-term tasks.  Then get started on the first task. For more on how to improve strategic planning and move on to strategy execution, see The Institute Way: Simplify Strategic Planning and Management with the Balanced Scorecard.

The rock music industry in 1991 was in transition. The glam-rock and new wave music of the eighties was out and the industry had not yet settled on alternative rock and grunge as the iconic sound of the decade. And most shockingly, after almost forty years of fans preferring rock music to country music by a reliably constant percentage, sales figures were indicating that preferences were shifting from rock to country.  The industry made what seemed like a very logical assumption: the shift was obviously caused by the incredible crossover appeal of Country superstar Garth Brooks, who had recently taken the music industry by storm. They also took very predictable actions in response: several promising rock bands were dumped while resources were shifted to other country acts. In the short run, these actions seemed to reinforce the trend, with even more country music sales. But then something very strange happened: the sales numbers slowly drifted back to the exact pre-Garth Brooks percentages, with rock being preferred by the same percentage it had for decades. Industry analysts were left scratching their head. What just happened? What they found after some analysis was surprising. In March 1991, the industry began counting record sales using the Nielsen SoundScan system. Before that, sales were counted by calling stores across the U.S. to collect sales data – an incredibly ineffective collection method. Unfortunately, not all record stores were able to implement the SoundScan system immediately and continued using the old method for months or even years. On the other hand, one behemoth was online immediately: Wal-Mart. In the early days of SoundScan, every single time a Wal-Mart sales associate scanned a CD, it was counted by SoundScan and reordered, whereas record store sales (and reorders) were hit-and-miss. Here’s the thing that nobody had thought about before: in 1991, country music fans primarily bought their music from Wal-Mart and rock music fans primarily bought their music from record stores.  Once all of the record stores were online, it became clear that the appearance of a shift in preference was nothing more than a measurement data collection problem. The lesson to this story is that it is critical to resist the urge for a knee-jerk reaction to data such as dumping promising rock bands! There is a process discipline to performance analysis and improvement and the steps are simple. First, a Smart Chart should be used to make sure you are correctly interpreting the data. Then, a root-cause analysis is in order to understand why you are getting the results you are getting. This root cause analysis would have likely revealed the issue with the data in SoundScan being dominated by Wal-Mart sales. Finally, an improvement action plan is implemented and the results are monitored over time. To learn more about how to interpret, report and react to your performance data, see the KPI Professional Certification Workshop, or see The Institute Way: Simplify Strategic Planning and Management Using the Balanced Scorecard.