Inspired.

Logical.
Strategy That Works.
Harness your creativity and reason for winning strategy

------------
Mark North

Illustrated by Zack North

Inspired. Logical. Strategy That Works .
Copyright © 2017 by Mark North

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means
without written permission from the author.

Published by North Creative, LLC

May 2017
 Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1- ​ Principles of Strategy That Works

Chapter 2- ​ How to Develop Goals that Matter

Chapter 3- ​ SWOT Analysis and Who Are Those

People Trying to Eat Our Lunch?
Chapter 4- ​ Big Ideas Are Needed. How to
Generate Inspired and BIG IDEAS
Chapter 5- ​ Logical Proofs. Bullet Proof Your
BIG IDEAS
Chapter 6- ​ Strategy Without Action is Dead.
How to Create Workable Action Steps
Chapter 7- ​ Putting the Strategy on Paper
Chapter 8- Into the Arena. Presenting the
Strategy to your Audience
Chapter 9- The Career Saving Power of
Checklists
Chapter 10- After Implementation. Review and
Tweak
Afterword ​
 Introduction
It is humbling to read the Declaration of Independence, a document with few rivals in world history.
How did our Founding Fathers come up with such brilliance, writing from their perspectives, influenced
by their time in history and personal experience? Historians tell us that Thomas Jefferson wrote the
Declaration between June 11 and June 28, 1776. It was then reviewed by a committee comprised of
members of Congress, and then adopted on July 4, 1776. The whole process was completed in less than a
month.
This is staggering in today’s context, when a three-line email to a company’s existing clients telling them
about a benefit they will automatically receive for free would take about as long as it took Jefferson and
friends to hammer out their momentous document. Nowadays, work related writing goes through
numerous edits, approvals, compliance reviews, maybe legal takes a look, then the graphics, disclosures,
fonts and who gets the email and when they get it are all discussed and, eventually, approved.
This is our world, making it harder than ever to get things done. I’ll go a step further and say that one of
the most striking aspects of most businesses is the incredible low level of actually getting anything
completed and implemented. I know people work hard. In fact, wherever you are between that first job
and retirement, your professional life may well be characterized by tons of effort, excessive traveling,
late nights in the home office, and the usual career ups and downs. Despite all the effort, all too often, one
year blends into the next without significant accomplishment.
For some of us, we see the aircraft carrier of our organization steaming along, making sound returns and
selling into a bright future. We may fit in somewhere as a component of the overall machinery and
wonder if our individual effort produces a noticeable difference. Just as often, you can be in the forefront
of your business unit, fired up, no end to the hours you are willing to put in and frustrated by your new
ideas going untapped.
I have had the great fortune to live and work in special cities in the U.S., including New York, Los
Angeles and Miami and wonderful places outside the U.S. such as Rio de Janeiro and London. From
these bases, my work responsibilities called for business travel to most European and Latin American
countries, and several capitals in Asia as well. We live in a fascinating world and I developed a deep
respect for the people and cultures in these marvelous locations. At the same time, in my job-related
roles, I was blessed with significant management and strategy development responsibilities in my job-
related roles. Studying the writings of acknowledged leaders in the field of strategy and my own
development and implementation of strategy in real world, workplace settings provides the basis for this
book.
This is a book, maybe more of an instructional manual, about how to accomplish things through effective
strategy development. As the title of the book indicates, this book is about coming up with workable
strategy through inspired ideas and logical testing of those ideas.
For most companies, including those that are highly successful, there are only a few people who create
strategy and design the action steps to achieve strategic goals. Some companies and business units do not
have anyone doing this, instead relying on past strategy and a core business run by competent workers
who churn out whatever the company makes or does and basically carry the enterprise on their backs.
Why don’t we see more emphasis on strategy? One reason is that companies and organizations are often
mired in a bureaucracy designed by bureaucrats. People get along in their careers, find that keeping one’s
head down to earn a salary for as long as possible is not only allowed but encouraged. Inertia rules the
day. You may even be in an organization where coming up with good ideas and a potentially winning
strategy is fundamentally misunderstood or discouraged.
There is a dichotomy here. Despite the obstacles and overall culture of non-achievement, the only way to
get ahead in life or business, is to come up with strategy and then make it work. Whatever the reasons
certain people and businesses don’t pursue achievement is beside the point. The point is this: how about
you, do you want to make things happen, be the person able to develop a strategy, get it implemented and
see it lead to success? I sure hope so, and I’ll tell you why. We do not live forever, we really don’t, and
time is incredibly precious. I know I waste time, and regret that fact tremendously. Let’s start this
journey by agreeing to be less wasteful of our time, because I believe accomplishing goals is fundamental
to our satisfaction at work and joy in our lives. Without a sense of achievement, we are unhappy and
unfulfilled.
Few people will disagree with all this. If you go to a book store, (if you can find a book store), or if you
go online to whatever provider of books is prevalent when you read this, you will be able to find
hundreds of books on strategy, effectiveness, success and related topics. People even read some of them.
However, they may as well not bother since there is little application of what they read. Again, we could
pose any number of reasons for this, but instead how about these two:
• Do people really want to make a difference?
• Do people know how to make a difference?
Replace “people” with “you” in the above bullet points and ask these questions of yourself.
You must want to develop and implement strategy or you would not have paid for this book, borrowed it
from a friend or skimmed it while waiting for your unique coffee beverage that makes you, you.
In this book, you will find out how to develop effective strategy that can be implemented for positive and
measurable change. That’s a promise and worth far more than the cost of this book.
The idea behind this book is to give you practical, usable and effective tools for a process that goes from
defining what should get done, to creating the mechanism for achieving those goals, to evaluating the
effectiveness of your work. There are ten steps to the process, each with a tool to enhance effectiveness
and speed things up and a clear result/output from the application of the tool. These ten steps are
summarized below:
Step 1
Process : Understanding the keys to effective strateg y
Tool : Principles of “Strategy That Works” and the Business Viability Assessment
Output : Application of Principles and completed Business Viability Assessment
Step 2
Process : Develop Goals that Matter
Tool : Goal Generator Process
Output : Issues, Questions, Problems, Desires, Result vs Desired Result, Goals
Step 3
Process : SWOT Analysis and the Competition
Tool : SWOT Analysis Format, Competitor Analysis Format
Output : Completed SWOT Analysis, completed Competitor Analysis
Step 4
Process : How to Generate an Inspired and Big Idea
 Tool : Idea Generation Process
Output : Inspired Strategic Ideas and Hypotheses
Step 5
Process : Logical Proofs. Bullet Proof the Big Idea
Tool : Logical Proofs Process and Format
Output : Logically Defended Strategic Statements for Reaching Identified Goals
Step 6
Process : Strategy Without Action is Dead. How to Create Effective Action Steps
Tool : Strategy to Action Process and Format
Output : Written Action Steps
Step 7
Process : Putting the Strategy on Paper
Tool : Strategic Plan Format
Output : Written Strategy Documen t
Step 8
Process : Into the Arena. Presenting the Strategy
Tool : Strategic Plan Presentation Format
Output : Slide Format for Effective Strategy Presentation
Step 9
Process : The Career Saving Power of Checklists
Tool : Checklist Building Concept and Format
Output : Applicable Checklists
Step 10
Process : After Implementation. Review and Tweak
Tool : Strategy Tracking Process and Scorecard
Output : Strategic Goals vs Actual Results, Scorecard, Written Modifications to Pla n

I tried to keep the book concise, and included tools and user-friendly examples for each chapter. There is
a fair amount of effort you will need to expend as you implement the concepts found in each chapter but
the results are spectacular and worth every second you spend moving through the process.
A word on “success”. What I believe to be a relevant accomplishment will differ from yours, not better
and not worse, just different. Success is a mixture of the objective and subjective, with the definition of
success as varied as there are people and circumstances.
You have all heard the phrase, “The end justifies the means.” Well, I believe the opposite is true, “The
means justifies the end.” What I mean by that is, your “end”, your goal, is worthy, as long as the way you
get there is correct, honest and ethical. In other words, comparing your goals to the objectives others
desire is pointless, since we all have valid and differing views of what success means. How you get
there is what matters, and a life well lived, by definition, is success.
Let me take a breath and hop off my soapbox so we can move along.
What we can agree on is we all want to accomplish things and achieve our version of success. Success
for a 15-year-old girl may be making the J.V. Tennis team at her high school. For another 15-year-old girl
it may be making the Varsity team, and for a 15-year-old prodigy it may be skipping high school altogether
and going pro. For another it may be reducing the hours spent on tennis to raise money for a mission trip
to Nicaragua. The key is developing the ability to set a goal and creating a strategy that leads to its
achievement.
For this book, the focus is largely on our working lives, though the connections to personal life are many
and natural. I believe you will see the tools in this book can be applied to anyone, any time something
needs to get done, no matter how small or large the desired end result.
So, don’t give in, up or out. This book will help you to know how to produce inspired and logical
strategy that works and give you the confidence to make it happen.
 Chapter 1
Principles of “Strategy that Works”
I am not a gambler by any means. However, I have been to a horse racing track a few times, utilizing a
betting technique a genius friend of mine developed. My best horse race win ever, the one I most
remember, was when Beth’s Regret went off at 112 to 1 and came in a winner. Why did I pick her? Based
totally on objective facts. It was a maiden race, with no horse ever winning previously and most had
never even run in a race before, including Beth’s Regret. Horse racing mavens generally bet more on
horses with experience, which is usually a good idea, but in this case, no horse with a previous race had
ever won, and they also had performed poorly according to the formula my friend concocted. I figured
the ones with experience actually had the least chance of winning. My hypothesis was that any of the
horses that had never run previously could win the race, and then bet on the one with the longest odds.
But due to the uncertainty, I only bet $2. Betting more than $2. would have been foolhardy in view of the
environment and unpredictability of the situation, (and the fact I was a college student with no money).
Beth’s Regret came around to win by a neck. Clearly, a key to this strategy was the small bet; I would not
have minded losing $2. in that situation. I am sure others lost significant amounts of money looking at the
same facts and putting them together differently.
Based upon the result, you could say my “Strategy for Betting” on that particular race was spot on.
We normally think of “strategy” as something bigger than throwing down a few dollars on a horse race,
and indeed it most often is.
What is “strategy” anyway?
This is a good question. The word and concept as used today is a variation from the original, which was
based on military tactics and battle craft. An accepted definition of “strategy” goes something like, “the
application of strength, advantage, differentiating factors against weakness, disadvantage, or sameness.”
Sun Tzu in the “Art of War”, is quoted, “So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong, and strike at what
is weak. ”
I think this is a good characterization of “strategy”, staying true to the word’s military roots and easily
applied to the “battle” of business and life.
In my experience, it is necessary to round out the concept of strategy by adding in the variable of certainty
or likelihood. In other words, what is the percentage chance of winning with a given strategy?
That’s where logic comes into play. In a way, a strategy is like a hypothesis in scientific theory, and like a
hypothesis, a strategy should represent a well-informed guess of future outcomes based upon a robust set
of facts and highly probable perceptions.
The less sure you are of the facts, the less confident you can be about the predictive ability of the
hypothesis, and the less you should be willing to “bet” on the outcome in terms of investment, resource
allocation and time.
Similarly, good facts can be overcome by excessively unstable environments; economic, client based, and
any number of other factors. The less stability and certainty there is in the environment that affects your
business, the more or better facts you should have, the shorter should be your time horizon and the smaller
amount of resources you should be willing to commit.
Along with logic, ideas are fundamental to good strategy. Inspired ideas, where there is an “aha”
moment, are particularly valuable, (along with being rare and quite thrilling to experience!).
The combination of inspired ideas and logic is the
cornerstone of effective strategy
Before we go any further, there is an imposing challenge to strategy development I am going to pass on to
you. That is, very few people pay more than lip service to “strategy”, despite what they may say or how
much they should care.
In fact, I think strategy is a lot like poetry; people say they like it, they think they should like it, but, if they
are honest, don’t like or read it. In fact, it is generally the case that the only person who does like it and
read it is the one writing it! More often than not, when I am asked to develop a strategy for a company or
a business line, I soon find myself to be the most concerned with the opportunities uncovered, pitfalls to
be avoided, implementation of a strategy and the possible outcomes.
I think a lack of desire to plunge into written strategies is in part human nature and somewhat due to the
type of people that reach senior positions or ownership in companies. People generally move up the
ladder, or branch out into their own enterprise, based on effective business development, ability to
multitask and a lot of effort. Some excellent managers seem to effectively utilize a tendency toward
ADHD. The mix of factors that often lead to management or ownership positions can be at odds with the
hours of focused thinking strategy development, or even reading a strategic plan, requires.
My advice is to use this to your benefit. If others fail to be fascinated about putting winning strategies in
place, you have a competitive advantage if you can think and write strategically. Just be aware that once
you come up with a solid document with the power to unleash all kinds of hidden potential, you may find
that others may not be captivated by your words, even if obligated to consider them by their job function.
At this point, I want to give you a framework for strategy: the “ Guiding Principles of Strategy
Development” . These Principles are fundamental to the way business, (and life), opportunities are
identified and developed for consistent success over both the short and long term. If followed, these
Principles can be used for the creation of an effective strategy for a company overall, for each individual
unit, and even for yourself. Big lead in, but principles are principles after all and deserve a drum roll.
The Guiding Principles of Strategy Development
provide a framework for developing your company or
business unit strategy

Principle Number 1 :
1) An effective strategy for the company overall and each of its business units must:
a) Accurately and honestly define the current situation – where are we right now
b) Clearly define what we are trying to do
c) Clearly define what the company overall, and each business unit, should be trying to do
d) Decide if where we are, is where we want to be. Is there a gap between the desired
and actual result?
Bullet point “a”, “Accurately and honestly define the current situation”, is fairly obvious, however, the
ability to accurately and honestly define the current situation is more difficult than you would expect.
People find it trying to define the current situation if it highlights mistakes, failures or faulty policy. We
humans are tremendous at self-rationalization, finding creative explanations for why things don’t go as
expected, and highly unlikely to see the problem in the mirror. You may have seen the purposeful
obfuscation of the truth at the Management and Board levels, maybe even with anyone looking to identify
the true state of affairs actually putting his or her job at risk.
If you are in the type of company or organization that cannot arrive at an honest appraisal of the current
situation, or even prevents this from occurring, consider leaving or at the least working hard to change
this. You will never have a winning strategy in that type of environment.
Ever wonder why the public school system in many states, childhood services, FEMA, the health system,
(your favorite sports team), can’t seem to get the way forward correct, even though the major problems
appear obvious? It is simply because they do not start with an honest and objective description of the
actual situation, which means it is impossible for any solution proposed to lead to desired results.
Apply this to yourself, or if that is uncomfortable, to a friend. Say this friend has a daughter who is
considering colleges in her junior year of high school. She is a B- student with a smattering of school
activities and the usual halfhearted “service hours”. The parents want her to go to a top tier university.
They tell you about their intention to push for one of those hallowed institutions and you have to bite your
tongue because it is obvious that her GPA will not fly at the Ivies. The entire exercise is doomed to
failure, disappointment and negative family emotion, though not before a lot of money is spent visiting
colleges, taking crash SAT courses and working with a college selection “coach”.
This family has two choices: invent a time machine and go back to the 6th grade and start laying an
academic base that can support their fantasy, or look at great schools where their daughter can matriculate
and achieve her goals. Give up? The answer is option two, with the exercise ideally an opportunity to
establish her educational goals and develop a renewed work ethic.
If you cannot get your company, unit or friend to be honest about the current situation, focus on what is in
your ability to manage and control, and develop an objective and accurate assessment of that situation.
This should take a surprisingly short amount of time since we already know where we are, we just need to
apply a bit of thought to spell it out.
Focus on what is in your ability to manage and control
when developing strategy
Now the difference between what we are trying to do, “b”, “Clearly define what we are trying to do” ,
and what we “should be trying to do ”, “c”, may seem redundant at first. However, there is a difference.
What we are trying to do is often an unintentional and evolutionary move away from what we should be
trying to do, as described in the company’s or business unit’s mission.
For example, you may have a stated purpose of financing single family homes in a clearly defined
geographic area. Over time, this becomes difficult due to competition from other finance providers, and
your team begins to stray to adjacent areas, and even picks up a few loans in other counties and a couple
in a major metropolis in another state. At this point, you are trying to book these loans, but should you
be? If you have never redefined your strategy, it is highly likely you will see loan losses from the non-
core business you are now pursuing. In many cases the correct strategy would be to come up with ways to
beat the competition for the business you want rather than flee from the challenge, follow the easier path
and start the process of creating your next round of problem debts and loan workouts. You cannot always
avoid the impact of business cycles, but you will surely be impacted if you stray from a strategy that was
specifically put in place to manage through inevitable change.
For the last point, “d”, “Is there a gap between the desired and actual result?”, there are a few ways to
think about the gap. It can be something like “Reality vs. the Vision”, or the “Result We Got vs. The
Result We Wanted”, or “Where We Are vs. Where We Want to Be”.
For example, if a bank wanted to open 500 new accounts and opened 250, the gap would be 250. This is
an easy illustration, but the point is that it is imperative to define what actually exists, or happened, and
what you want or expected. Most of the time, the gap is discernable, with the why and how the gap
occurred more a subject for debate.
You can see the aspects of the first Principle are closely related, basically an assessment of the present:
where are we, what are we doing, what should we be doing and what and how big is the difference
between what we want and what we have. Again, the key is being honest and objective in the
determination of these aspects.
Principle number 2 :
2) An effective strategy must answer:
a) What can we do best ? Where can we be first ? (Based on SWOT and the advantages
we have)
b) Are we willing and able to commit to a given business with passion, products, services
and resources ?
c) Do we understand and have the ability to turn on the drivers of a given business?
d) What do we value , ethically, internally and as required by the regulatory environment?
I think of Principle 2 as a “Business Viability Assessment”. An illustration of this Principle is found
below: (This tool is provided at the end of the chapter and explained further)
Test any new business initiatives and review
your current business lines by putting them
through the Business Viability Assessment
Whenever you look at potential courses of action, these questions should be asked and answered. Some
business leaders think of, “Where can I both have a good client and be a good client?”, or, “Where can I
be the top, or one of the top, providers of my particular service or product?”
We see this on an individual level all the time. A left-handed relief pitcher when evaluating potential
teams to join will examine the pitching staffs of the various teams, the batting orders these teams will face
over the course of the year, and the configuration of the home field. If a team is stacked with lefties and
the division has primarily right hand power hitters, he would be unwise to choose them over a team with
few southpaws, lefty power in the division and a Yankee Stadium type ballpark.
Similarly, going into a market, geography or competitive environment should be guided by the ability to
make a splash, be key, win, big fish/small pond; or other analogy you may favor.
For “b”, “Are we willing and able to commit to a given business with passion, products, services,
resources ?”, the concept is to only pursue something you are willing to strive for with a passionate use
of your time and resources. We all know people who became lawyers because they came from a family
of lawyers and were coerced into doing what was expected of them. Many of them get through law
school and pass the Bar with little problem. Then, a few years later, they quit and become ski instructors
or woodworkers or teachers. People jump all over them telling them how wrong they were to throw
away their former career and perceived big bucks, eventually stopping when they see the smile of
fulfillment on the face of the recipient of all this well-intentioned commentary.
The point is, your business, and you personally, need to have a passion and a willingness to commit
unreservedly to a goal or it will not happen. You should be able to easily explain why you want to do
something by referring to clear examples of this passion and commitment. For example, if you run a
successful Wealth Management business dealing with foreign nationals from Latin America, you are
highly likely to apply the same enthusiasm to a target market in Spain and Portugal. On the other hand,
thinking your original market is drying up, and deciding to try Wealth Management to U.S. persons
residing in Utah will be a stretch, if not in conflict with Principle 2, and for sure with Principle 1.
Understanding the drivers of a business is vital to its success, reflected in “c”; “Do we understand and
have the ability to turn on the drivers of a given business?” When I talk to business developers and their
managers, and one or two steps up from the managers, I will usually get a significantly different version of
what makes the business work. The business developer may say, “As long as we price the sneakers under
the competition, I can sell,” the manager may say, “As long as I can drive my salespeople with the carrot
and the stick, I can hit quotas,” His boss may say, “As long as I can cut good deals with the retailers for
product positioning, the sneakers will sell,” and the woman overseeing design may say, “as long as I can
stay ahead of the style changes in this industry, people will want our sneakers.”
Which of them is right? Probably all of them, and there are other key pieces, no doubt. So, someone has
to put all of these drivers down on paper and evaluate their relative strengths and the company’s ability to
make these drivers happen. In other words, how to drive the drivers. Think of it the other way around;
how can you be successful if you do not know what makes the business work? Any success will be
haphazard and ephemeral .
There may be numerous drivers of your business’s
success. You need to know them and their
relative impact on business generation
Finally, for Principle 2 “d”, “What do we value , ethically, internally and as required by the regulatory
environment?” A company, and individuals, are guided by values and a set of ethics, or determination of
what is right and wrong. Some of these are purely internal, self-imposed constructs, while others are
incorporations of the legal and regulatory environment surrounding a particular business. In any consumer
related activity, there is a mountain of legal and regulatory compliance requirements that must be
followed. On the other hand, a company deciding to only use supplies recovered from recycled waste is
acting upon an internal view of what is right for them.
This is key because you cannot set goals that are in opposition to the company’s value structure, either in
the goals themselves or in the way the goals are achieved.
As an aside, my experience is that most small to medium sized companies have a strong set of ethics and
are governed by a set of laws and regulations that work to preserve their integrity and protect their
clients. However, within those companies, you may find quite nasty individuals who are somehow able
to exercise their own value system, which can be somewhere between unpleasant and extremely
hazardous to the company and all it touches. One has only to look at the financial crisis of 2008 to see
how a few people can affect so many. Hidden and open agendas, self-centeredness, a view that life is a
zero-sum game, and any number of other personality flaws can survive and even thrive within an
organization. Identify and monitor the behavior of these people so you can steer clear of their ingrained
desire to see things go badly.
In any case, for you, figure out what the company’s value structure is, along with your own, and clearly
incorporate that value structure into any goal, or action toward that goal, you develop.
One piece of advice I often share with people starting their careers is: do the right thing, first because it is
the right thing to do, and, second, do the right thing because sooner or later you will be brought up before
a boss, friend, board, panel or Grand Jury if you don’t !
Principle 3 is comprised of several sub principles that may be adjusted through your own experience.
The third Guiding Principle of Strategy Development is:
3) An effective strategy must internalize the following core characteristics:
a) Extreme Discipline , in terms of intense ambition to succeed and the self-control to
ensure the company is around to enjoy the success
b) Productive Paranoia , aggressively and proactively striving for positive change to
overcome the dangers of inertia and in recognition that even the most successful and well-
built structures, if left alone, will eventually slow and fail; entropy.
 c) Tested Creativity . Utilize low-cost trials to see what works then follow up with
larger commitments of resources when results are more predictable. (Bullets followed by
Cannon Balls)
d) Fix and tweak . Reject, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Fix ineffective businesses and
tweak successful businesses, even at the expense of affecting, possibly cannibalizing,
existing good business lines. If you do not adjust, someone else will , resulting in a loss of
market share.
e) Build something enduring and worthwhile that creates pride in the effort, greater than
one’s own personal success.
f) The future is unknowable . However, always look ahead to what you believe is coming
next
g) A focus on people: Intelligent, flexible, hardworking and committed people can
overcome whatever the future may offer
h) Strategy without action is dead
I am sure you are thinking those are a lot “core characteristics”! You are right; however, these are
important and need to be internalized into the approach you take in developing a strategy intended to get
things done.
Let’s have a brief look at these core characteristics.
For bullet point “a”, “Extreme Discipline , in terms of intense ambition to succeed and the self-control
to ensure the company is around to enjoy the success”, refers to attributes vital for effective strategy
creation. I have no apology, or way around this. Sometimes we overuse sports analogies because they
work so well, and it is true there is a simplicity to physical achievement that is hard to replicate in the
workplace. However, the same discipline, ambition to succeed and self-control that enables Ichiro
Suzuki to put together a 25-year professional baseball career is found in the workplace more often than
you may think. The problem is we tend to smother these characteristics rather than give them their head.
Why is this? Well, anyone can tell you that a disciplined and ambitious person with a high degree of self-
control will quickly draw the attention of those around who are challenged by this behavior. The stories
in the public-school system of principals telling new teachers to “back off”, “these kids are just dropouts
waiting to happen”, and “you are being foolish to try to actually teach them”, are all true. How many
times have you heard, “That’s good enough”, “Don’t overdo it”, and even, “take it easy, you are making
the rest of us look bad!”
The point is, make up your mind to do things right, insisting on excellence, acknowledging that you do
indeed intend to make a difference and are willing to work as long and hard as it takes to achieve
strategic goals.
When I first started working in a big bank in New York City, my father told me to work as much as
possible at night so that I could willingly accept any task thrown my way and volunteer whenever
possible to do more during the work day. This was, and is, an amazingly effective strategy for early
corporate success. Most people will duck work because their plate is already full and they have
deadlines they are in danger of missing. Along the same lines, I have to say that the sick days you have
available at your workplace are not actually there to use unless you simply cannot make it to work due to
a real illness. Those extra days, nights and hours of work lead to a significantly greater ability to work on
things that matter and that make a difference. Isn’t that what we want?
Point “b”, “Productive Paranoia , to overcome the dangers of inertia and in recognition that even the
most successful and well-built structures, if left alone, will eventually slow and fail; entropy” , is a
personal favorite of mine. The concept of Productive Paranoia. Where for some reason, it is
fundamental to your psyche that you need to work hard, and harder, that maybe something is gaining on
you, that your job is not secure no matter who your daddy is, is vital to a hard driving strategy. I do not
know where this comes from, but over the years, a great many of my successful colleagues who I have
enjoyed working with the most, recognized this concept as soon as I started to describe it.

Do the right thing, insist on excellence in

your own work and commit yourself to
making a difference
Most of us were not born with a silver spoon in our mouths, quite the opposite, with the example our
parents and others influencing our lives by demonstrating a tremendous work ethic, resulting in a greater
range of opportunities for us. We did not take these opportunities for granted and don’t easily forget the
sacrifices made to provide them.
This leads to an aggressive and proactive approach to our work life, necessary to overcome the root of
many evils: inertia. What if you could bump someone with a cattle prod every time they said, “We have
always done it that way”? Try to never say that, instead using a real explanation for why things are done
the way they are, and perhaps question why they continue to be done that way.
Why is it necessary to be proactive, aggressive and slightly paranoid about the future? The Second Law
of Thermodynamics considers entropy. You can look up the Second Law of Thermodynamics with its
fascinating applications. For the purpose of this discussion, entropy dictates there is no such thing as a
perpetual motion machine. In other words, through wearing down and transference of energy things just
do not go on forever, they wear out. A simple example is a battery operated remote controlled car you
give your son at Christmas. So much fun for a few minutes, then the battery wears out, (and you forgot to
buy a ten pack of D’s), and you are back around the tree trying on polo shirts from Grandma. Note that
even with new batteries, it is only a matter of time before the wheels come off, the engine freezes up with
rust or it just stops working.
Now, how do we keep the car going? New batteries, replace the pieces showing wear, and even replace
some pieces before they fail. Keeping our business fresh and moving forward requires the same regular
addition of new energy and replacement parts to overcome the natural tendency for slowing down and
eventually grinding to a halt.
Tested creativity, noted in “c”, “Utilize low-cost trials to see what works then follow up with larger
commitments of resources when results are more predictable. (Bullets followed by Cannon Balls) ”, is
important and fun. Let’s say you work in the clothing industry with a niche in the shirts with buttons, vs.
polos, space. You think you have a great idea in making shirts with Velcro closures to sell to the elderly,
and you bring this to your boss and ask to launch a nationwide plan to sell these shirts. You tell him that,
from your experience caring for Uncle Lou, now in his 90s and not so dexterous at this stage of his life,
you know that it is time consuming and frustrating for older people to get dressed in the morning.
Your boss starts racking up the costs in his head of all the retooling, production, materials, advertising
costs, distribution costs, other logistical issues and just says, “no”, or “not now, we have too much going
on at the moment.” This is true and he is the boss so that’s that.
Now, same idea, but in your presentation, you say you have identified five retirement homes where people
are still generally able to care for themselves who have agreed to see if Velcro closures ring a bell with
their clients. You have also found one of the production lines that is well under capacity and could do a
run of the same shirts they are already making with Velcro closures for a minimal cost and no impact on
the company’s overall production.
The boss will say yes to this. The point is, effective strategy for new initiatives should be built off what
you already do, with low cost and measurable experiments opening the way for the big guns in phase 2.
One of the sayings we grow up with is, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. I could give you many examples of
why this is no longer the case, and others have done this well in any number of books.
One of the sayings we grow up with is, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. The point made in “d”, “Fix and
tweak ”, rejects this out of hand. It is vital to “Fix ineffective businesses and tweak successful
businesses, even at the expense of affecting, possibly cannibalizing, existing good business lines. If you
do not adjust, someone else will , resulting in a loss of market share.” In today’s internet based
economy, manufacturing innovation and other forms of competitive edge, last for a very short amount of
time. The traditional way of a great idea giving an edge followed by economies of scale and synergies
enabling lower costs to keep that edge and limit effective competition are gone, really, gone.

So now, you absolutely must fix anything you see in your business that is not working or inefficient and do
it now. Similarly, successful endeavors must be tweaked, even if it seems to cut into what you are doing
well. Otherwise, someone else will do it and you will lose competitiveness and market share.
Should Nikon be making phones? I don’t know, but for sure they aren’t selling as many cameras anymore
due to the competition from phones. Even the best at something does not guarantee continuation.
Bullet point “e“, “Build something enduring and worthwhile that creates pride in the effort, greater than
one’s own personal success”, is maybe a bit idealistic, but I’m sticking with it. One can wonder if
anything we do matters in the overall grand scheme of the universe, with the inevitable conclusion of
nihilistic thinking doing very little with one’s life. Others, and I am so happy to be in this camp, believe
that every person matters and that we are put on this planet for far more than slurping up caloric intake to
maintain our organisms for a while before pushing daisies. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the
lives we have been given, living on a rare if not unique planet as a small speck of an incomprehensible
universe, demand we make the best of things and do our utmost with what we have been given. For any of
you in unethical businesses, or where the company is doing things that you know are not right, please
consider getting out. Spend your time and your life on something enduring and worthwhile that you can be
proud of. A manager has a great deal of influence over the families of the people who work for him or
her. Think about those people, along with all your colleagues and try hard to do something with
substance.
Ask anyone who has played a sport where their team won something, from a t-ball championship to the
World Series and they will have sincere feelings about the importance and worth of that team and that
time period. Don’t let those feelings and desire for meaning fade away as you “mature”.
Focus your energy and time on something that
is enduring, that matters and provides you with
a sense of accomplishmen t
Point “f”, “The future is unknowable” . In the Bible, you can read that anyone who claimed to be able to
predict the future, and was then proven to not have that particular skill was killed.
Wouldn’t that policy shake up a few of today’s all-seeing, all-knowing predictors and would be shapers
of our opinions!
We know, without a version of our own burning bush, that the future is unknowable. However, that should
not prevent you from using the brain you were given to actively look ahead to what may be coming next.
Statistics, trends, commentary, market analysis, political directions, geography, people migrations, flows
of money, resources, agriculture, real estate and, of course, the weather, all need to be factored into a
view of the future.
When Henry Ford built Fordlandia in 1928, intended to be home for ten thousand people as part of an
industrial complex in the jungles of Brazil, he obviously did very little analysis of relevant facts. There is
a reason you have never heard of it. On the other hand, Jeff Bezos’ willingness to lose money year after
year on a concept of garnering a massive number of clients and utilizing technology to give them what they
want, even before they knew what they wanted, was clearly brilliant from today’s vantage point.
You have a lot of data and information at your disposal and numbers are wonderful for describing the past
and pointing toward the future. Again, the key is to be honest about the numbers and fully understand the
drivers of the business through objective testing and analysis of correlations. It is helpful to have people
around who can think of variables that may have affected the past, and will influence the numbers in the
future, and who can bring these thoughts up in a welcoming environment.
It appears, and I am sure you can relate to this, that once the more senior person or people have put an
interpretation on a set of data, it is generally difficult if not detrimental to a person’s career to put up a
rational challenge. In view of this, I believe you must be willing and able to understand and interpret the
numerical data you have available yourself. An additional luxury is working with a highly competent and
strategic CFO or financial analyst. The interpretation of past performance and decisions regarding the
future are largely based on numerical data. The ideas held by those with the facts and an understanding of
them will carry the day.
Bullet point “g”, “A focus on people ; intelligent, flexible, hardworking and committed people can
overcome whatever the future may offer”. Now, every company you look at will say something to the
effect that, “Our greatest asset is our people”. If that is so, why do they so often treat their greatest asset
with contempt, underpaying them for work and ineffectively applying their underutilized skills?
I have lived and worked in many of the civilized countries around the world and across the U.S., dealing
with all levels of income, race, and religious backgrounds across a variety of cultures. I find that people
are quite similar wherever you go, and that, the business environments in many countries share a lot of
similar characteristics.
In a corporate setting, in regard to performance, this tends to result in a workforce that would be easily
mapped with a bell-shaped curve. Some people would be placed at the ends of the curve, either very
good or very bad, and the majority of the people in the middle, or mediocre. The reasons given are
generally along the lines that “We don’t need a rocket scientist running the Call Center,” or “if we got
smart people to work on the assembly line they would be frustrated and leave.”
In fact, if you have the willpower, you can have all your people be at the high performing end of the bell
curve. If you are willing to waive the offered salary out the window and only take the very best people
who jump for it, you will end up with stars. This is hard, requires a plan, a way to evaluate talent and a
willingness to undo bad choices rather than kicking the can of mediocrity down the road.
If you read anything by the acknowledged top managers throughout history, or just ask someone you
admire as a boss, they will always say the right people led to the success of their company or business.
A winning strategy and the ability to accomplish things, is wholly dependent upon ensuring you have
intelligent, flexible, hardworking and committed people in place. As a manager, I always prepared an
excellent budget with clearly defensible goals for the coming year. The budget was the culmination of
everything I knew and could analyze about the business. Therefore, though predictive and without the
benefit of omniscience, it was a fairly solid educated guess about future performance and not easily
questioned.
The right people, intelligent, flexible and committed,
are vital to any company’s success
However, I knew two things about those budgets for certain; 1) I was committed to attaining the bottom
line projection, and, 2) The projected results would be achieved differently from my original design. In
other words, circumstances, markets, and any number of variables would change, but with the right
people, flexible and intelligent, willing to work as hard as I was, would enable the adjustments necessary
to overcome whatever the future may throw our way.
Point “h”, says “Strategy without action is dead ”. I admit I adapted this from James’ claim that faith
without works is dead, and in a way, there is something to this analogy. Of course, James would never
have said that one’s works can compare with faith or even have anything to do with salvation. Instead he
was saying that you can claim all the faith you want, but if you don’t do anything good with your life as a
result of faith, your faith itself must be dead.
In strategy, the connection is that a good strategy is simply a useless mental exercise unless there are
specific actions produced. In our own lives, we can think of many times when we had a good idea and
did not act upon it. What could be more meaningless? Probably better to not have a good idea than to
have one and do nothing with it. The same is true for a corporate strategy. If the strategy is good, do not
commit the sin of foregoing the called for action steps.
Many companies create a strategy document only to please the regulators or in response to a directive
from the Board. They have no intention of using the strategy as a guideline and, therefore, would be
wasting time coming up with action steps.
For you, the opposite should be the case. Regulators and others telling you to have a strategy should be
the last reasons you need to develop a written strategy. You need that strategy, complete with detailed
actions to use as your clear roadmap toward success.
The last bullet point on action steps leads right into the 4rth and last, Guiding Principle of Strategy
Development , which is:
4) To follow the defined strategy, action steps will be characterized by:
a) Focused Action , Clarity and Coherence - reduce complexity and ambiguity – few successes
are better than many half-done jobs
b) Focus on key business drivers – Understand and allocate resources to the elements that drive
revenue
c) Focus on high gain activity – 20% of anything gets 80% done
d) Focus on actions we can take now , with precise steps and measurable results – Big,
Cheap, Now
e) Incremental steps, variations of existing initiatives with near term implementation and
providing quick results .
f) Utilization of the company’s or unit’s available resources – Do not wait for input or support
from areas we cannot control
g) Application of the company’s differentiated leverage and power
h) Building shock absorbers against the unidentifiable though recurring extraordinary
 disruptions to business; succession planning, financial reserves, quality business, compliance,
ethics, policies, procedures
For bullet point “a”, “Focused Action , Clarity and Coherence ”, the idea is to keep things simple and
clear. When you write down the action steps, strive to avoid complexity and ambiguity. Remember, a
few successes in getting things done are better than many half-completed jobs, even if the incompletes
sounded better than the finished items when they were just ideas.
For a birthday present, my wife got me an opportunity to drive a NASCAR race car around the
Homestead, Florida track. Before letting you in the vehicle there is a two-hour session on what to do
once you are out on the track and zipping along at 150 miles per hour. In reality, there was too much to
learn and, it did not help when the instructor said the first lap would be the scariest thing we had ever
experienced, and the second lap would be worse !
The key was to boil down the instructions to the minimum and make them as clear as possible. Therefore,
I remembered the big action items: Get in fourth gear by the time you leave the pits, never use the brakes
unless you are coming in or about to hit another car, stay above the white line at the base of the banked
turns or you would crash for sure. Finally, do anything and everything your team captain said through your
earpiece or they would shut down the engine on you. One thing that helped a lot is that with the helmet
and the head constraints as part of the seat, you cannot look left or right, much less behind you. You can
only look straight ahead, which ties in with one of the key insights the instructor provided: “All you have
to know about this car is that it was built to do two things, go fast and turn left.”
The experience was awesome and far more exhilarating than I imagined it would be. However, with a
car going 150 miles per hour, with a lot of other things going on, the instructor’s words to just focus on a
few key things could not have been more appropriate. Trying to pick out my wife in the stands and wave
to her as I was flying by was an unthinkable distraction given all the stimuli and potentially disastrous
downside of messing up. So, for your actions steps, be clear, be concise and have them work together and
coherently.
Remember, in Principle 1 we saw that understanding the drivers for your business was essential for
effective strategy development. So, for bullet point “b”, “Focus on key business drivers ” go back to
those specified drivers and focus your action steps on them.
For example, if you know a driver to the sneaker selling business we used as an example before is a
compensation program rewarding regional salespeople through commissions on sales volume, one of your
action steps better be to allocate funds for this and maybe step up this part of the program. Or if your
analysis shows the sales funnel to require 100 cold calls to produce 30 responses, leading to 10 meetings
resulting in 2 sales, you need to develop the action steps of ensuring the 100 cold calls get made. Of
course, each of these steps must be analyzed and motivated, but if your driver turns out to be 100 cold
calls for 2 sales, then anything less will result in under budget results .
The 80/20 rule often comes into play here, in that for most business activity, 80% of the result is driven by
20% of the activity. This could be 80% of revenue driven by 20% of clients, or some other aspects, with
the same 80/20 ratio. Many times, you will see this ratio, but with an allocation of resources
inappropriately linked. In other words, say the Residential Real Estate Division of a small commercial
bank brings in 80% of the Net Interest Income, probably with 10% to 20% of the bank’s resources
allocated to the team, on a fully loaded basis. That means that other areas, that are producing far less are
getting a disproportionate share of available resources. There may be a variety of reasons for this,
including current investment looking toward a future return. Even so, there is no justification for under
resourcing a team that is providing the lion’s share of the revenue. This seems so obvious, but just look at
your own company and see how often resources are allocated disproportionately to benefits derived.
Since we are looking at the 80/20 rule, moving to “c”, “Focus on high gain activity ”, the concept of
focusing on high gain activities, is natural. Again, if 20% of anything gets 80% done, make sure your
efforts, not only resources, are focused on achieving the 80%.
Whenever I managed a sales team, I had a goal of the individual salespeople spending some 80% to 90%
of their time on business generating activities. This meant I did not assign projects to them, or ask them to
pick up elements of the overall bureaucracy that I did not want to do. My job was to defend them from
these things which are almost always someone else’s idea of what is important. The justification for this
is easy; the only thing that matters to a sales team is selling, and the only thing the team will be judged on
when it comes time to hand out the year end goodies or pink slips, is selling. So, anything else must take a
back seat.
I was asked to provide some productivity training to a group of sales managers, and it soon became clear
that a key driver was regular telephone interaction with the salespeople spread out over the company’s
Latin American region. Once this was acknowledged, the feedback was that it was impossible to speak
with them on the phone regularly since each manager had about 100 salespeople to supervise. However,
within a few minutes it became clear that of the 100 salespeople, usually some 20 were bringing in
business, with the remainder largely ineffective due to a lack of commitment. So, 100 became 20 and the
question was then, can you talk on the phone to 20 people regularly? Four per day gets everyone once a
week, and 10 such calls a day were easy enough, particularly in view of the high gain nature of these
phone calls. Don’t waste time engaging in make work, and resist other people taking you or your team
from the things that matter. Look at your preset goals for your performance evaluation. The actions
required to attain those goals are your high gain activities.
Bullet point “d”, “Focus on actions we can take now , with precise steps and measurable results”, is
another call to concentrate on actions you can take now, described in precise steps leading to
measurable results. For this it is useful to think of, “Big, Cheap and Now”, and write down and go for
actions that meet this simple criterion. In general, if you can get your colleagues in a room and ask them
to write down suggestions for making more money, beating the competition, getting a certain product to fly
off the shelves or even keep the break room clean, and tell them the answers must be Big, Cheap and
Now, you quickly will get excellent and actionable responses.
Most companies are already doing something that is working, maybe with varying degrees of success.
Similarly, your business, business unit or team is doing something that, according to a written or
unwritten strategy, is producing results. From there, your strategy can expand to growth, innovation, or a
different approach to increase market share and revenue.
In bullet point “e”, “Incremental steps, variations of existing initiatives with near term implementation
and providing quick results ”, the idea is to make your action steps in pursuit of this growth incremental,
emphasizing variations of existing initiatives where you can achieve implementation of the steps very
soon with quick results.
I am sure there are times when radical changes are needed, particularly if a business is failing or where
circumstances have changed such that the company is inviable. However, most of the time, you are trying
to grow, improve, enhance your revenue stream and the best way to do this is to take actions that are
closely related to your existing successful business activity.
Let’s say you are in the business of making racing bicycles and sales are declining for 10 consecutive
quarters, despite price cuts, a new marketing plan and changing logo and colors used on the bikes. Your
research shows various trends occurring, including a move to the Cruiser type bicycle and toward electric
scooters, for people to get around.
What should you do? You should build Cruisers; staying in your field and utilizing your existing
fabrication facilities and distribution network. You may go electric by way of electric assisted bicycles,
if your research shows people are growing weary of peddling at all, but you would do well to stay out of
the scooter business.
The point is, it is far easier to move ahead quickly and with bottom line results if your new initiatives are
built on the success and expertise you have in place with existing business lines.
Point “f”, “Utilization of the company’s or unit’s available resources ”, is a powerful concept. When you
come up with your action steps, make sure they do not require the input or support from areas you cannot
access or control.
I had a good friend who wanted a simple profitability system for the business transacted out of his field
office of a gigantic, multinational corporation. He asked for the resources to set up the profitability
system, in the low thousands of dollars, and was told he would have to wait for the head office to include
his small unit in the overall system the corporation was installing worldwide.
So, what did he do? He rearranged his budget, with a few thousand dollars not making any difference in
the overall numbers, and went ahead and contracted for the profitability system. The next time his boss
visited him from head office, he was roundly criticized for moving ahead and not waiting for the Head
Office delivered solution. However, his highly effective system was in place and all of us in similar
remote business locations envied his ability to obtain vital profitability data. In the end, the head office
never implemented the profitability system, and my friend had four years of showing his team’s
outstanding work in clear and indisputable numbers. Why only four years? Because he was transferred to
a bigger role based on his measurable performance!
I know you have experienced this if you have worked for any length of time. If there are actions you need
to take to meet your strategic goals and make things happen, you simply cannot wait for, or depend on
anything or anyone outside of your own team, unit or personal control, to take these actions. Think of this
another way, how silly will you sound if you don’t meet your goals when you tell people you were
waiting for head office to do something so you could implement the needed action steps?
Your action steps should directly apply your company’s differentiating factors, intrinsic leverage and
unique power. Bullet point “g”, “Application of the company’s differentiated leverage and power”, is,
therefore, all about maximizing your strengths in the actions you determine to take. Military tactics come
to mind with this concept.
Don’t wait for or count on help, resources or
support from areas outside your control to
develop your strategy
Would it be wise to engage in a military confrontation where you do not have the support of your people,
agree to underutilize the advantages you have in terms of material, technology and information, put your
soldiers in a position where they are affected by an uncommitted and fundamentally corrupt ally and
where the fighting is to take place in the backyard jungle of the enemy? We know how that worked out
and we all owe our gratitude to any soldier ever asked to serve in such circumstances. Don’t be part of
that kind of misapplication of your company’s strengths.
What does your company or business unit have that others do not have? Maybe your bank can capture
funds at 25 to 50 basis points less than your main competitors who need to obtain funds through high
priced time deposits while you are flush with demand deposits. Why would you lose a deal on pricing in
this scenario? You have at least 25 basis points to play with, and all other things being equal, should get
the deals you want when pricing is the client’s issue.
Your differentiating factors may be your brand, location, cost of production, speed of production, a
household name in your management team, innovative product line, a new technology that blows the
competition away for a few months or a unique culture, language or work environment. Whatever makes
your company unique and different must be fully incorporated into the action steps you take to achieve
your strategic goals.
Sometimes a simple inventory of the education levels, schools attended, languages spoken and a list of
prominent people known for each employee will uncover significant opportunities leading to direct
actions.
Finally, bullet point, “h”, “Building shock absorbers against the unidentifiable, though recurring,
extraordinary disruptions to business; succession planning, financial reserves, quality business,
compliance, ethics, policies, procedures”, highlights the need for your action steps to build shock
absorbers against a certain level and percentage chance of extraordinary disruptions to business. You
may not be able to anticipate all challenges, but many of them will happen sooner or later. For example,
you need an outline for steps you will take related to succession planning. The familiar, “what if she gets
run over by a bus, what would we do?” question. Even without those menacing buses, things happen to
people, usually more mundane such as finding another job, but some shocking occurrences also. Other
things that will happen eventually include the need for financial reserves, business resumption steps
following a natural disaster, (ask anyone in Miami or New Orleans about this!), the cost of maintaining
regulatory compliance, legal costs associated with unforeseen lawsuits, the need to revamp policies and
procedures, increases in occupancy expense, employee fraud and the costs associated with obtaining
services from any number of outside providers.
The key is to incorporate the concept of Enterprise Risk Management, where potential risks associated
with your business are defined, understood and mitigation steps put in place. You cannot afford to bury
your head in the sand in regard to these items, and by addressing them head on you will be able to get
through them and keep on getting the work completed.
 Guiding Principles for Strategy Development :
Guiding Principles for Strategy Development : The following principles are key to the creation of an
effective strategy for a company overall and for each individual unit. They are fundamental to the way
business opportunities are identified and developed for consistent and profitable business over both the
short and long term.
An effective strategy for the company overall and each of its business unit must:
• Accurately and honestly define the current situation – where are we right now
• Clearly define what we are trying to do
• Clearly define what the company overall and each business unit should be trying to do
• Decide if where we are is where we want to be. Is there a gap between the desired and actual
result?
• Reality-Vision-Action (R1 vs R2) (Ideal State Action Planning)
An effective strategy must answer:
• What can we do best ? Where can we be first ? Based on SWOT and the advantages we have
• Are we willing and able to commit to a given business with passion, products, services and
resources ?
• Do we understand and have the ability to turn on the drivers of a given business?
• What do we value , ethically, internally and as required by the regulatory environment?
An effective strategy must internalize a core approach characterized by:
• Extreme Discipline , in terms of intense ambition to succeed and the self-control to ensure the
company is around to enjoy the success
• Productive Paranoia , aggressively and proactively striving for positive change to overcome the
dangers of inertia. Most successful and well-built structures, if left alone, will eventually slow
and fail; entropy.
• Tested Creativity . Utilize low-cost trials to see what works then follow up with larger
commitments of resources when results are more predictable. (Bullets followed by Cannon
Balls)
• Fix and tweak . We reject, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Fix ineffective businesses and tweak
successful businesses, even at the expense of affecting, possibly cannibalizing, existing good
business lines. If we do not adjust, someone else will , resulting in a loss of market share.
• Building something enduring and worthwhile that we can be proud of – greater than our own
personal success.
• We know the future is unknowable . However, we will always look ahead to what we believe
is coming next
• A focus on people: Intelligent, flexible, hardworking and committed people can overcome
unknowable future challenges
• Strategy without action is dead

To follow the defined strategy, action steps will be characterized by:

• Focused Action – reduce complexity and ambiguity – few successes are better than many half-
done jobs
• Focus on key business drivers – Understand and allocate resources to the elements that drive
 revenue
• Focus on high gain activity – 20% of anything gets 80% done
• Focus on actions we can take now , with precise steps and measurable results – Big, Cheap,
Now
• Incremental steps, variations of existing initiatives with near term implementation and
providing quick results .
• Clarity and Coherence
• Utilization of the company’s or unit’s available resources – Do not wait for input or support
from areas we cannot control
• Application of the Company’s differentiated leverage and power
• Building shock absorbers against the unidentifiable though recurring extraordinary disruptions to
business; succession planning, financial reserves, quality business, compliance, ethics, policies,
procedures
----------------------- -

Earlier in the chapter, you saw the worksheet found below.

This tool, made in Excel, provides the basis for an effective strategy and one that is applicable to your
particular business or situation.
It works like this: In the first column, list the existing and/or intended business lines/activities the
organization pursues. If nothing comes to mind where you can be the best or significant, you have a
fundamental problem and need to revisit the basics.
However, assuming your organization has viable options, in the second column you write down proofs of
commitment and passion to the Business Lines/Activities. For example, if you are in the business of
distributing generic drugs in the U.S. and are considering a strategy to attack markets in Latin America, the
fact that you have invested heavily in material, infrastructure and human capital to get the business to
where it is today, is a plus.
Next you highlight the elements that drive the business line or activity, based upon a thorough knowledge
derived from experience and sufficient research. You simply must know what makes it work.
In the last column, you put in comments that elaborate on the company’s proof of commitment and the
business drivers. Basically, highlight the strength of commitment to the idea and expand if necessary on
the depth of awareness you have of the business drivers.
As noted previously, this simple tool is a mechanism for predicting if a business line or activity is going
to work. It is possible to be wrong in our evaluation of the relative importance of these elements,
however getting them in a reviewable format and putting some heads together can reduce the error rate
tremendously.
There is a good story about McDonalds’s entrance into the Brazilian market. Apparently, the original
proposal for financing was rejected by a bank for a few seemingly sensible reasons. At the time of the
discussion, previous attempts at fast food had failed, with the prevailing view this was due to Brazilians
enjoying quality food at home, often prepared by a cook, removing the harried mom from the fast food
equation. Another consideration was pricing, with eating at McDonald’s somewhat expensive. On top of
that, the food and service in Brazilian restaurants, is exceptional, throughout the country. Sao Paulo is one
of the world’s best providers of meals in restaurants, offering astounding variety and quality. In other
words, why would a Brazilian pay more for lower quality food that he or she must stand in line to get
rather than having dinner cooked and served up at home or at a favorite restaurant. Why indeed?
So, the deal was turned down, but the proposers got other financing, and McDonald’s became an
enormous success with some of the locations in Sao Paulo among the highest volume producers in the
world.
Were the points against the idea wrong? Not at all, they just were not strong enough to overcome the fact
that it was perceived as “cool” to go to McDonald’s. Coolness is so powerful. It is the basis of many
advertising campaigns, and eating at McDonald’s in the early days was a slice of the U.S. (Isn’t it weird
to see the McDonald’s near Montmartre in Paris packed with customers, and not just with U.S. tourists?)
Additionally, the previous attempts at fast food were poorly and unenthusiastically carried out. In Brazil
where service is a way of life, the staff fly around behind the counter at McDonalds in a way unthinkable
in the U.S., removing one of the major drawbacks to the experience. McDonald’s broke the ice for the
fast food business and, of course, nowadays most brands are solidly established in the country.
Give this tool a try. Test any idea you have for your business floating around in your head with this chart.
Remember, this is a tool for finding out if your idea has potential for success in your company and
situation. Once you can support an activity with this chart, you can move on to the next chapters for
developing a strategy that works.
 Chapter 2
How to Develop Goals that Matter
I am elated when, looking for a book at an airport bookstore before a flight, I see a new book by Lee
Child featuring Jack Reacher as the protagonist. The Jack Reacher series features a guy blessed with
size, (not as played by the diminutive Tom Cruise in the movies), incredible quickness, great physical
strength and a desire to do the right thing, his version anyway, that he cannot reign in. Those are all
differentiating factors, but what really sets Mr. Reacher apart is the fact he has no home, no job, no
personal attachments and is unburdened by any physical possessions other than a toothbrush, an ATM card
and the clothes on his back, which he exchanges for new items every three days. What Jack Reacher does
is wander, taking the next bus, accepting the next ride or just walking with no destination in mind. Jack
Reacher gets into all manner of situations, overcoming improbable odds using his mental acuity, near
Hulk-like power and lightning hand speed to clean up messes and punish the bad guys. It is all very
compelling, particularly if you are in a suit and tie, about to fly toward a destination not of your choosing
and in need of your job to service the mortgage and keep the kids in Air Jordans.
The wandering aimlessly always raises eyebrows among Reacher’s short-term acquaintances, as well it
should. As romantic a concept as hitting the road with no idea where you are going sounds, (even Jack
Kerouac had sort of an idea where he was headed), it is not realistic. That’s why you find Lee Child’s
books in the fiction section, where I hope new ones will keep appearing while I reread the old ones.
Think about it, a motorcycle trip through Big Sur, winter hiking and camping on the Appalachian Trail or
sailing across the Atlantic with a crew of four are all fantastic things to do. But they all have a goal and
they all have a start and an end, and a concept of what the person engaging in these activities wants to
accomplish.
Effective strategy is no different. What is the first step? You must decide what you want to achieve,
obtain, get to, or get done. You probably dropped the book, iPad or Kindle once this revelation whacked
you upside the head, but sit down and regroup and we will go forward, slowly, of course .
Knowing where you are going is the
first step to getting there
Seriously, while it is true that all trips start with a destination, Jack Reacher to the side, it is startling to
see how many business lines, companies and individuals with responsibilities in their jobs are hard
pressed to define clear objectives.
I enjoy addressing interns and new hires to talk about “what it takes to be an initial hit in the new job”. I
always ask them to state the point of the enterprise. Rarely, rarely, rarely will they say the point is to
make money, when, in fact, bottom line profit must be a fundamental goal, in part to provide the
wherewithal to fund all the other things they think are important.
Without a proper identification of desired goals, the connection between strategy and action becomes
abstract and amorphous, like a pool size quagmire of grape Jell-O. You certainly don’t want to fall into
that. So often the thing that keeps us from doing something worthwhile is simply an inability to convert
our strategy into action resulting from ill-defined goals.
The obvious question is: “How do we know what the strategic goal is?”
In many cases, your goal, in a business context, will be assigned to you. In other words, you may be
asked to grow sales of website creating software to your geographical territory by 15.7% annually. Or
your budget is dependent upon attracting 47 new students to the elementary school where you oversee
admissions.
Sometimes the goal is obvious. You are sent to Milan to open a Representative Office by the end of the
year. Your goal? Open a Representative Office, in Milan, by the end of the year. Or, you just started a
new company on your own and need to build a pipeline of business. Your goal? Build a pipeline of
business. That type of goal is often thrust upon people from someone or a committee in upper
management and employees receiving such goals do well to focus and get that thing done.
The tricky situations are when things are less clear and there is a need to define the goals and establish the
fundamental point of creating a strategy. This can be daunting, so I am introducing here a wonderful tool
to make this happen: the “Goal Generator”.
I am sure there are variations on the process described here. However, this system of surfacing strategic
goals is excellent and can be used for goal definitions for small business needs and for uncovering
objectives for immense corporations.
The “Goal Generator” gets you started on
the path to effective strategy development
The Goal Generator works like this:
Goal Generating Process
The Goal Generating process works on the principle that 20% of anything get 80% of the job done. In
other words, focus on the big priorities and an overwhelming amount of what you want or need to do will
be accomplished. Therefore, it is vital to accurately determine what these “Big” goals are!
It is vital to limit the number of goals and then establish priorities. In practical terms, it is difficult to
remember or accomplish more than, say, five key tasks in a given period. Think back to any week, month
or year where you reached five major goals. In the years you make that happen, you will almost certainly
have made a major splash in your business activities, became exposed to more interesting opportunities
and derived significant personal satisfaction.
More often, we finish up a year with unfinished projects carrying over endlessly into the coming months,
with achieving goals as elusive as a sighting of Big Foot. As an aside, one aspect of business as long
lasting as a lovingly cared for laboratory stem cell is the “undying project”. There are ongoing projects
in many companies that have outlived the original project manager, implementation team and, even, the
original perceived need for the project. The digital age with its forced rapidity of change along with
competitor adaptation will make this an ever more damaging pitfall in the future.
Going back to the Goal Generator, the point is, setting and achieving one to five key objectives is always
a major victory and will bring great benefits to your business and to you personally.
Finally, the Goal Generator Process, is empowering to you and your colleagues, simply because it
produces your goals with your definition of priorities that you agree are keys to success.
How to do a Goal Generator:
To get started, you need to pose the question, issue or problem . For example, “What is the fee income
we want to have by the end of next year?” “What is our desired level of sales for our digital baseball
cards in the Milwaukee market next month?”, or “What are potential new business lines we can pursue
with the existing team and culture?”
As you can probably see by now, you can apply the Goal Generator concept to your personal life as easily
as in a business setting. If you are considering your own life’s goals, your issue may be, “What do I need
to ensure an adequate retirement financially?”, or “What is my desired officer level in my company by the
end of the next 8 quarters?” or “What city should I transfer to in order to enhance my career advancement
possibilities?” You get the idea.
If you are in a group setting, ask each of the team to write down a list of no more than five potential goals
for each of the questions.
Now, a key to the process is to limit the time for writing the five goals down to no more than 60 to 120
seconds. This may not seem like enough time, but, trust me, with one minute or one month, you get the
same answers. We already know most of the answers, we just don’t usually write them down and then act
on them.
Of course, if you are looking at your own life’s goals, you should write the five things down on your own
or with the help of a close friend with your interests at heart.
To guide the preparation of the five goals, tell the participants valid responses must be:
• Precise and measurable . Clear, numerical, yes/no, on/off, no ambiguity.
• Doable from available resources . This is not always unanimous, but it is of no use to say we
want to set up a Regional Sales office in Sacramento when this can only happen if the head office,
gives us X or Y. X and Y may never come and waiting equals zippo action and, therefore, no
possibility of benefit.
• Within your, or your team’s power to access or do . It is not worth working on things that you
can’t work on.
• Goals that can be worked toward immediately . (Studies show that if something from a
meeting is not started within 48 hours, it will not happen).
I like to add that when we are talking about business, let’s really focus on the Big, Cheap and Now. It is
amazing that most people in an organization will have clear ideas on inexpensive, quickly implementable
steps that will lead to big bucks! Some call this “Low Hanging Fruit”, or, staying with semi farming
analogies, “Easy Pickings”. Some even say, “I know that is right there to grab, but after that, what will
we do?” Two answers: 1) grab the low hanging fruit now before someone else does or it falls and rots on
ground, (to stay with the fruit thing), and, 2) You can use the money produced by the easy pickings to build
the contraption you need to reach the more inaccessible fruit in the future.
On the “Big” side, why do something of little impact? Seriously, there is no joy, and certainly no ongoing
career benefit to achieving small goals. Budgets need to be stretching, territories need to be vast,
numbers need to have almost scary deltas. Be visionary, pulled by the thrill of what if you make that
objective! Think of Ian Fleming’s villains. James Bond is needed because the bad guys are shooting for
world domination. No one cares to see 007 solving his lost laundry problem.
You may worry over what happens if you don’t make a stretching goal, and maybe your organization is
one of those that delights in punishing people that give it their best but come up a little short of success.
Need I say what you should do if you work for a company or a supervisor like that?
I can repeat that adage of “if you think you can, you are usually right. If you think you can’t, you are
always right.” Or, “You miss all the shots never taken.” If you are a tennis player or golfer, you know
that nothing is more upsetting than hitting it softly into the net or holding back on a putt and leaving it a
foot short. In your goals, pound the baseline and bang the back of the cup of your team’s numerically
measured goals.
Once the objectives are on paper, it is best to use a flip chart and debrief each person, asking them to read
off their five answers. Once you have the first person’s five answers on the chart, go to the next person,
telling them to avoid repeating anything already on the chart (Please!). People usually do, to show that
they are at least as smart as the previous person, but this is a waste of time and discipline here will show
benefits and create a pattern for future Goal Generation exercises.
Then, ask the group to pick the most impactful five goals from the list and circle them on the chart.
Then ask the group to prioritize them, putting 1 through 5 next to the items, thereby creating your Top
Five Goals. The chart is messy by this time so rewrite the Goals on another page.
You just took a huge step toward developing a strategy for making something new happen! As you will
see in the coming chapters, goal definition underpins clear and coherent thinking, effective writing and
idea development. Therefore, give this aspect of the process your full attention and apply those brain
cells at full volume to produce solid and meaningful goals .
Goal Generator Tool
Concept : You cannot get anywhere until you decide where you want to go! Without a proper
identification of desired goals, the connection between strategy and action becomes abstract, amorphous
and unworkable.
The Goal Generating process works on the principle that 20% of anything get 80% of the job done. Focus
on the priorities and an overwhelming amount of what you want or need to do will be accomplished.
Therefore, it is vital to accurately determine what these “Big” goals are!
How to do a Goal Generator:

1. Pose the question, issue or problem

2. If you are in a group setting, ask each of the team to write down a list of no more than five
potential goals for each of the questions, issues or problems. If working on your own, write
the five things down yourself
3. Give no more than 60 to 120 seconds to get the five goals down. (We already know the
answers!)
4. To guide the five goals, tell the participants valid responses must be:

• Precise and measurable. Clear, numerical, yes/no, on/off, no ambiguity

• Doable from available resources
• Within the power of the meeting attendants to access or do. It is not worth including
goals that depend on elements outside of your control.
• Goals that can be worked toward immediately

5. Focus on the Big, Cheap and Now. Why do something of little impact?
6. Once the objectives are on paper, use a flip chart and debrief each person, asking them to read
off their five answers. Once you have the first person’s five answers on the chart, go to the
next person, telling them to avoid repeating anything already on the chart
7. Ask the group to pick the five most critical goals from the list and circle them on the chart
8. Have the group prioritize the goals, putting 1 through 5 next to each objective, thereby creating
your top five goals
 Goal Generator Help Shee t
(Use your word processor software to make these sheets)
Question, Issue or Problem : (this is not the “HOW?” part of strategy development, instead it is the
“WHAT?” part). What is the question being asked? What is the issue that needs addressing? What
is the main problem?

POTENTIAL GOALS
Take 120 seconds to write down potential goals that could address the Question, Issue or Problem
 Chapter 3
SWOT Analysis and Who Are Those People Trying to Eat Our
Lunch?
When doing business outside the U.S., and assuming you are the type of person who listens, you will
notice that American business people use more illustrations from sports to flavor conversation than do
business people from other countries. Of course, if you do business in Spain, Italy or Uruguay, you do
well to know the local soccer teams and star players, and keeping abreast of how many centuries a top
cricketer has this decade may create a common ground between you and an old-school tie wearer in the
U.K. In the U.S., our fixation and mingling of sports and business terminology goes well beyond these
examples. Frankly, I think this is a good thing and tend to regularly bring sports analogies into business
conversation.

Putting together a syndication your peers thought was going to bust, is “hitting a Home Run”, “Knocking
one out of the park”, “Going Long”, “Delivering the Knockout Punch”,
“Going for the Gold”, “Getting a Hole in One”. If you are needed to help with some effort at the office,
you, “step up to the plate”, “put the uniform on”, be willing to “take one for the team”, “hit the clutch
shot”, “come off the bench”, “pick up a bat”. I love these, sorry, can’t help it.
Sports are attractive to many of us because of the simplicity of the objective, “Just win, baby”, as Al
Davis of the Oakland Raiders used to say, the teamwork involved, the clear rules and the chance to start
over every season is appealing.
When fans think about their favorite teams, or when sports writers analyze the local heroes in the paper
and anytime the dinner conversation rolls around to “how do we look this year?”, a list of positive and
negative things about the team will come out. These are accompanied by commentary, usually expressed
with wide eyed vehemence laced with loosely based accusations regarding the head of player personnel’s
lineage, manhood and size of brain pan.
In business, a SWOT analysis is analogous to fan-led conversations, though usually with a lot less
emotion. It will not be news to you that “SWOT” is an acronym that stands for Strengths, Weaknesses,
Opportunities, and Threats. Performing a SWOT analysis may be a bit old school, but it is a healthy
discipline, useful for focusing thoughts on the current situation of an organization and surfacing areas
posing potential obstacles and/or opportunities.
The problem is, unlike in the informal discussions around sports, people don’t like coming up with the
various items and putting them in the categories a SWOT format requires. This is because; 1) people can
be lazy, and, 2) people can be lazy and lacking in imagination.
A SWOT analysis is challenging for many business people.
However, the insights produced mandate the effort required
In this chapter, I will help you through both obstacles and you should be able to whip out a SWOT
analysis in little time with the tools provided. By the way, even though people do not like to do the
SWOT analysis exercise, once it is in at least draft form you will find that your colleagues will fall all
over themselves correcting the analysis, moving the descriptive pieces around and adding and subtracting
items. In other words, once started, the SWOT analysis gets a lot of traction, again not as much
enthusiasm as discussing how Miami is going to handle the Gators, but you will see some nerves touched.
A SWOT analysis can be used for a variety of purposes, situations and at any time a business is
considering options. For example, an owner of a network of 25 gas stations in San Diego may have an
opportunity to buy 15 more from a company in Mexico desiring to refocus on the Mexican market. A
quick SWOT analysis would bring out factors the decision makers can use to focus their thinking.
SWOT analyses are usually part of new
initiative and new fiscal year planning
A SWOT analysis can be done at any point in a business cycle, though at the beginning of a new initiative
or semiannually for ongoing businesses, are most common. For ongoing businesses, the frequency should
be sufficient to enable proactive addressing of changing circumstances. Whenever you are developing or
updating a strategic plan, a SWOT analysis should be part of the process. Finally, when faced with a new
idea or a significant change to your business model, a SWOT analysis will expose areas that need to be
addressed and, in the end, give you confidence in the final decision on the best way forward.
A SWOT analysis is often best conducted in a group setting with representatives from various parts of the
organization providing input. Frankly, this can prove difficult to manage. I often go through a process of
interviewing people from across the organization, researching the company to the extent possible and
taking a look at competitors, the company’s target market and the overall business environment. I then put
together the SWOT analysis on my own before bringing the group together to opine. At least 90% of the
items are captured this way with the remainder the result of interesting insights into the business I missed
or didn’t fully understand from the interviews and research process. I will agree this takes some time.
However, the information obtained is useful for further strategic work and it does get done. Trying to get
a SWOT done with a large group from scratch can be like the proverbial herding of cats.
I like the usual format of four squares containing the components of the SWOT analysis. However, I
always start with a simple list since it is a lot easier to work through, making changes as needed. I also
use the four-square graphic as a summary of a more detailed SWOT analysis, which allows the freedom
and space to get the components of the analysis on paper and fleshed out.
In general, it is useful to think of Strengths and Weaknesses as internal to your company. Going back to
the Goal Generator Process and Guiding Principles for Strategic Development, it is vital to focus on the
things that you can affect and control. These are the Strengths and Weaknesses in the SWOT analysis.
Opportunities and Threats are harder to control , maybe even impossible to impact in any way. These
are elements that are external to the company and following their own agendas, trends and paths.
Ok, so how do you do a SWOT analysis ?
As always, it is imperative to be honest with yourself and your colleagues when working through a
SWOT analysis. Willful burying of the truth is dangerous when the intention is to use the analysis as a
foundation for making decisions affecting the future direction of the enterprise. I know this won’t stop
everyone from trying to fool themselves and others, but most of us can see the downside to building on
shifting sand.
That said, the first aspect of a SWOT analysis is to identify your Strengths. Remember “Strengths” are
positive internal factors that are within your control and include the experience and resources
available to you and your company.

It is helpful to consider and identify Strengths according to the following list. For each item, take the
time to write down what you have for these points and questions:
 • Financial resources: What are the company’s revenue streams, investments, how is income
diversified, describe the company’s access to funding, cost of funding, cash, capital.
• Physical items: What are the company’s buildings, property and equipment related assets?
• Intellectual property: Describe patents, copyrights, and trademarks.
• Human resources: Who are the owners, describe employees, volunteers, what is the access to
people with needed skill sets?
• Key employees: Identify personnel who are vital to the business.
• Employee programs: Outline any programs designed to help employees excel; bonus programs,
401k’s, SERPs, child care, stock ownership, vacation policy, etc.
• Company workflow: Describe work practices and how things get done in terms of timing,
pressure, accessibility to decision makers.
• Company culture: Put into words the work environment characterizing the company.
• Company reputation: How does the market perceive the company, clients, prospects? How is the
company viewed in the community, in social media?
• Market position: Where does the business stand in the target market in terms of size, rank,
perception, market share?
• Growth potential: How is the business anticipating and positioned for future growth?

You can also ask questions along the following lines to further uncover your Strengths:
• What does the company do well?
• What do you have internally that competitors do not?
• What do you do that your competition cannot?
• Why do customers come to you?
• What kind of processes do you have in place that make your company efficient?
• Does your company have an edge in the marketplace that your competitor doesn’t?
• What plans do you have in place to improve your market position?
• What plans do you have for growth?
• Do you have potential to grow in certain sectors where your competitors cannot?
• What is the main reason you are able to grow?

The list of components and questions is long and you may not need them all, but take heart; the Strengths
section should be your longest and most complex of the four SWOT pieces since you need to know the
company’s strengths in detail.
Now, for the “Weaknesses ”. Weaknesses are internal elements that challenge your business or have
the potential to leave you at a disadvantage. Fortunately, you can use the same categories used in the
Strengths section to help you derive your Weaknesses:
• Financial resources: What are problems with the company’s revenue streams, investments, the
way income is diversified, describe the company’s access to funding, cost of funding, cash, capital.
• Physical items: Are there negatives associated with the buildings and equipment the company
rents or owns?
• Intellectual property: Any issues with patents, copyrights, and trademarks?
• Human resources: Weaknesses associated with the owners, employees, volunteers, and mentors.
• Key players: Dependencies and potential issues with personnel who are vital to your business.
• Employee programs: Are there gaps in these programs?
• Company workflow: How does workflow inhibit production, revenue generation, etc?
• Company culture: Describe the work environment.
 • Company reputation: What are obstacles to business growth and company reputation?
• Market position: What limits the company from increasing market share?
• Growth potential: Is the business positioned for future growth?

Helpful questions to reveal Weaknesses include:

• In what areas does the company struggle?
• Are there reasons that customers select competitors over you?
• Does something specific stop you from performing at your best?
• Are financial resources holding you back? If so, how?
• Does your business get its revenue from one main stream? If so, is diversification
a concern?
• Does the company prepare for its financial future?
• Are any of your physical assets creating a problem?
• What is the condition of physical premises?
• What is the condition of the company’s equipment?
• Are any patents, trademarks, or copyrights in jeopardy?
• Does the regulatory environment pose significant obstacles to the company’s business?
• Are there current legal or regulatory issues the company is facing?

What types of human resources are available?

• Are there any departments that are lacking staff, creating inefficiencies?
• Are you happy with the company culture? If not, why?
• Are your competitors growing in ways that you can’t ?

To identify your “Opportunities ”, keep in mind Opportunities are generally external factors that
have the potential to contribute to your success. As noted previously, they are usually elements you
cannot control or impact in a meaningful way. To help develop your opportunities look into:

• Economic trends: What is the current and projected view of the economic environment in your
markets?
• Market trends: Is your target market driving new trends that could open doors for your business?
• Funding changes: Are donations, grants, or other elements of funding affected by events outside
the company’s control?
• Political support. How does the political landscape affect the business in positive ways?
• Government regulations: Are there legal or regulatory changes that may provide new
opportunities?
• Changing relationships: How might relationships with vendors, partners, or suppliers enhance
the business?
• Target audience shift: Is the target market expanding, aging, shifting, etc?

Helpful questions to ask to further surface opportunities include: (if a question does not fit your
business, skip it and go on to the next one):
• Is the economy where your business is located improving?
• Will the economy enable your target client base to spend, invest, save?
• Does the overall economy impact positively your target market?
• Are the fundamentals of your client base and prospects changing?
• What new trends could benefit the company?
 • What kind of timeframe surrounds these new trends?
• Do you expect an increase in funding sources and/or amounts this year?
• How will funding changes help the business?
• Do you anticipate a shift in political support this year?
• What opportunities could result from political associations ?

Finally, identify your “Threats ”, which are external factors that are not within your control and
that must be acknowledged and considered due to their potential for negatively impacting your
business . The fact Threats are outside of your control may cause you to wonder why you need to spend
time identifying them. Sound business practice requires an understanding of the risks facing your
business and an evaluation of the potential severity of those risks. In many industries, regulatory
guidelines demand an assessment and mitigation plan of potential risks. In any case, we can agree that
ignoring things you cannot directly control does not make them go away, with whistling in the dark never
as effective as flicking on the light.
For those of us who live in South Florida, hurricanes present a real and severe threat. There is precious
little that can be done to prevent them forming and wending their way across the Atlantic with a fair
degree of frequency each year. Most don’t hit us directly, but some do and the impact this has on lives
and businesses is enormous. Therefore, no South Florida company can have a list of “Threats” that
leaves potential storm damage out. Basically, you cannot stop a hurricane, but you can be prepared for
one and ensure you can continue in business operations in the aftermath.
Categories to consider to draw out Threats include:
• Economic trends: How are economic conditions, locally and overall, impacting the business?
• Market trends: What trends are changing or shrinking market opportunities?
• Funding changes: What factors outside your control may negatively impact funding sources
and/or amounts?
• Political support: What effect can change in political/regulatory support have on your business?
• Government regulations: What changes in legal and regulatory guidance could hurt your
business?
• Changing relationships: How are changes in the company’s vendors, partners, or suppliers
affecting the business?
• Target audience shift: What is occurring among the company’s target market demographics ?

Asking the following questions can help to further round out the Threats section of the SWOT
analysis:
• Is the economy in your area in a recession?
• Will the economy negatively impact your customers’ ability to buy, invest or save?
• What new trends could hurt your company?
• Has competition increased in your market or for your client base?

Once you have completed the SWOT analysis in a list form, going through the categories and questions
indicated above, you can summarize and prioritize them into the traditional four square format: (This
form is in Excel)
Competitio n
Following on the idea of “Threats”, it is useful to identify the organizations out there that are going after
your target market. These are companies that want you out of business so they can incorporate your
customers, revenue stream, best people and become a more scalable and profitable business. They
want to destroy you, buy you or make you fail, basically the same way you think of them.
“Know thy enemy” Sun Tzu
In sports, historical rivalries take on larger than life meaning. Ask the Red Sox and they will say,
“Those damn Yankees!”, and similar to Florida State, University of Florida, and the “U”, (Go Canes!),
in state football rivalries are generational and where one earned a degree may well be factored into
hiring decisions and who one marries.
In business, the list of competitors is often just as clear; airlines flying the same routes, gas stations on
the same block, and fast food restaurants with similar menus, among others. For these companies, the
target market is well defined and much of strategy is focused on taking clients away from the “enemy”
and preventing your client base from straying.
For other organizations, defining the competition is less obvious. Online brokerage businesses at one
level are competing against all other online brokers along with geography specific bricks-and-mortar
based companies offering investment services. However, if you were to ask the management team at
one of these firms who they view as competition, the answer would reflect a boiled down focus on key
competitors viewed as pursuing specific client segments with one, or a combination of, tailored
products.
The chart below, is useful for defining the important elements of your competition. (The chart is in
Excel).
As you can see, the chart asks you to fill in the companies believed to comprise the competition. The
next columns are designed to put tangible measures to the concept of competitor. Determining where
you overlap with a particular competitor, which products are facing each other across the ring and the
specific client segments you are both pursuing is vital. An important consideration for noting the
answers to these headings is: “are these current markets, products and client segments or are they under
review for their future potential?”
The remaining columns are vital to understanding what you are up against and how you can win. The
way a competitor markets their products, the channels used for distribution and how they are directly
coming after your business is knowledge your company must incorporate into its decisions on
maintenance, growth and long-term success of its business.
Fortunately, the digital world we inhabit makes finding this information simply a matter of time and
attention to the subtleties of your competition’s online presence, social media interactions, customer
feedback, public commentary in the press, financial information, Board composition, and so on.

In the beginning of the book, I gave a description of strategy as, “the application of strength, advantage,
differentiating factors against weakness, disadvantage, or sameness”, and threw in Sun Tzu’s quote, “So
in war, the way is to avoid what is strong, and strike at what is weak.”
When planning for dealing with your competition, these elements of what strategy is come to the
forefront. Once you have the competition chart completed, realistically consider your company’s ability
and will to win by applying its strengths, creating client perceived differentiation and hammering the
competition where it is weak, injured or bland.
A last thought on competition. One of the aspects of a great coach is his or her ability to make those
“half time adjustments” that end up winning the game for the team. You have seen it a hundred times; at
half time the teams seem even, but in the 15-minute halftime break, the coaching staff got together with
the players and a conversation more or less like this occurred: “Team, from fighting with the other team
for one half, we know them, what they can and cannot do. We have led them to believe we will
continue to do what we have been doing in the past. They think they have a winning game plan against
us, when they actually have a winning game plan against what we used to do. Applying our strengths
against their vulnerabilities, with all of our effort and willpower, will overwhelm them before they
have a chance to react, and if they did not adjust at halftime, there is not enough time to adjust before
we beat them.” The second half is then a masterful outplaying of the other team and what ends up
looking like an easy victory.
Business is more complex than sports and the “game” is never over. However, the lesson here is once
you have identified your competition and how you are going to engage and win against them, you may
find yourself highly successful. If so, take care, the people over there are meeting and putting their best
minds together to retake any lost market share. Or you may find your push into a new market producing
lower than desired results. In that case, regroup, take your “halftime break” and come up with
adjustments based upon what you have learned about the competition’s effectiveness and unleash the
new game plan with all you can bring to bear.
Now, armed with Goals and an understanding of your company’s SWOT, it is time to come up with
some new, (and BIG), ideas!
 Chapter 4
Big Ideas Are Needed. How to Generate Inspired and BIG Ideas
We have all seen or heard of a new invention or solution to a problem and wondered, “Why didn’t I think
of that?” Or worse, you see half of a university student body zooming around on two wheeled scooters,
and remember, “I did think of that!”, but didn’t do anything with the idea.
We would all like to have more ideas, especially good ones. I enjoy hearing how fiction writers,
scientists and advertising people come up with their ideas. Part of their ability comes with the territory.
If you are in one of the idea generating businesses, you naturally have more time and inclination toward
them, like a body builder showing more muscle definition. Many creative people claim to have great
ideas for books or movies, scientific insights and the solving of intricate problems during dreams. This
may well happen, though I would bet the creative dreamer was hard at trying to come up with big ideas in
his or her waking hours as well.
There are people who seem to have more good ideas than others. Nonetheless, we are all somewhere on
the “idea continuum”, with Benjamin Franklin on one end and your pet goldfish on the other. For the
purposes of coming up with ideas relating to strategy, it is important to remember that we are not trying to
come up a cure for Alzheimer’s, or a way to transmit our corporal body’s molecules via interstellar fax to
a distant planet. Instead, we are looking at business related ideas, specifically those related to the
attainment of the goals developed through the Goal Generator process.
A lot of discussion centers around “Design Thinking” nowadays, as a process for coming up with the right
idea or right set of ideas. Please read up on Design Thinking if you have some time. It is interesting and
there are many nuances I won’t get into here.
I will not satisfy those who spend their lives devoted to Design Thinking, but a summary is as follows:

1. Define the problem, through observation, experience, asking questions

2. Create and consider many options through brainstorming
3. Refine selected directions with teams coming to agreement
4. Pick the winner and execute the best idea
Of course, this is simplistic and if you read more on the subject you will see there is a lot to Design
Thinking and its potential applications.
For consulting projects, my website says I will:
1. Listen, assessing the current situation to arrive at an understanding of how the current
situation is different from the desired outcome.
2. Research and explore ways to bridge the gap between what is and what is desired.
3. Come up with inspired ideas, alternatives and options that are presented and brainstormed
with the company to arrive at an agreed upon design for the way forward.
4. Deliver the objective and, if desired, help ensure the objective is implemented .
5. Evaluate and adjust through a formalized review of the effectiveness of the project

As you can see, the summary of Design Thinking and an approach to project management say basically the
same thing, though I had no input from Design Thinking when I wrote up the web page. Rather than worry
about which came first or ponder a lack of true originality, I think this demonstrates a commonality in the
way ideas are surfaced, regardless of the terms applied to the process.
When ruminating on how ideas are developed, you will find experts on the subject proposing some
derivative of, “getting a bunch of people together” and “thinking outside the box”, with “no wrong
suggestions”, and working with a “Blue Sky” approach”. Don’t you just love meaningless clichés,
especially when they don’t work?
In an effort to be as practical as possible, here is what I think works well for generating ideas in the
workplace.
To start, you have already started. As an important background piece to the search for brilliant ideas, go
through the exercise using the “Business Viability Assessment ”. Remember, this is simply:
1. Listing the business lines/activities the company pursues or is considering developing
2. Determining if these existing or potential business lines/activities can achieve significance
and “best” status
3. Writing down specific proof of the company’s commitment and passion for these business
lines/activities
4. Detailing the primary drivers of these business lines/activities

You do not want to come up with ideas,

develop strategy or spend any of your
treasured time on working on business lines
that are inherently inviable
Next you want to set goals, following the guidelines from Chapter 2, “How to set Goals that Matter”. The
Goal Generator process is how you come up with what you believe would be the best result for the
organization or business unit. Your goals are answers to questions such as, “What would success look
like for our marketing of season tickets for the Miami Dolphins?” There could be many answers,
including, “increase sales of Executive Boxes to corporate buyers by 30%.” It is essential that you come
up with clear goals, focused and as numerically based and measurable as possible. The entire idea
generating process is dependent upon the establishment of the proper goals.
Then you do your SWOT analysis. Going through the SWOT process is vital to ensuring overall
understanding of the dynamics of the organization and the percolation of the SWOT components in your
head is foundational to idea generation.
There is an excellent little book, really a pamphlet, by James W. Young called, “A Technique for
Producing Ideas”. In it, Mr. Young says that an idea is a new combination of existing data, accrediting
this idea to Pareto. Further he states the ability to make new combinations is enhanced by the ability to
see relationships. I could not agree more with these statements, particularly in regard to business.
For us, the existing elements are past performance, financial statements, target markets, economic data,
political environment and any number of other aspects of our businesses. The relationships are the
interdependencies of the drivers of our business. In other words, you must know the facts and know how
changes in one area affect other aspects of your business/activity.
As a quick aside, I believe you will do well to work independently in the beginning stages of developing
ideas. Brainstorming with a team right off the bat seems to dampen creativity. Once you have worked up
some solid ideas on your own, getting together to share fairly developed concepts can produce workable
ideas.
Based on these points, you can agree you need to know as much as you can about a given subject to have
good ideas on that subject. Remember being thrust into a meeting where you did not know what was
going on? Maybe you listened, observed and eventually came up with an idea you thought could help. I
can tell you that nine out of ten times, if you tossed your idea onto the meeting room table it was received
like a batch of five-day old tuna fish. With so little time spent on getting up to speed, there is a lot more
you don’t know than there is that you do, making a great idea, in that context, about as likely as hitting the
half-court shot in between quarters to win a dinner with Dwayne Wade.
There are individuals who think they have a strong sense of intuition, like to follow hunches and tell you
about their successes from “following their gut”. I will grant there may be people who somehow have an
ability in this area. However, I do believe that if analyzed, these “hunches” and demonstrations of
intuition would be traceable back to a depth of knowledge that enabled effective relational thinking to
take place. Think of Sherlock Holmes, one of my wife’s favorite characters when played by Basil
Rathbone through Benedict Cumberbatch. His conclusions have the appearance of wizardry when first
presented, but we soon learn his particular magic is in his ability to observe and link those perceptions
rationally.
Now, let’s say you only pursue viable business lines, have come up with your goals, crammed your head
with facts and understand the interdependent relationships of the various drivers in your business. What
do you do next? Nothing. At this point you need to let your subconscious operate, pulling things apart,
putting them back together, while you look up and away for a while. When people say, “let me sleep on
it”, this is exactly what they are doing. Think of Don Draper, in “Mad Men”, going to the movies in the
middle of the day to give space to his subconscious to churn away while his conscious mind enjoyed a
good flick and movie popcorn.
In short order, ideas, the idea or at least an idea will pop into your head. Write it down fast, again, like
Don Draper, on any napkin you can find handy. I find airplanes and boring seminars to be fertile locations
for ideas exploding into consciousness. I think this is due to having a bit of time where your physical
freedom to roam is cancelled and your conscious mind is cruising along like a car on a long downgrade;
coasting with the engine on. This frees your subconscious to do what it was created to do; put seemingly
unconnected relationships together.
Try these steps provided below and I believe you will be pleased how your mind steps up to the plate and
knocks a few out of the park.
Be sure to write all your ideas down, and once you have the Big Idea, or series of Big Ideas, you will
need to make sure you have good ones, the right ones and maybe even the best one. In the next chapter, on
Logical Proofs, you will see just how to do this. (That is a cliffhanger sentence, designed to prevent you
from putting the book down at this point!)
-------------------------------

Idea Generation Process

Start by working independently, and:
1. Assess the business lines/activities for fundamental viability

2. Write down the Goals from the Goal Generator exercise

3. Go over the SWOT analysis in detail

4. Learn as much as you can in the time available in regard to your subject, including facts and
relationship interdependencies

5. Step away and let your subconscious restructure and recombine these elements of Goals,
SWOT analysis, facts and relationships

6. Write down your ideas as they come to you. Work on them until they are clear and concise.
Work on them until you are pleased and excited about them.

7. If you have a team working on the strategy, bring them together and discuss your ideas, and
the ideas of other members of the team

8. Write the best ideas down and test them for logic through the use of Logical Proofs
 Chapter 5
Logical Proofs. Bullet Proof Your BIG IDEAS
When I was in college, I was often frustrated by the grades I would get on papers. Since I went to a
challenging Liberal Arts college, there were a lot of papers to write. I would come close to making up
for the lower than desired grades on my papers by testing well, though the unfortunate averaging of my
grades left me with a lot of A- or B+ final grades. In contrast, my then girlfriend and now wife, got
excellent grades on both her written and test work. We often took a class together, both studied hard, for
sure she a bit more than me, but it was easy to see that even when we had a similar grasp of the material,
her papers were invariably A’s and mine were way too often slammed with a B+.
In those days, you typed on an electric typewriter and my lack of funds meant my typewriter ribbons were
often on their last legs. I type with decent speed but with an indecent amount of errors, so the pages were
filled with white outs, X outs and sometimes I just had to leave a poorly written sentence sitting there
looking as out of place as a grown man wearing sandals at a funeral.
But there was more to my poor scores than illegible pages. It was the fact they were illegible pages of
poor writing that shaved off a half point or point on my grades. I analyzed my work, particularly against
the stellar showing of my wife’s, and saw several things I could improve. I did not do enough drafts, did
not allow myself enough time to formulate cogent arguments, and often did not know my subject
thoroughly and often rushed the process, forfeiting my best effort.
When I got my first job, it was not long before I was considered a “good” writer. I was often asked to
take the lead on written proposals and other work requiring putting pen to paper, literally in those pre-PC
days. I should say this was largely because there is so little writing required in the U.S. education
process that my demanding professors at Occidental College got me ahead of my peers in this skill, even
if I was often not up to their standards for an A .
Because I was writing more at work, I gave additional thought to the process, got frequent feedback and
got better at it. There is power in the written word in a business setting. I saw a lot of talkers but few
people willing to follow a simple process I found to be effective:
• See a problem
• Come up with an idea to fix it
• Write the whole thing down, background, current situation, where the problem is leading, what
this would mean to the company, and then provide a solution
• Then put the names of several people at the bottom of the memo who have authority, within the
existing bureaucracy, with “Approved” next to the signing line, and go around getting signatures
Identify problems and provide solutions, in writing.
Management has lots of problems, not so many solutions
and becoming a solution provider will get you noticed
This worked extremely well, and helped me get more opportunities to be involved in interesting deals
than most of my colleagues. Isn’t that a big part of what we want from our jobs?
Then, years later, I was exposed to the consulting business. The consulting business, particularly if you
are competing against the big and well known firms, is extremely challenging. In short, companies with
any number and type of problems go out to the best consulting companies in the world and request them to
make proposals to fix the issue. These proposals are compared at the highest level of the company, since
consulting engagements can rarely be approved by anyone other than very senior management level
executives. This means the proposal, often a PowerPoint type “deck”, must be outstanding, close to
perfection, in terms of quality.
Now, what is quality? I will confess that despite my many years in higher level positions in the finance
industry I did not know how to make these proposals. In fact, the first proposal I prepared was rejected
so many times it became a sad and painful joke. I felt like I had landed in a 10-foot-deep sand trap, filled
with molasses and could in no way get my wedge to the ball.
What happened? I got better at it, from reading hundreds of proposals and from getting very direct and
clear criticism from the more senior people in the firm. I learned that sleep is totally unnecessary and that
your mind can come up with things, even with no existing knowledge of a given subject and no time, that
are quite creative.
Output from the big consulting firms is consciously esthetically pleasing. There can be no wrong font on
even one letter of a back page of a presentation and colors, graphics, charts and the way the elements are
arranged on a page must be artistically sound. Meeting this standard was a far cry from the disasters of
editing I submitted in college.
So, I got pretty good at all those things, but it was not until I had a seminar with Barbara Minto, on her
logic in writing formula, that things fell into place. Ms. Minto is a modern-day change maker with an
incredibly insightful concept of writing. Much of what I use for logical writing is based on her book,
“The Pyramid Principle”, and I would urge you to buy it, read it and keep it handy.
From that point on, I understood that judging a written document as either “good writing” or “bad writing”
is generally made without the reader, (or even the writer), able to succinctly say why the verdict is
levied. People may say, “it was well written”, or “the writing was clear”, or “he made his point”, or “I
agreed with what she said”, or simply, “I liked it.” Someone may get his or her idea approved, product
sold or petition accepted without the writer or the reader able to say why the document “worked”.
In fact, despite the incredibly poor excuse for grammar and punctuation accepted in our schools today, in
a simplistic way, I would probably say there is no “good” or “bad” writing. Instead there is “logical” or
“illogical” writing.
Writing is generally not “bad” or “good”, instead it
is usually either “logical” or illogical”
I saw this clearly when I worked for a large international bank where over half the employees were
Chinese and where another large percentage were from a wide range of other countries all around the
world. All written correspondence was in English, so a credit proposal coming from Laos to the head
office in London, for example, had to be in English.
I will admit that there were some quite amusing emails and memos where phraseology of concepts and
direct translations into English, provided a chuckle. In general, however, no one made an issue of the fact
that high level and impactful written documents were often written at a fairly low level of English. In the
end, it was the logic of the argument that mattered, though, again, few people would have put it in those
words.
My point is that logic makes good writing. The lack of clarity and understanding we sometimes
experience with our writing is generally not a style issue, instead, almost always, it is a structure and
logic issue. If what you write makes compelling sense, people really don’t notice or care about the style.
This is good news since most of the time, particularly in business, the purpose of a written document is to
inform and gain acceptance and adoption of ideas. Writing is an attempt to obtain agreement, or at least a
positive response, to the writer’s ideas.
With that in mind, wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a way to set out your ideas so that your reading
audience could evaluate them and, by the end of your document, agree with them? What if this same
structure could help you review your own argument to see if it holds water?
Fortunately, there is such a structure, a way of writing, utilizing “Logical Proofs” that enables the
placement of ideas in such a way that the audience can make a proper, and positive, evaluation of them.
It is useful to point out here, that most of what you write for business is highly uninteresting to those that
read it. Let’s face it, people are not sitting up at night, cutting into their much needed Z time, due to the
page turning thrillers of work related memos. You already know how hard it is to get your board to read
the company’s Strategic Plan, or the Credit Committee to read the loan presentation they are expected to
vote on or any number of emails, memos or project proposals that should be read, need to be read, but are
often not given the perusal they merit.
The problem is everyone is busy and the emails, memos and proposals are often boring and frequently
hard to decipher. The point is, most of us are not writing bestselling fiction, instead, we are spending a
significant amount of time writing up a narrow genre of company specific nonfiction that you could not
give away to the general public.
The paradox lies in the fact that much of what we write in the workplace has huge monetary and policy
impact and decisions on the content are necessary to keep the enterprise moving forward.
With all this is mind, I am going to provide you with an extremely powerful structure for getting your
ideas across in a way that people will want to read. At the very least, you will gain a reputation for
producing memos worth the read.
The summary points are set below.
With no exaggeration, utilizing the Logical
Writing Format will transform your
effectiveness. Use it and keep it next to you for
EVERYTHING you write
The Logical Writing Format . To write logically, the following points need to be addressed:

1. What’s going on Now? Who are we? What do we know to be true? What is our common
ground?

2. What’s Wrong? (Basically, the idea is to identify the gap between what you wanted and
what you have).
• What are you seeing, that maybe no one else sees, that is not working?
• Where do we want to be? Instead, where are we?
• What do we have? What did we want?
• How far did we want to go? How far did we go?
3. Once the Gap is identified, the questions are:

• Why did the Gap happen? What created it?

• Should we leave things alone?
• Should we do what it takes to close the Gap?
• What should we do to close the Gap?
• How should we close the Gap?
 4. Develop a Big Idea / Solution in response to the above questions, then State the Big Idea

5. Create a Logical Proofs Tracking Sheet to ensure answers to:

• Why?
• How?
• How do you know?
• Who?
• When?
• What will happen?
6. Take each idea and the associated answered questions and flesh them out in memo form

A quick note on point 6. The length of your writing will depend on the subject matter, audience, situation
and relative impact of the Big Idea. For example, if you see a Godiva Chocolate representative wheeling
a cart of free samples for the office to enjoy, a tweet of “Godiva Chocolate! Free! Board Room, Now!”,
would be plenty.
Let’s discuss the process more in depth. First, “What’s Going On Now?” It is highly effective to start
your writing with something the reader already knows. This is a powerful way to get the ball rolling in a
document or even in a verbal sales presentation, where, in fact, you are basically trying to transfer an
idea.
Therefore, to start a document, of practically any kind, purpose and length, write down something
everyone knows and where you will find agreement. This can be a simple statement, a description of the
status of the company or something explaining how we are all in this together.
Many would say the best speech ever given is Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. How does it
start? “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation,
conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
This point is highly relevant to the rest of the speech, however, whether intentionally or not, Lincoln
started this wonderful piece of writing with a statement with which no one in the audience would take
issue. From there, he took his speech where he wanted, with, and this is key, the audience already
nodding their heads in agreement.
Let’s use a less eternal piece of writing as an example. Say you want to set the venue for the next meeting
of the “Society to Ban the Use of Outside the Box from Business Jargon.” You should start with a
statement all members of the Society will agree upon, such as, “The use of Outside the Box is so
widespread that it has become meaningless and its use must be limited at all costs.” The Society’s
members will be nodding in assent and you are on your way.
After your ground setting start, you need to identify, “What’s Wrong?” There are many reasons for writing
something up, however, most of the time, writing designed to gain acceptance and agreement of an idea, is
made valid by its ability to counteract something that is wrong, not working, or a problem. We have all
seen memos, speeches and comments in meetings where the presenter, often a very senior person, puts on
a serious face, works the forehead wrinkles and restates the obvious or repeats what a more junior person
said, sometimes only moments before. This is, of course, hard to take, but it is also completely
worthless. People delving into this part of this book are not about covering explored ground or masking
laziness and incompetence with prosaicisms, (minor soapbox break, now back to our featured
presentation).
How do you know what the problem is and how do you present it? This is a matter of observation,
research and integrity. Few people think in ways necessary to create change. However, the people who
do change things see the world through a different lens, in business perhaps big picture or bottom line
thinking. This is usually characterized by never losing sight of what the company’s clients want and
deserve and seeing ways to constantly improve things, even when it goes unnoticed.
Basically, the “What’s Wrong” is along the lines of, “we are here and we wanted to be there”, or “we
have this and wanted that”, or “we wanted to get that far and we only got this far”. What you are doing is
identifying the Gap between what you want and what you have .
This could be market share related; “we are selling fewer sandwiches since Jimmy Johns opened down
the street” or, “our flights to Utah are 15% under projections”, or “we had eight rainouts last year and 28
days when fans suffered game delays due to weather.”
It is imperative that you are honest with yourself and the company to be clear on what you expected and
what you got. There are a great number of instances where your honest appraisal of the situation is met
with push back, at times including clear instructions to not state the gap. In other words, people and
companies often purposely bury their heads in the sand rather than face a problem head on.
Ok, so now that you see the Gap, you can put it in a clear and concise sentence, casting it in stone, so to
speak.
On to the third step, where you formulate a question in regard to the Gap. Most of the time the question
will be one of five, or a combination of these:
• Why did the Gap happen? What created it?
• Should we leave things alone?
• What should we do to close the Gap?
• How should we close the Gap?
• Should we do what it takes to close the Gap?
Think about this for a second, and maybe go back to the sandwich shop owner getting hammered by the
new Jimmy John’s down the block. Easy to see why the Gap happened; new competition, close by.
Second, should the sandwich guy leave things alone? Generally, I think inaction is harmful, however, it
may be that people will try Jimmy John’s for a bit, find the bread is thick and no Markook, with the
mayonnaise smeared on at a frightening thickness and come back to the old favorite sandwich shop, once
the novelty is over. Could be, have to find out .
Then, three semi-related questions: What should we do? How should we do it? and Should we do it?
These are great questions and you will need to take a few minutes to come up with worthy answers.
This leads to the fourth step of developing a Big Idea in response to the above questions. The chapter on
Idea Generation is useful in this regard. What you want is inspiration, the “aha” moment of satisfying
insight when your brain pops, you get that cool river down your spine and you just know you are onto
something.
Once the Big Idea hits you, write it down in draft form, fast. Turn it over in your head for a while until it
is crystal clear in your mind what you want to get across to your audience. For example, you may be
proposing a bunker type complex to house your file servers to keep your operating system live in the event
of a category 5 hurricane. You will certainly have dozens of reasons why this is a good idea, and there
will be several alternatives. Your Big Idea, however, is simple: “the best way to ensure our system stays
live in the event of a major hurricane is to house our primary system in a bunker type complex.” Get to
the point where you can put your Big Idea into a clear sentence or two.
Though not exactly the same, it is useful to think of the Big Idea as a “solution”, and in fact, it is often
helpful to put them together; “Big Idea / Solution”. This enables the subtleties of the words to roam free
to good effect.
Our sandwich guy, after answering the five questions and mulling things over may decide the way Jimmy
John’s is eating his lunch, so to speak, is by putting a sandwich in a customer’s hands within seconds of
ordering. So, his Big Idea is to, “Make sandwiches as quickly as Jimmy John’s.”
It is possible this is not the only idea the sandwich shop owner has to tackle his Jimmy John’s problem.
Still, he has a better shot at being read if he goes with one idea per document, and so will you. If you
have a lot of ideas, write a lot of memos. If there are closely related ideas, consolidate them or work on
prioritization so that your Big Idea stands out.
Now, after you have the Big Idea, we get to the fascinating power of Logical Proofs. The key to writing
logically is to understand how logic works. It is common for people to think that a logical train of thought
starts with an introduction, a series of statements, arguments or examples and ends with a conclusion.
This is a form of Deductive Logic where the concept is the conclusion is the result of a train of reasoning,
and that people will follow you down that road until you get to your expository destination. This doesn’t
work!

In fact, the best structure for logical writing is the opposite, with the conclusion stated first and the
reasoning coming after. This is a form of Inductive Logic. (I recognize there are nuances to deductive
and inductive logic beyond these straightforward examples). To make a simple analogy, if you are
planning a vacation, which works best? To say, “We should go to Lake Tahoe”, and then provide the
reasons why this is your best bet. Or, starting with, “There are some places we have never been, many of
them extremely beautiful. We went to Europe last year and in the interest of our finances need to do a
domestic vacation this year. I found a good deal on a four-star hotel at the base of the ski run. Did you
know the city of Lake Tahoe is half in California and half in Nevada so you can enjoy the unspoiled nature
and access to casino nightlife at the same time?”
You can see this goes all over the place and causes listeners to get snagged by one comment or another
and not even hear most of the other points.
Many of us, and I mean me, talk like this and you see people glazing over and don’t know why. You are
giving them too much rationale and not enough answer. So, start with the answer, and follow up with the
needed reasoning.
Key to all this is realizing that if you say something such as “The San Francisco Giants will win the World
Series this year”, there are six questions your fellow baseball fan can ask. These are:
• Why?
• How?
• How do you know?
• Who will make it happen/do the work?
• When will it happen/be completed?
• What will happen if successful?
There are smart people who would say the last three questions are redundant and can be found within the
first three. However, my experience in business and with getting things done leads me to insist on all six
of these as valid and likely questions to anything of importance that you state as a Big Idea.
The wonderful thing about logical writing is that if you can answer these questions to your audiences’
satisfaction, you have obtained acceptance and adoption of your Big Idea using logic.
I need to stick in somewhere here that you do not need to list pros and cons of an idea. This is confusing
and takes away from the reader’s ability to follow your train of thought. In logical writing, as the reader
moves through the document, cons will pop up, with the process addressing them naturally.
To help ensure your logic is sound and that you obtain agreement on your Big Idea, I am giving you the
“Logical Proofs Tracking Sheet ”, produced below. This is a spreadsheet and you can work with it in
Excel with all the flexibility the program allows.
This tracking sheet is a thing of beauty, if you use it. If you don’t use it, it is still a thing of beauty, except
it will be for others to enjoy, kind of like waiting too long to ask a girl out and then getting her wedding
invitation in the mail.
The tracking sheet makes the Logical Proofs step in the process a fill-in-the-blanks exercise, albeit a very
thoughtful fill-in-the-blanks exercise.
Try it out. First, put a Big Idea in the first cell. In the case of our sandwich guy, the Big Idea is to “Make
sandwiches as quickly as Jimmy John’s.”
Then, in the “Why?” cell, write in the reasons your Big Idea should be implemented. In this case, a
primary answer to “Why?” would be, “so Jimmy Johns stops eating our lunch! ”
“How?” requires some research. He should go to Jimmy John’s, place a few orders and see what they do
behind the counter. Read up, study Subway and a few other places and take a critical look at his own
process to see what the differences are, and how they could be addressed.
So, the “Why?” and the “How?” are not so hard to defend. The “How Do You Know?”, is more difficult
because the sandwich shop owner will have other possible reasons why he is losing customers; location,
ingredients, price, interior seating, exterior seating, attractiveness of the shop and any number of other
things.
Make no mistake, if you do not satisfactorily answer the “How do you know” question, you will be unable
to gain acceptance and adoption of your Big Idea.
Therefore, in this case, the sandwich shop owner must do surveys, ask customers what they think about the
speed of service as an element of buying behavior, eliminate the other possible factors, rely on his own or
others’ expert opinions. Put these answers into the chart in bullet point form for now.
Right here you can see that one of the most worthwhile aspects of utilizing the Logical Proofs Tracking
Sheet is to test the power of your own argument before you present it to others. If you cannot remove your
own doubt by the answers you provide, you know you need to look harder or consider the possibility that
your Big Idea is the wrong one. The process also forces you to anticipate questions so that when you are
called upon to defend your Big Idea, you have already had your own mental SWAT team firing skepticism
bullets at the idea so you can easily repel your audience’s attacks.
My guess would be the sandwich shop owner would realize people think it is amusing to have your
sandwich fired at you within seconds of ordering, but that, if other things are equal or better, making
sandwiches as fast as Jimmy John’s is not the right Big Idea. Instead, look at consistency, value for
money, a place to sit, dress up the external image and see if the novelty will wear off over the next few
weeks.
For the sake of argument, let’s say the owner’s Big Idea is correct. It is all about making sandwiches
faster, and he researches the heck out of the competition and his own operation and figures out how to
make this happen. That leads us to the next question in the tracking sheet, “Who?” The older I get, the
more I am convinced the “Who?” question is as important as any other. Without a qualified, hardworking
and accountable person you can charge with the task of getting the Big Idea through the “How?” stage, the
exercise will fail, even if it is the right thing to do. Remember, the “Who?” could be YOU! Consider
suggesting yourself as the one willing to take on the Big Idea, drive it until it produces results. After all,
as the one coming up with the Big Idea, you are likely the most knowledgeable about how to get it done.
In my career, I have seen the lack of accomplishment, incomplete projects, failure to attain budgets and
inability to achieve necessary change is often directly attributable to a lack of clearly defined
responsibilities and accountabilities laid on individuals. Strong enough statement? I really mean it, and
will say if you cannot find the right person to make the Big Idea happen, wait until you do before
shipwrecking a great idea on the rocks of poor leadership.
The next point in the process, “When?” is easy enough to grasp. Once you have your highly skilled and
professional person or team in place to pull off the Big Idea, you need to set time lines, delivery dates and
other time bound expectations. These can change based upon new facts, but the deviations are also noted
on the tracking sheet and the new dates for delivery are expected to be met.
The next stage in the process is a discussion of “What Will Happen?” In other words, if the Big Idea is
the right one and you can get your list of official approvers to take a bold leap (do their jobs) and sign off
on your idea, what can you project as results? For business, this will usually be a financial forecast, but
it may be anything objectively quantifiable, or subjectively reasonable, to expect.
Our sandwich guy, with double-deckers, hoagies, subs and lettuce wrapped, all veggie, tasteless wonders
flying at customers at near injury producing rates, will have to put the market share and financial impact
of this new selling point in this cell in the tracking sheet. The bullet points here will be forecasts, market
share improvement, additional cost of effecting the change in sandwich production, marketing costs and
anything else that affects the pluses and minuses of measurable aspects of the business.
This is a key part of the discussion. You should always be prepared for, and acknowledge, that a correct
Big Idea, resulting in small quantifiable change, may not get approved. This is a bit like betting on a
“sure thing” at 3:5 odds. A sure thing does not exist and every Big Idea implementation has associated
risks. Therefore, even a good idea may not pass the risk/reward test.
This is a good thing, since you do not want to spend your time or work-related capital on things that don’t
have a substantial impact. If you see your “What Will Happen?” cell spit out small and boring results,
think of shooting for greater scale, doubling up, applying more resources, cutting expense elements and
otherwise blowing up the value of your Big Idea so it snaps some heads around.
Even good ideas may not pass a Risk/Reward test.
This is good; you only want to work on things with
substantial impact
Remember when I said some companies don’t want to hear about “What’s wrong?”, and may even try to
prevent you from openly expressing the Big Idea? The “What Will Happen?” section of your document
gives you another chance to be heard. If your Big Idea leads to major positive impact, it may be powerful
enough to get some people to reach for the ear swabs after pulling their heads out of the sand.
A quick aside to you marketing/advertising people. Your business is a beautiful thing, and I’m not just
saying that because “Mad Men” is one of my favorite shows. Your founders, great thinkers and the
marketing programs and ads they have produced over the years are true art, particularly in the U.S. where
business still ranks somewhere high on the list of things people care about.
However, you can see that putting an ad idea through the Logical Proofs system could lead to a lot of
unconvincingly answered questions. Basically, what is the measurable value of a marketing campaign and
advertising?
That was then; this is now. Nowadays, the digital age has enabled the monitoring and measurement of the
effectiveness of marketing efforts to a degree not imaginable not so long ago. I’m pleased with this
development since it should provide an opportunity for the truly creative people in the field to get some
tech related support in the “How do you know?” and “What will happen?” questions for their Big Ideas.
Moving on, the last column on the tracking sheet is simply, “Completed?”, with the answer either Yes or
No. Some of you may want to use a graphic to note you are 25%. 50%, or 75% completed, and that is
fine. However, my experience with organizations is that it is extremely difficult for them to get anything
done, so I hope you go for the Y or N on this one since, in the end, something is either done or not done.
Now, once you have completed the tracking sheet, primarily listing your answers to the questions in bullet
point form, it is time to put them into memo form. This part flows easily since you have done the hard
work already. However, please give your document the respect it deserves and do a nice job. Let’s face
it, if you have done a good job on the Logical Proofs, your Big Idea has a strong chance of getting
approved and making an impact on the company in some objectively quantifiable way. You are about to
effect change! So, do a good job and enjoy the write up.
To reiterate, your steps in logical writing are:
1) What’s going on Now?
2) What’s Wrong? Identify the Gap
3) Once the Gap is identified, the questions are:
• Why did the Gap happen? What created it?
• Should we leave things alone?
• Should we do what it takes to close the Gap?
• What should we do to close the Gap?
• How should we close the Gap?
Develop a Big Idea in response to the above questions, then State the Big Idea
4) Create a Logical Proofs Tracking Sheet
5) Take each idea and the associated answered questions and flesh them out in memo for m
A hypothetical memo from the sandwich shop owner to his partners would follow this format, step by
step. You can be brief in points 1 and 2, basically an introduction and a statement of the Gap. A little
more space is given to point 3, so you can provide some thought why a decision is necessary, even if it is
a decision to not do anything now.
Once you have come up with the big idea, you want to introduce it early in the document, maybe even in
the “re” line before the memo even gets going. Remember, the Big Idea is the key to the proposal’s
acceptance and adoption and needs to be stated early on, with the minor concepts that support the Big Idea
coming into the argument later, if needed.
Newspapers articles follow this format. Though the purpose is more to convey information rather than
transfer ideas, journalists are taught to go from big to small, like an inverted pyramid, in regard to the
points made in the article. The idea is that if the universe collapsed while you were halfway through the
article, the major facts would accompany your rapidly imploding atoms as they careen off into space.
Then create and work through a Logical Proofs Tracking Sheet for your Big Idea and related secondary
ideas if you need them. Put bullet point answers to the questions in the appropriate cells. Once the
Tracking Sheet is complete, pull the answers off the Sheet and flesh them out in memo form.
Sometimes, you may find it difficult to transfer the question and answer format in the Tracking Sheet to
fluid writing in your memo. What you want to do is satisfy the primary and most meaningful questions. If
significant and sensible queries are left unaddressed, the document stops right there in terms of logic and
effectiveness. You can make each answer concise, and should, but need to address the primary questions.
An aside to that aside. One thing we have all observed is that people are different in terms of the way
they assimilate information. For some, it takes very little detail before they get to the, “ok, I got it”,
stage. For others, a far more complete explanation is required before they feel ready to head off into the
fray. You can place yourself somewhere along this range. With this in mind, write to your audience’s
level of perceived information assimilation .
Feel free to continue with the question and answer format in some cases. For example, in our lightning
sandwich delivery proposal, when you get to the “Why?” cell, you may, in your memo write something
like, “Why do we need to implement this idea now?” Answer, “We are experiencing an 18% drop in walk
in traffic and have one long standing corporate client that decided to go with Jimmy John’s for the catering
of their employee Family Day Picnic this year.” Add as many “answers” to this question as you have,
ensuring they reflect significance.
Be sure to work each Big Idea one at a time and thoroughly, going through all of the questions and
providing answers until there are no more unresolved queries. Once the questions have been exhausted
by impossible to contradict replies, you have reached the conclusion. You can conclude with something
like, “Therefore, in view of the support provided for the recommended course of action, please note your
approval by signing in the space provided.” You will be pleased with your percentage of approved
recommendations, and, if you worked the process through sincerely, will down deep know that even the
rare rejected proposal was actually good business and possibly a Lazarus for the future.
 Chapter 6
Strategy without action is dead. How to create workable action steps
One of life’s little pleasures is the ability to watch just about anything on your television or mobile device
at any time, practically anywhere. If your family is like mine, everyone is busy and it is not easy to have a
time where everyone can sit still for 90 minutes to watch a movie together. Then, when those rare
moments are suddenly there, and all are assembled in the family room, dogs have been out and coffee and
dessert in hand, the question, “What do you want to watch?” comes up.
One of my sons makes no bones about what he wants to see; an “action” film. Though I like a lot of
genres, I understand this view. Since we don’t watch that many movies, why not be smacked over the
head with the best in creative cinematic trickery, thoroughly removed from our everyday lives and more
than a few standard deviations from reality? Chases through crowded streets, hurricanes toppling
skyscrapers, secret agents giving it all for Queen and Country or even remakes of the giant lizards,
gorillas and comic book idols from our childhood can leave us breathless viewed from the safety of our
recliners.
Action is exciting, and a nice break from the sitting around, waiting, doing not much of anything, having
meetings, talking about what a company should do, could do, ought to do, that comprises much our work
lives. I think the reason a lot of higher level management personnel have active hobbies, besides
providing a way to embarrass themselves by demonstrating their neediness on social media, can be
attributed to the frustration of not doing anything meaningful at work.
This chapter is designed to help you bring some much-needed action into your workplace by showing you
how to create effective Action Steps that spring naturally from your strategy.
Successful people are, or were, active people, often getting up the ladder through hard work, record sales
performance, traveling whenever required to close a deal, and staying on site for days at a time to
complete a project. But then you can hit a wall. Like a marathon, (or for most of us a 5k). There comes a
point where you think you can’t go on and the finish line isn’t worth the effort to get there.
That can happen in business, with the “wall” representing a massive construct comprised of bureaucracy,
inertia, conformity, the never-ending search for mediocrity and the mistaken belief that someone else will
do it. I propose a summary word for this, “crappola”. Not that offensive, but enough there for all of us to
agree we would not want to step in it, much less have it served up to us on a daily basis in the office
cafeteria.
Crappola exists. Feel free to add to the deadly combo of bureaucracy, inertia, conformity, mediocrity and
someone else will do it, with your own personally perceived wall component. It is a healthy mental
exercise to express in words what your mind dislikes. This puts the concept into an almost physical thing
that you can put before you on a table and examine and deal with rationally.
You have a daily fight against the deadly combination
of; bureaucracy, inertia, conformity, mediocrity and
someone else will do it!

Many of you have heard James’s powerful statement from the Bible that “Faith by itself, if it does not
have works, is dead.” As a big fan of James, I mean no disrespect when I suggest you replace “faith”
with “strategy” and come up with “strategy by itself, if it does not have action, is dead.” It would be a
pleasant diversion to explore this analogy more, and maybe we will another time. Suffice it to say, that
“strategy” can be likened to a belief, desire, plan, thought process and state of mind. In other words, it is
in your head, I would hope in your heart (remember the importance of passion in building a strategy), and
you may have gone as far as writing it down. However, anyone would agree that leaving it in your head
and on paper does not actually do anything and certainly will not get anything done.

I know you have come up with a lot of great ideas in your life, big and small. My grandfather, born in
Arizona in 1917 and living there most of his life, apparently invented a workable air conditioner well
ahead of its time. He made two of them, one for himself and one for his dear mother, and that’s all he ever
did with the idea. I guess you can give him a nod for making at least two, but imagine what could have
been!
By the way, my grandfather, and then my father are first class story tellers. I think the air conditioner
invention story is true, but I have never seen either one of them let facts stand in the way of a good yarn.
On a much smaller scale, how many times do you think something like, “It would be nice if I went over
and hung the Christmas lights for my friend whose husband passed away unexpectedly this year.” Or, you
learn there are 125 students at a local high school that miss their free breakfast, often after having nothing
to eat all weekend, because the school bus drivers always get them to the campus 15 minutes too late. Or
that to sign up for subsidized lunch you need do it online, but kids that need subsidized lunches often don’t
have computers. So, you say, “I can fix these things easily”, and you can, but you don’t. All of us have a
huge amount of good deeds laid out for us that we don’t bother to pick up. Why? Our old nemeses:
Bureaucracy, Inertia, Conformity, Mediocrity and Someone Else Will Do It .
Remember, Chapter 1 provided an overview of Action Steps including some key concepts behind their
development. I am repeating the summary from the Principles of Strategy Development here:
To follow the defined strategy, action steps will be characterized by:
• Focused Action – reduce complexity and ambiguity – few successes are better than many half-
done jobs
• Focus on key business drivers – Understand and allocate resources to the elements that drive
revenue
• Focus on high gain activity – 20% of anything gets 80% done
• Focus on actions you can take now , with precise steps and measurable results – Big, Cheap,
Now
• Incremental steps, variations of existing initiatives with near term implementation and
providing quick results .
 • Clarity and Coherence
• Utilization of the company’s or unit’s available resources – Do not wait for input or support
from areas you cannot control
• Application of the company’s differentiated leverage and power
• Building shock absorbers against the unidentifiable though recurring extraordinary disruptions to
business: succession planning, financial reserves, quality business, compliance, ethics, policies,
procedures
For this chapter, I want to give you a practical guide relating directly to your strategy. It must be said that
a lot of this is obvious, and I apologize in advance for every, “Duh!” you believe must be voiced when
reading this section. For my part, I will try to make those “Duhs” as rare as Golden Retriever attack
dogs.
The first step is to get your written strategy and go to the sections on “Specific Areas for Strategic
Change”, and “Summary of Strategic Change” . Looking back on Chapter 7, you will see these
sections detail the areas directly and uniquely affected by your strategy. How long of a list of Specific
Areas you have depends upon the complexity of your strategy. If you draw up a Strategic Plan for a
commercial bank, there will be many Specific Areas. Sometimes there are not many Areas, but these few
may be multifaceted and immensely important. For example, a bank in Indiana may be pleased with its
business line of financing farming equipment, accounting for 90% of its lending activity. Here, the
strategy could well be, “Keep it up boys!”. Sounds simple enough. However, under that idea will be a
number of specific actions, without which the desired momentum cannot be maintained.
There are times when listing the Specific Areas for Strategic Change uses up a few trees worth of paper.
For example, should an internal or external review of the business lead to the necessity for a major
overhaul, you will have dozens of Specific Areas.
On the good side, by now you are, or on your way toward becoming, a person who writes strategic
documents that are focused, clear and based upon the principle that getting the main things done equates to
success. Therefore, in most cases you will have a manageable list of Specific Areas for Strategic
Change.
For many projects, the Project Manager will come up with a slide that looks something like this:
(There will be several other similar slides outlining subsequent steps toward project completion)
The “Tasks” are listed, the “Process” outlined and what the client receives, “Deliverable”, spelled
out. This defines the scope and what the client can expect, both useful aims. However, for our
purposes, I suggest you go back to Chapter 5 on Logical Writing and pull up your Logical Proofs
Tracking Sheet.
Now, for the purposes of creating Action Steps , we simply:

1. Replace the heading “Ideas” with “Specific Areas for Strategic Change ”
2. Delete the columns for “Why?” , “How do you know?” and “What will happen?”
You then have a spreadsheet that looks like this: (This one is in Excel)
Take each of your “Specific Areas” and insert them in the appropriate column. Then flesh out a
description of how the change will occur in the “How?” column. This can be trying, since you have to
determine a level of detail enabling understanding without compelling minds to wander. My suggestion is
that you bullet point the main ideas of how the change is to occur, such as:

Hire 3 welders
Move the sales teams to geographic regions
Develop a mobile device based X-ray interpreter

If the “How?” is exceptionally complex, a separate project management document should be used to guide
the work, working off the high level Action Step.
From there, the all important “Who?” and “When” columns are musts. Remember from the previous
discussion of these elements in Chapter 5 that without a qualified, hardworking and accountable person
you can make responsible for each “Specific Area of Strategic Change”, you should not bother (again, the
“Who?” could be you).
Always keep in mind the “Who” could by You!
Following the “Who?”, fill out the due dates for the completion of each Specific Area. When the
“Specific Area” has several components spelled out in the “How?” section, give each one its own due
date, since they will often build and be dependent upon each other in some sequence, like a contractor
adding an in-law’s quarters to your house.
Go over the Action Steps, tighten them up as much as possible, and Bob’s your uncle! You can leave them
in the spreadsheet form, however, I suggest you also type them out in memo form to make them more
accessible to members of your audience.
As a quick example, let’s say that following a goal of increasing loan production, one of your “Specific
Areas of Strategic Change” is to convert several of your existing bank branches into loan referral and
production offices. In the first column; “Convert branches 1 through 5 into loan referral and production
offices”.
Then, in the “How?” column you detail what it would take to accomplish this. A change in Branch
Manager focus would require training, goal setting and an incentive program aimed at producing desired
behavior. Sales people would come from retrained and redirected existing staff and/or new hires.
Marketing of the new concept would entail explanatory information in the branches, website content,
external signage and appropriate disclosures. It is likely credit approval procedures would require some
modification to ensure the business generated from the branches is effective and competition-beating
timelines for the approval process are in place.
From there, a designated person is inserted in the chart, fully responsible and accountable for making this
specific “Strategic Change” happen.
The “When” column defines expectations and creates accountability and the needed sense of urgency.
Finally, “Done?” , yes or no. With this form clear and easily reviewed by supervisors, Management and
the Board, the question of, “Is it done?” is answered with no ambiguity.
I know this seems easy and obvious. However, take a look at things that are not getting done, drag on or
seem to go missing in the aftermath of a decision. It is rare you would find an Action Steps type chart
associated with any of them.

Chapter 7
Putting the Strategy on Paper
Now we get to the nitty gritty; the putting down on paper, (or more likely typing into some hard drive), of
a strategy. The previous chapters are steps in the process toward putting a strategy in written form. In
other words, you are not starting from scratch, and in fact have most of what you need from the prior
chapters to come up with well-documented strategy.
Much of the strategy will roll naturally from your Logical Proofs exercise into an effective document.
However, there are some structural elements I would like to share with you that can nudge your work
toward excellence.
I will give you a format for writing up a strategy at the end of the chapter that follows the concepts found
in Chapter 5’s treatment of Logical Writing. Of course, you can vary the form as you wish and if you
come up with some clever ideas, I’m all ears!
As a quick review, Logical Writing starts with an introduction, basically stating the status in a way
everyone can agree with and get behind. This holds true for the beginning of your strategy. I find it
helpful to combine an introduction with an organizational profile. Say you are writing a strategy for a
Trade Finance team looking to build a business based on utilizing the Export Import Bank of the United
States as a credit enhancement. Your introduction would say something like, “In the following pages a
strategy for building a Trade Finance business based on utilizing the Export Import Bank of the United
States as a credit enhancement will be outlined.” Then some comments on where the business stands
overall and a description of the company, including size, charter, start date and other facts that can be
strung together. Not so problematic.
I like to put the fundamental purpose of the company in the introduction portion of the strategy and
highlight the primary business units, support units and any other groups that would be offended if not
mentioned. Then it is good to state the period covered by the strategy, provide any other scope limitations
and pre-position the fact that you will not be covering every possible scenario and that the strategy can be
adjusted in the future to account for new facts and perceptions. This may seem unnecessary; however,
most senior management teams and boards of directors are replete with people looking to deconstruct
anything that comes their way so it is best to be proactive with a paragraph or two describing the scope of
your document.
Remember, for the opening of the document, you are not looking for controversy, instead taking your
audience’s hand and making that first step in unity. Later, you will lay out ideas that may break some
dishes, but for now you want everyone calmly reading along.
The next section goes back to Chapter 2 on Strategic Principles, specifically the part on the Key Drivers
of the business. Here, you should go through the things crucial to the company’s or business unit’s
success. A few minutes of thought and you will be able to jot down a list of important drivers: people,
clients, products, revenue producing elements, capital, compliance, risk mitigation, data protection/cyber
security, systems, software, marketing/advertising, geography, locations, ownership, history, legacy,
specific innovation, brand and any others that are key to moving the company or team forward.
These drivers should be written up in a positive and professional manner. Think of a high-level pat on the
back. Remember your strategy will be read by an immediate audience and then, particularly if it is going
places, by a variety of constituents. There will be readers who have little direct awareness of you, your
company or the situation you are writing about. They will be regarding the strategy from different angles
and toward dissimilar ends.
So, when you talk about people, start off with something like: “People: Our results are driven first and
foremost by our people. We are committed to the existing culture of our company, characterized by
personalized service, respect and tailored solutions to our clients’ needs. Our employees apply this
same concept to their dealings with each other, ensuring a positive working environment.”
You get the idea. From there, bullet point key things about your people, including characteristics, such as,
“every member of our physical training business has a medical degree and has worked for a professional
sports franchise.” If succession impacts your people, comment briefly on this aspect, along with any
unique ways the company attracts and holds on to stellar employees.
The next section is where you will state the primary Strategic Initiative(s) covered in the document. This
is your Big Idea derived through the Idea Generation Process, built upon predetermined goals. You will
have other Big Ideas as you plunge into the strategy and make statements that reflect innovation, financial
impact and other head turners. Announcing the Strategic Initiative(s) here is a great way to jump from the
Introduction, Organization Profile and Key Drivers, all basically tasty appetizers, to telling the audience
what the main course will be. You aren’t pulling the silver dish cover off the main course just yet, instead
enticing them with a mouthwatering picture of what will be later served.
The statement of the Strategic Initiative(s) should be strong and crisp, leaving no doubt about where the
document is going. I have found that most Strategic Initiative(s) will have a lot to do with a simple
thought: “Keep and grow the good elements of the business, bring in new good elements, get rid of the
bad”. I know that sounds simplistic, but anytime I try to poke holes, it keeps floating high in the water.
Keep and grow the good things, bring in new good elements,
get rid of the bad stuff. Simple, and it works
Once you boldly hammer into place the Strategic Initiative(s), the next step is to take what we covered in
Chapter 3 and insert a SWOT analysis. Depending on your audience and views on how long the
document should be, you can prepare the full SWOT analysis, keep it as a reference or appendix, and put
a summary in the document. The SWOT four square model works well for this and people derive comfort
from the familiar format. When you present a SWOT analysis, there is a tendency for the whole thing to
be glossed over. This is unfortunate because if you have truly identified a company’s or business unit’s
strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities, you have an incredibly valuable tool for making
informed decisions regarding the all-important future, so you would think people would scrutinize every
word. They don’t.
So, when you present a SWOT, or sometime early on when you have a solid draft, take just the SWOT
summary and sit with whoever is in charge of the unit, team, division or company and have them go
through the SWOT summary point by point and tell you if they agree with what you have in the little
boxes. You can then adjust the SWOT early on, rather than have some minor “threat” be the subject of
debate later and derail the conversation.
Now you can move to the section where you bring in the numbers. In general, your strategy will be aimed
at some variation of developing consistent, sustainable, and meaningful numbers. For many pursuits, you
can replace “numbers” with “profitability”. However, the numbers may refer to a variety of countable
items: attendance, purchases, students, market share points, new accounts, clicks, looks, tweets, yesses,
no’s, births, operations, goals, pitches, blocked shots and so on.
I am inordinately fond of the following graphic, taken from Chapter 1’s Principles of Strategy, and like it
placed at this point of the strategy presentation.
The Fundamental Business Viability Assessment is derived from Jim Collin’s wonderful book, “Good to
Great”. I suggest you dash off and buy this book, or sit down and order it since your dashing may prove
unrequited in this day of vanishing sellers of physical books. I have “Good to Great” within arm’s length
of my desk at all times and recommend you keep a copy near to wherever you like to come up with ideas
on the way forward for your business.
Again, to determine business viability, consistent growth and profitability, fundamental questions are: 1)
Can we be competitive, significant, the best? 2) Will we commit to the business/activity? and 3) Do we
understand what drives measurable success?
If I were you, I would consider utilizing this graphic in every significant strategic document and include it
in your PowerPoint summary of your strategy. Beyond that, make it a fundamental way you look at the
world. You might say, “Hey, not so fast”, but think about it. If every time you consider some new
business idea, an innovation, or if someone says, “Know what, I think we should move the whole
operation to Sioux Falls”, you have an immediate litmus test in the concepts behind this graphic for at
least an initial view on whether this is a Big Idea or a misguided road to perdition.
Now, after commenting briefly on the graphic, you can go right to a series of numerical presentations,
starting with the past and ending with your most recent figures. Your particular business or business line
will define what type of numerical presentation makes sense. Banks need Balance Sheets, Income
Statements and a table of ratios. Retail outlets will have spreadsheets for same store sales, sales per
square foot of space, inventory turnover, sales trends, seasonal trends and others affected by the
characteristics of the business.
The numerical aspects of your strategy should tell the
best and most relevant story

Decide how far to go back in time. I like to use a relevancy and “best story” concept for determining
this. Go back far enough to ensure the background is sufficiently depicted. At the same time, figure out
the time frame that fits best with the Big Idea you want to carry the day.
For example, imagine you own a real estate development company in Orlando. Your historical numbers
will be all over the place, with the recession of 2008 and its aftermath affecting your business
tremendously. Now, you want to convince your partners of your Big Idea to build a new 800 unit condo
development 15 miles from Disney World.
Right away, you should be thinking, “How can this get by the How do you know? Question.” One way is
by showing historical numbers going back far enough, and recent enough, to highlight your claim that the
latest real estate disaster, and its impact on your financials, was an aberration. If you were to only show
numbers starting from the lowest point of the crisis, people will see the numbers improve from that point,
but will reproach you for glossing over the hits you took the preceding immediate years.
So, go with numbers that provide an honest view of the company and that also help tell the story behind
your Big Idea.
For each graph, you can write up a brief explanation, basically interpreting the numbers for the right
brained out there. Make the graphs and charts as attractive, professional and consistent as you can. Use
your company’s colors, ensure all the graph sizes, fonts, bold headings, and other stylistic features look as
good as you can make them. You will often have a person in the finance department with a flair for this,
but if not, do it yourself and see if you can come up with real art.
Once you have presented all the charts, graphs, ratios and trends that define your business to the present, it
is time to detail the key factors for future great numbers, utilizing numerical measures that fit your
business.
Here, it is a great idea to put in the directives, desires and other forms of pressure the business receives
from any number of sources. For example, a key factor for future profitability may be the opening of new
hardware franchises in West Texas. Your Board may have met a month ago and decided that one of the
things they expect to see by the end of the year is more franchises in West Texas. Your job, as the writer
of the strategy is to put this nonspecific concept into a concrete part of the strategy, while ensuring your
readers understand that the opening of branches is a driver of future profitability and also expected by the
board of directors. This is part of answering the “Why?” question, as you have already construed.
In this part of the strategy presentation, you will do well to come up with a phrase for defining the way
forward. Fortunately, this is made easier by the fact that most of the time, as noted before, you will be
fundamentally looking to, “Keep and grow the good elements, add more good elements, get rid of the
bad”.
This will often lead to a usable phrase along the lines of “Growth and Diversification”, or “Maintenance,
Growth and Innovation”, or “Renewed Focus on Primary Businesses”, or similar. Once you have that,
you can refer to it regularly in your document and subsequent presentations.
Now you can move to the Specific Areas for Strategic Change. With a heading like that, your audience
will think, “Ah, now we are getting somewhere!” Using the term, “Specific”, holds you to coming up
with clear ideas but also has a way of getting your reader to blink a few times, wipe away the mental fog,
and look forward to what comes next. What comes next is a detailed list of exactly what your strategy
calls for over the defined time period.
So, if you intend to open those hardware franchises in West Texas, you would bullet point, “Open 10
franchises in West Texas”. Sub bullet would be, “Obtain physical locations”, another, “Sell franchises to
skilled and financially sound individuals”, followed by the other primary bullets specific to the West
Texas hardware store franchising business.
The number of Specific Areas for Strategic Changes will depend upon the size of the company or unit, the
time frame covered by the strategy, complexity of the endeavor and number of Big Ideas. Put them all in,
if they matter. If maintaining a Primary Debt to Equity Ratio of x% is vital to your creditors, make sure it
is in there. Do you need ratings, expense to asset ratios, number of employees, annual growth rates, or
anything else to be maintained while you do the Big Idea? If so, make sure they are in this section. Show
you know what the interdependencies are in your business. A lot of business is like playing that Whack a
Mole game at Chuck E. Cheese; once you hit one of them, another pops up, so you have to know, and show
you know, how some actions influence others.
End this section by summarizing the Specific Areas, and note this summary will be a useful tool for
regular monitoring of the strategy. Many strategies, even the approved ones, are not followed up and
monitored adequately. The last chapter in this book goes over how to create a monitoring process, so we
will leave the subject until then. Suffice it to say here that you should slide in a sentence in your strategy
proposal indicating you welcome regular and formalized monitoring of progress against the objectives
outlined in the document.
At this point, I think it works well to describe the primary businesses in significant detail. If you are only
dealing with one business line, go into it with gusto. This is the “How?”, “How do you know?”, and
“Who?” support for your Big Idea. Keep this in mind while writing up the businesses and you will avoid
the regulators, board, colleagues, senior management and other parties with vested interests chipping
away at your strategy with questions about the way the business works.
For example, if you run an admissions office in a private school, and are at this juncture of your strategy
document with a Big Idea to increase enrollment by 18.5% within two years, you are probably heading
toward a request for human and marketing related resources. However, you may believe you need to have
a winning baseball team to attract families to your institution. If your audience does not know how many
people you have in the Admissions Department, how many applications the unit processes, the
percentages accepted, denied, retained, the current methods employed for student acquisition and thorough
information on your primary competitors, you will have an abundance of rabbit holes decision-makers
will go down, all leading away from the approval you seek. You will also need to show some connection
between a good baseball team and enrollment.
For your cause to prosper, it is imperative to describe exactly how the admissions process works. Do
you think even your boss knows you average 17 touches with every student admitted? And if he does not,
how can you expect a part time Board member, only there to make sure his little Sally Anne gets a fair
shake, (and then some) from her second grade teacher, to know. He won’t. So, have fun with this section
and get it all off your chest on how the business works. Repeat this process for each primary business
line.
Now you come to the “What Will Happen?” part of the strategy presentation. This consists of numerical
projections derived from the implementation of your Big Idea, broken down into the Specific Areas for
Strategic Change. Here you forecast the business based upon a successful implementation of the Big Idea,
again with the numerical measures that apply to your endeavor.
Financial forecasts are basically the answer to “What will
happen if the strategy works?”
Since you are dealing with time bound numerical projections, the “When?” question is also answered.
Following up on the regular monitoring comment made previously, if your strategy goes out over one year,
you will likely want to have formalized quarterly reviews of progress against the strategic objectives
defined by way of your numerical forecasts.
As much as possible, use the same graphs, charts and ratios used to cover the past to describe the future.
You may want to change some colors to highlight certain aspects, but consistency here enables apples to
apples comparisons, appreciated by your audience.
In our Admissions Director example, forecasts would project new, retained and lost students over the
period and outline the resources and their costs to make the forecasts viable. For most businesses, you
would do pro forma balance sheets, income statements and chart relevant ratios for the months or years
covered by the strategy.
A graphic contrasting forecasts with current numbers, and trending out current numbers without the Big
Idea, is an excellent way to show the quantifiable change your Big Idea can bring. Of course, work
diligently to make your projections as unassailable as possible. Leaving out costs, overestimating
revenue and basing saving or earnings on wishful thinking will place a seed of doubt in your audience’s
mind, which, in a group presentation, can easily lead to some painful piling on from senior management
and colleagues you thought were nice.
On the other hand, nailing the financial forecasts, clearly depicting the cost/benefit of taking recommended
action and showing there may be a pot of gold at the end of your Big Idea rainbow can have your strategy
run up the flag pole and roundly saluted by all concerned.
To ensure the “What Will Happen?” is well understood, a “Summary of Projected Results” section should
follow, with commentary on the key elements of the strategy and the expected results. If the document
turns out long, or you want to guarantee your audience understands the way the “How?”, “How do you
Know?”, and “Who?” questions are addressed, simply bullet point the main answers in this section.
You are almost done! Now, all you need is an overall summary and an appendix with any reference
material your wider audience may need to see. For the summary, note the strategy is designed to be a
roadmap, describing the company’s projected performance over the period and how the combination of
strategic goals, people and other resources will lead to success. It is proactive to say the strategy is a
living document, meant to be incorporated into the day-to-day activity of each employee, with the
understanding it will certainly experience positive change as the company progresses.
Because the eventual audience can include an assortment of individuals with any number of standpoints, I
like to end strategy papers on a positive note, affirming the company or team as a good place to work,
chock full of exciting opportunities for personal and professional growth for each of its employees and
that you look forward to continued success, (for example).
There may be constituencies among your audience that should, or at least think they should, get a shout out
for their contribution, support, ownership of the company or past leadership. I firmly believe in
acknowledging others, even profusely. However, only do this if it is sincere. For example, if you thank
your boss for his steadfast support and everyone knows, especially him, that he is not in the habit of doing
the only job a supervisor has, which is to clear obstacles and pave the way for his team’s corporate and
individual success, it will come off as hypocritical. You don’t want or need that, especially when you
are on the verge of the approval of your Big Idea by the powers that be.
------------------------------------
Outline for Developing a Written Strategy
As a useful tool, I am providing you with a sample guide to writing up your strategy. It is a bit like a
Table of Contents, with the headings identifying sections to be filled in with some reference to the
commentary in Chapter 7. You should modify this format for your own work, for any number of reasons,
however, this should prove to be useful to get started.
Remember that you are essentially:
• Providing background information on the organization and current situation
• Highlighting what makes the business work
• Laying out your Big Idea and any related Ideas
• Numerically describing a defined number of past years to the present
• Describing factors that can improve the business and what needs to be done to get them in place
• Numerically describing a potential future if the strategy is implemented
--------------------------
The following format will help capture the elements of a written strateg y
1. Introduction
2. Organizational Profile
3. Key Drivers for Success
4. SWOT Analysis
5. SWOT Analysis Summary
6. Numerical Analysis and the Road to Sustainable Quantifiable Measures
7. The Basis for the Strategy – (Graph)
8. Numerical measures from a defined period in the past to the present
9. Key Factors for Future Quantifiable Measures
10. Specific Areas for Strategic Change
11. Summary of Strategic Change
12. Other relevant areas for success, particular to the business
13. Primary Business Lines
14. Numerical projections over the life of the Strategic Plan
15. Summary Numerical Measures over the period
16. Summary of Projected Results
17. Conclusion
18. Appendices
 Chapter 8
Into the Arena. Presenting the Strategy to your Audience
Once you have completed your written strategy, and print it out, you will experience a sense of pride in
the accomplishment. Going from thought to paper is an achievement, not to be taken lightly, so give
yourself 15 seconds to bask in the glow. Now is a good time to remember a point from the first chapter
on the Principles of Strategy; most people struggle to read through a complex strategy, even one with
strong revenue producing potential.
A formal presentation is the most likely vehicle for
gaining approval of your strategy
This is human nature and it is of no use trying to force perusal of the document; it is just too long and
detailed for most busy people to absorb. So, how do you get the strategy across, and more importantly,
how do you get it approved?
The way to do this is through a presentation utilizing PowerPoint or similar software to produce slides
you either project on a screen, hand out, or both. Putting together a slide presentation for your Board of
Directors, Senior Management or other decision makers can be daunting. At the very least it requires
some free time and the ability to concentrate. In other words, they are best done at home or late at the
office when everyone else is gone.
You are way ahead of the game, however. By creating a first-class strategy document, replete with
meaningful and artistically created graphs and charts, the bulk of your work for the presentation of the
strategy is already done. Your task is to select the key elements and bring them out in a cohesive and
effective presentation.
By completing the strategy work to this point, you
already have the flow of your presentation

To prepare a powerful presentation of your strategy, the slide show can follow this format:
First, I like to put in a slide going back to the original idea of “Why do we need a strategy?” For this
slide, you will have a header saying something like, “Why Plan?”, or “Why This Strategy Now?”
Then you can insert the information from the first Chapter on the Principles of Strategy, saying “An
effective strategy is built upon:”
• Accurately and honestly defining the current situation
• Clearly describing what the business unit, management and the board are trying to do
• Describing the gap between the current situation and where we want to be
• Developing ideas for closing the gap between the actual situation and the desired result
• Establishing appropriate business objectives, budgets and risk tolerances, while confirming
policies and controls are in place to ensure the organization operates within company established
parameters.
• Highlighting a powerful set of specific and coherent actions that are practical and readily
implemented
• Remember, any communication to a group of people is aided by an introduction that is agreeable
to all and reconfirms the status/situation. It would be odd for anyone to disagree with this as an
opening slide. Instead they will think, “Yes, we know, let’s move on,” which is what you want.
Then a slide on the company’s status, taken from the Introduction and Organization Profile section of
the Strategy document. Bullet point the highlights that are the most relevant and that provide the most
solid base to your strategy.
Next, include a slide on the current situation . This can be numerical milestones at quarter or year end,
and a brief description of the business. For example, if your company is developing online life insurance
products to the 55 to 75 age group, you can show the number of clients acquired over recent quarters,
revenue from policies issued and ratios that demonstrate the efficiencies gained through a non-bricks-and-
mortar approach. A brief depiction of the product set, target market and marketing/advertising approach
would round out the current situation slide.
Following the current situation description, you should put in foundation slides that reflect the key
numerical measures over the time period you believe most applicable. In other words, lift the tables,
graphs and charts directly from your Strategy document that you used to provide an understanding of the
organization and why a new Big Idea was necessary. Decide how many to include based upon your
audience and the level of information needed. I tend to put in too many slides, since I think people “need”
to know a lot to make the right decisions.
In reality, the dynamics of decision making are complex, with all kinds of apparent and unseen variables
tumbling your audience like a washing machine’s spin cycle. It is impossible to anticipate the
professional and personal baggage your audience brings into a room on the day you do your presentation
and how their thinking will be affected. So, try to contain the number of slides. If requests for more
detail arise from the floor, guess what, they are asking the expert, you, the person who wrote the full
strategy document. Time to shine!
Following the foundation slides, slap in the summary SWOT analysis graph. Your audience will be
well acquainted with the four-box format and the content will be both familiar and interesting.
I like to put the “Business Viability Assessment” graphic next, highlighting the fact that for consistent
growth, profitability and incorporation of new initiatives, fundamental questions must be answered: Can
we be competitive? Will we commit to the individual business lines? Do we understand the key drivers
of our business lines? Again, this graphic is in your full strategy document. When you go over this slide,
show a little emotion, speak with feeling and get the point across that you, personally, want to work for a
company considered to be the best. One that is passionately committed to the business and fully
understands what it takes to succeed. Remember, this slide is like a litmus test for any potential strategic
Big Idea. If a potential strategic direction cannot get by the hurdles of significance, passion and
awareness, and ability to manage drivers, it has a low chance of success.
Next, pull out the Summary of Strategic Change from your strategy document and format it on the next
slide. These are bullet points of the key elements and objectives behind your Big Idea. How you develop
these and their characteristics are covered in Chapter 7, so won’t be repeated here. Suffice it to say these
are high level but not generic. In other words, “Grow the users of our product from 10,000 to 90,000 in
12 months through targeted marketing efforts,” rather than “Expand the client base.” You have the
Summary of Strategic Change in your full document, so move it into this slide intact.
Now, I think it is best to put in a couple of slides that show the recent history of the organization or
business unit, taken from the full document. The same criteria for determining how far to go back and
what to include remains the same as used for the strategy document. Remember to be honest and
forthcoming in regard to what you present and show the numerical and descriptive information that best
illustrates past trends and best leads into the rationale behind your Big Idea.
Next come the slides on the projected results from implementing the strategy you are proposing.
Follow the same format as the previous slides you used for past performance so the audience has an
apples-to-apples appreciation of the impact of following the strategy. Remember, Excel spreadsheets
with a lot of columns and rows are a lot harder to read when projected than they are in handouts. Put
highlights up on the screen, bar charts, pie charts and focus on specific areas that are of clear importance
in your organization. For example, Full Time Employees, FTE, may be a footnote in some companies.
However, if your strategy is about reducing factory staff in China and doing the patriotic thing by bringing
back manufacturing jobs in New Britain, Connecticut, FTE will be featured.
If it works, a slide headed something like, “Transformation of X business through the Big Idea initiative”
is visually powerful. For the body of the slide, put in two side-by-side columns, the one on the left listing
characteristics of the present and the other column listing the transformation possible if the approvers in
your audience stay out of your way.
Personally, I like to put in one slide on each primary business line at this point, as you did in the strategy
document. This is a summary, with a brief description of the business, key drivers and a snap shot of
where the business line is now, usually through meaningful numerical measures. A few bullets on what is
being asked of the business line to achieve the strategic objectives rounds out the slide.
Finally, a summary slide lands the presentation and sets the stage for commentary and subsequent
approval. This slide should clearly state the strategy and expected outcome in high level terms. Then,
bullet point the expected change for each area affected by the strategy.
It is most likely your audience will stop you along the way with questions, slide by slide. If they do not,
or if the discussion was light up to this point, encourage questions now. Remember, you tested your
strategic Big Idea(s) when preparing the full document, and it holds water. However, your audience may
not have read the document, instead waiting for this presentation to provide the basis for their vote to go
ahead or stay mired in sludge. In other words, the people in the room may not have walked the path of
sound logic with you as any reader of the full document would have.
You know this stuff cold and have answered every meaningful Why? How? How Do You Know? question
already. Therefore, relax, focus on giving clear, concise and pointed answers and think, “game on,
baby”! It is exhilarating to be in front of a group defending your very own Big Idea and driving the herd
toward approval of a way forward with substantial potential benefit to the organization.
Since you prepared the Logical Proofs worksheet,
your strategy is bullet proof, so have fun with the
discussion and questioning during your presentation
Once the questions are answered, call for an approval of the strategy so you can have it voted on, signed
off and minuted, enabling you to get on with it and start the path toward reaching the identified goals.

Additional comment on presenting your strategy:

Successful mass retailers, such as Walmart, are no accident and it is illuminating to look at how they
structure their customer management process.
First off, customers enter through a single entrance, one the store chooses for them. The entrance is
narrow and controlled, making it easy to greet customers as they come in. Once in, customers
immediately come upon specifically selected items the store wants you to see. For example, in late
August, you will see an ocean of back to school items.
After you pass the featured presentation of items customers have the store opened to them. The way the
store is set up may look haphazard, but be assured it is not. EVERYTHING is exactly where it is
supposed to be based on research into buyer behavior. Ever wonder why the car fan belts are way off in
the corner? They know that if you want a fan belt, it is not an impulse buy and you will certainly not mind
walking all the way back to the corner to get what you want. Then, once you have that fan belt in your
hand, to leave you must walk back through the entire store, including the fishing department where those
shiny lures catch at least as many fishermen as fish!
On the other hand, the cosmetics, seasonal clothing and other items customers think they are just going to
dash in and grab, are near the front. But they know there is no dash in and grab at Walmart; there is just
too much shiny stuff and once you are in a quarter of the way, you look up and see signs for other things
you want to look at, touch and maybe toss in the cart. Have you ever wandered around Walmart and not
spent $50?
Ok, so you made your purchases, all according to the store’s plan for you, and it is time to go. You are
funneled to the cashiers where you have to pay for what you have in your cart. But, there is a wait, they
make you wait, and while waiting, what happens? You are barraged with small things to buy, low cost,
glimmering, tasty, make you feel better, curiosity tickling things, and you generally flip one or two of these
into your cart. It is a consumer behavior fact that people go from big to small in their purchases and the
gum, candy bar, energy drink, three dollar video or gossip mag you buy after making your other, larger
purchases, would be unlikely to find a home in your shopping cart on the way into the store. Always sell
the suit before suggesting the shirt and tie. Finally, you pay and you are out the door, looking forward to
enjoying your purchases .
How does Walmart’s customer management process apply to your presentation? First, you should manage
the entry point. Accept that left to our own devices, we are wanderers, time wasters and easily
distracted. So, bring your audience in through the narrow door by way of your introduction, greeting them
and then immediately showing them a graph, picture, or statistic they are more than likely looking for from
this meeting and presentation. They can digress and go down their particular tangents later, for now you
are bringing them in under your structure.
So, just like Walmart has the Christmas decorations out in November, (October?), know what your
audience probably wants to see and show it to them early. Then move through your slides on things they
need to see; you know what they are from your business or business line. Then, give them some leeway to
wander in terms of asking questions and going off on tangents. A little time wasting at this point is ok,
since by now you have made your points and have their decision-making shopping carts loaded with stuff;
in this case, the strategy you are proposing for approval.
After some minutes allowing the audience to pursue individual interests, you can start leading them
toward the meeting’s conclusion. Sticking with the retail analogy, for those in attendance, their exit is a
vote for approval of the strategy, similar to handing over credit cards to settle their purchases.
If there are smaller, but important to you and your business, business items you want approved, consider
putting them on the table at this time. We have all been in meetings where we come out saying, “They
were in an approving mood, I should have proposed doubling bonuses!” The fact is, this can be an
effective time to throw in your perceived need for an additional headcount, 10% more for the marketing
budget to launch a campaign or minor upgrades to facilities. Avoid adding an “impulse buy” item here
that will cause the group to stop and begin an extensive analysis of your request. For that level of
approval, you should give the item its due with a separate approval process or larger allocation of time
and description in the overall strategy presentation.
Once you have the votes in on the strategy, the audience is generally pleased with what they have
accomplished, like exiting the store with a cutting edge television. Some participants may have a tinge of
buyer’s remorse. You will know from the discussion which votes came with reluctance. It is well worth
assuring these individuals, and the group overall, they have done a great thing today with their vote and
that you and your team will work hard and deliver the projections. You will usually hear comments to the
effect that you do indeed need to deliver and will be monitored and judged accordingly. Fortunately,
since you have developed your strategy with discipline, great ideas and tested the projections with
Logical Proofs, you very much look forward to being “judged” on the effectiveness of your strategic
planning!

Sample Presentation Format for a Strategic Plan (PowerPoint)

 Chapter 9
The Career Saving Power of Checklists
I think of my grandfather, on my father’s side, as one of the most fun, outgoing, adventurous guys I have
ever known. He seemed to know the rules of society but selectively picked the ones he thought applied to
him. When I was 11 years old my younger brother and I stayed with him for a month in the wilds of Utah
outside a town called Panguitch. Way outside of Panguitch. Panguitch was, and is, a small town, but
where my grandfather lived was right smack in the middle of nowhere.
On the first day, he said, “You guys know how to ride motorcycles?” We said no, and he said, “There are
a couple of motorcycles in the garage, here are the keys,” and that was all the supervision and instruction
we ever got. There were no helmets, gloves or other protective clothing. We, and the motorcycles
somehow survived, with our scrapes healing better than those we inflicted on those bikes. Needless to
say, that month remains one my best summer vacation memories.
This same person, in the Army Air Corps during WW II, was nicknamed “Mother”, because he insisted on
every element of flying an airplane to be exactingly followed with zero tolerance for skipping any of the
requirements to take a plane up.
I think this illustrates two points. One, you must be more careful with big things, such as an airplane, than
with less essential items (such as your own grandkids), and, two our work lives and our personal lives
often require entirely different approaches to risk. In other words, you can decide to wing it at times
when it is just you and yours, but you do not have that leeway when you are in the workplace and dealing
with other people’s money, lives, futures and overall wellbeing.
You can wing it in your personal life, but must be sure
all bases are touched when dealing with your job and
other people’s careers, lives and futures
In his book, “The Checklist Manifesto”, Dr. Atul Gawande utilizes the example of pilots like my
Grandfather to provide the foundation for his argument in favor of using checklists to make sure the right
and requisite things get done. By the way, Dr. Gawande has several excellent books out, (don’t miss
“Being Mortal”), and his short book on the power of checklists further demonstrates his insight and ability
to communicate powerful concepts in writing. Many of the concepts behind the material on checklists in
this chapter were derived from Mr. Gawande’s “The Checklist Manifesto”, and I encourage you to obtain
his book for a more in-depth treatment of the power of using checklists to ensure completion of vital tasks.
Formally or informally, we all use checklists to a greater or lesser degree with varying degrees of
effectiveness. Basically, a checklist is a reminder to do something that is of vital importance, with that
something usually in a sequence of other vitally important things.
In lieu of checklists, some people leave little Post It notes all over their workstations to make sure they
show up for meetings and remember to send the right information to the right person. A marketing
strategist will often have a complex software tool for ensuring the long and detailed process of getting an
ad in print or other media meets a deadline. A builder will have a “punch list” for each part of the
construction process, to avoid jackhammering a freshly poured concrete slab to lay the missing plumbing.
I can guess, though this chapter is barely rolling, many of you reading this are already a bit restless. You
are not that thrilled with the idea of checklists.
Why is that? Two main reasons. First, checklists are tedious to make and require that old bugaboo of
sitting down, thinking, writing and revising, which most of us prefer to dodge. Second, you probably
think you don’t need to make a formal checklist because you go through process and procedure steps in
your head. In other words, “I know what I’m doing”. By the way, from my experience, when someone
tells you, “Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing.” you should worry. Let’s say this time, I’ll give you the
benefit of the doubt and agree with you that you know what you are doing and that your knowledge of a
given process is deep enough so that you have a legitimate basis for saying you do not need to avail
yourself of the potential benefit of a checklist.
But what if you are wrong? What if you screw up and forget to do something indispensable? What if you
get to the end of your Big Idea implementation, and something is missing, late or half done? How bad
would that be? Frankly, I hope your Big Ideas are so earthshaking that messing up would be very bad
indeed.
My son learned from his grandfather, this one on my wife’s side, how you approach a game of golf.
Before you leave the house, count your clubs. When you take the bag out of the car, count your clubs.
After each hole, count your clubs. When you put your bag back in the trunk (you guessed it) count your
clubs. He learned this at a very early age, is a very smart guy, and “knows” you need to have all your
clubs at the end of the day. That does not stop him from going through a most simple checklist of, “Do I
have my putter? Yes, check. Do I have my wedge? Yes, check” and so on. What does this ensure? Well,
he is always ready to play, and more importantly, I knew I could buy him an expensive set of golf clubs
when he was younger, or let him use mine any time, because I was absolutely sure he would come home
with the full set. When it comes to golf clubs, he can be trusted.
In strategy implementation, which is basically getting your Big Idea operational with the Action Steps
necessary to achieve its potential, the stakes can be high. You cannot afford to lose a metaphorical golf
club in the process.
 A reputation for accuracy
and dependability is career
building gold
In addition to developing checklists to make sure you take necessary steps, you can utilize them
proactively to avoid undesirable consequences and positively shape your business. For example, if you
are the Head of Credit Administration at a bank, consumer finance company or insurance concern, you
would find creating a basic checklist for what you will and will not approve invaluable. Most bank
managers and credit people will tell you their problem loans arise largely from a failure to follow their
own written lending policies. In other words, they know how to avoid loans with a higher than
acceptable risk of default, but for some reason, in the approval process, exceptions to policy get
approved.
How does this happen? A commercial bank will want to grow the lending portfolio in its geographic area,
and will seek to please its existing clients and respond favorably to requests for new financing. Further,
lenders are generally paid on a commission or part commission basis. Management is generally
comprised of former deal doers and successful business developers. These factors conspire to encourage
lending, with factors outside of the analysis of the loan request often brought into the discussion to
rationalize any weaknesses in the credit itself.
Now, if you, as the Head of Credit Administration, have a checklist of what you will and will not
approve, derived from your Credit Policy, the discussion of the risk will stay focused. It is likely most
problem deals will never reach your desk. For example, your policy may say, “No raw land financing”
and “Construction Financing only with 50% of the project completed and at a 50% loan to value”, or
“Financing of condos only with 70% of the building closed, and 90% sold.” Or “Minimum FICO score of
590 needed for the financing of household appliances.” If you put these elements into a checklist, you
have something like:

- Is this loan to finance raw land? Y N

- Is the Construction Project 50%
completed? Y N
- Is the Construction loan requested at Y N
50% or less of appraised value?
- Is the building where the condo is Y N
located 70% closed? Y N
- Is the building where the condo is
located 90% sold? Y N
- Is the borrowers FICO score at or above
590?

The Relationship Manager will either check “yes” or “no”, reviewed again by one of your analysts, with
an unacceptable answer stopping the deal. Imagine the savings in time, expense and future loan losses
possible through this simple use of a checklist.
Finally, you may think your particular project would take a huge checklist to cover, and you may be right.
The solution is to either boil down the critical elements to fit a shorter checklist, or, realize this Big Idea
has a lot of moving parts and will need to have many things that that need to be marked as done or
pending.
When I do a consulting project, I use a checklist to note the items I need from the company to do the
work. These are usually interviews with key members of the company’s team and Board of Directors,
financial information for some years back and forecasts into the future. If I do not get these things, I
cannot finish the project. In fact, I cannot start the project. Remember, the first point in the “Principles of
Strategy Development from Chapter 1:
5) An effective strategy for the company overall and each of its business units must:
e) Accurately and honestly define the current situation – where are we right now
f) Clearly define what we are trying to do
g) Define what the company overall and each business unit should be trying to do
h) Decide if where we are, is where we want to be. Is there a gap between the desired
and actual result?
Without the front-end information, this first step is unmanageable.
Okay, so you are probably still not thrilled with checklist development, but maybe to the point of giving it
a test drive. In that case, the tips below should be helpful. First, develop a clear objective. For a doctor,
this may mean “amputating the correct appendage”. For a head of IT the objective may be to “upgrade all
PCs to the latest version of a companywide software application”.
Once you have the objective, make sure that each item in the checklist is:
• A critical step with a real possibility of being missed
• Your responsibility to get right
• Actionable, and can be answered with a “yes” or “no”. Writing the steps as questions helps with
this
• Written so it can be read aloud to the team as a verbal check. Nothing beats putting people on the
spot so the only answers to whether something is done are “yes” and “no”.
If you are working with a team, it is useful to get input from the other members on the appropriateness of
the checklist items. You can’t think of everything and you may have little awareness of the sub processes
that are foundational to the Big Idea’s success.
An effective checklist will present the vital elements of the process, with enough, but not too much,
detail. For example, if you convinced the owners of your company to move to new premises, there are
literally thousands of steps required to get this done. You will need to categorize the steps, and then for
each one, such as “Negotiate New Lease”, determine the key steps in the process. Again, keep your
checklist high level but with all critical pieces covered. So, you would have a checklist that includes:

- Have you obtained market rates for lease pricing and

Y N
terms?
- Are the lease terms and contract Y N
negotiated and agreed upon?
- Has the legal department reviewed and approved the contract? Y N
- Do we have written approval from Management? Y N

Each one of has a lot of work behind it, but in the end, you want to know, and be able to say these steps
were ticked off .
Again, drawing from Dr. Gawande’s book, when writing up the checklists, be sure to:
 • Identify natural breaks in workflow/process, such as status checks
• Use simple sentence structure and basic language
• Have a title that reflects its objectives
• Make it easy to read, with proper fonts, size, minimal use of color, etc.
• Have fewer than 10 items per objective
• Have the date of creation or revision of the checklist clearly marked
To ensure the checklist functions as desired:
• Try it out with those who will use it
• Modify the checklist as needed. Things change and a stale checklist is useless
• Make sure the checklist fits the flow of work
• See if the checklist can detect errors proactively with enough time to allow for corrections
To fine tune your checklist, think of thing that could go wrong, have gone wrong in the past and what could
have been done to avoid the failure. Anyone who has worked on a major acquisition can tell you there
are innumerable pitfalls in the process and even the “successful” mergers and acquisitions are cluttered
with big and little things that went wrong. Learning from these events is not easy since you may not know
many people who have presided over more than a few acquisitions and you may not have access to
people with this kind of experience. You need to research, talk to as many knowledgeable people as you
can, anticipate to the best of your capacity and, get down in writing a process for completing the job.
The tool found below will further help with Checklist preparation: (This format is in Excel )

A useful format for developing a checklist:

The key is to create checklists for activities that are critical, are sometimes not done and that other
processes are unlikely to catch. You want to be able to read them off and say, “check” when completed.
Keep the wording of the checklist activities simple and clear. To maintain effectiveness, be sure to
review your checklists from time to time, asking yourself: Does it work? Have processes changed? Does
it continue to be used at the appropriate time in the flow of work?
 Chapter 10
After Implementation. Review and Tweak
Think of the last time you bought something major, such as a house or car. Almost assuredly, you went
through the typical buyer behavior process. First, you found out you needed a new house or car (maybe
you didn’t “need” a new one, but you sure wanted it!) Then, you went about researching alternatives,
talking to people, reading up on the market and burning up the internet. You met with the current holder of
the thing you had to have and were steered to a selection of the best option. Then you paid for it, and it
was yours. Then what? For most of us the next step in buyer behavior is to evaluate the purchase, through
any number of tests, objective and subjective, from the reaction of our friends to how we feel now that we
have it. Basically, did it work out like you expected? While you are considering this, if your purchase
was a car for example, you will be bombarded with emails checking on your degree of satisfaction over
the purchase because the dealership wants to make your post purchase mindset a positive one.
This is true from deciding which video to stream, picking a graduate program to selecting a spouse, and
should be true when it comes to your Big Idea/Strategy. In strategy development and implementation, the
cycle’s last step, evaluation, is often left off. Why is this? There are a few reasons, I think. One, is there
is frequently a lot of time between getting a strategy approved, effecting the Action Steps and giving them
the chance to bear fruit. IT projects can take so long to implement the original reason for the work and
new technology make the whole thing outdated by the time it is launched.
Another reason is that people working on the implementation of approved strategy are busy and usually
must move immediately on to other projects and simply do not have the time to go back over one just
completed.
More than all of these, I think it is a simple lack of discipline and a tendency to let “mostly done” be
enough. Guess what? It isn’t, and without a formal evaluation process for your strategy, two things will
happen: 1) it will have limited impact, and 2) you will not be able to make the tweaks and adjustments
necessary to keep the strategy effective in the face of new facts.
Your strategy is a living document, requiring
continuous input and care to realize the Big Idea it was
created to deliver
Going back to strategy’s military roots, Helmuth von Moltke is credited with saying, “No battle plan
survives contact with the enemy.” For our business battling purposes, the application is that once your
strategy goes from plan to implementation, adjustments will be required.
A great strategy is rarely a perfect one and you will find that even minor adjustments can enrich the Action
Steps’ results.
Now, for your strategy review to be worth the exercise, be sure to:
• Make the review process formalized . Set a time period for the review, with shorter term
initiatives requiring fewer evaluations. If you have a strategic plan that goes out more than a year,
consider quarterly reviews, linking them, if possible, to your regular financial/numerical
presentations.
• Have the people responsible for attaining the strategy’s targets at the review. This is when their
accountability is public and the pressure is on. Knowing reviews will be regular and that
performance will be judged is motivating.
 • Develop a format for the review for consistency and clarity . A suggested format is in the Tool
Box and described in this chapter
• Depending upon the size and type of your business, you will benefit from incorporating the
review into Management meetings, Board meetings or other forms of meetings where minutes are
recorde d
From these recommendations, you can see the point is to take the strategy seriously, particularly the “What
Will Happen” aspect. You have worked too hard, fought too well to get your Big Idea approved and
installed to see the potential result go unrealized.
A formalized Review Process goes like this: (I like to use PowerPoint slides since you will likely project
the review for a group).
First, an “Introductory Slide” on why the Review is central to the strategy through implementation
process.
Next, fill in some background, taken from the Strategy document. This can include a summary of the “Key
Drivers”, a brief description of the primary business lines and support functions. Then come up with a
statement summarizing the reasoning behind your “Big Idea” and point out this led to a written strategy,
approved by whatever authority structure your organization has in place.
I find it helpful, in the review process to repeat some of the information from the Strategy to remind
everyone of the fundamentals of how it was originally deemed necessary and subsequently developed.
You can select what you want to include as you think best. I like to have a slide covering the numerical
situation, relevant to your company and overall state of affairs, taken from the strategy document. Again,
take what makes the most sense and tells the best story. If your Big Idea was a way to sell more
advertising space on your company’s social media related website, you would do well to show how such
sales languished prior to the application of your mass of brain cells.
The “SWOT Summary” from your strategy document comes next.
A slide with your assumptions follows. This is usually a set of parameters, measures, starting points and
views on the market that set the base for the strategy.
You may be thinking, “My audience already knows all this!” I hope they do. However not all of them
will and your audience members may have changed over time. Also, remember from the chapter on
logical writing that effective communication is improved when you set the stage with information your
audience can agree upon.
Then, go back to your strategy and grab out the “Specific Areas for Strategic Change”, dividing them into
“Short Term Objectives” and “Long Term”, over one year, Objectives.
A nice slide on the “Strategy Summary” is helpful next.
From there, you should make slides with the numerical based graphs and charts from the section,
“Numerical projections over the life of the Strategic Plan”. These are your “What Will Happen?” slides.
Use as many as you need to show what is expected from the implementation of the strategy. This is where
the work put into informative and attractive graphics in the strategy document saves you a lot of time and
the consistency will resonate in the minds of your audience.
If it makes sense, one slide per “Primary Business Unit” can come next. These should be high level and
descriptive, explaining in brief terms what the business is and does. Your audience should be well aware
of the fundamentals of the organization primary business lines, so a lot of detail is not needed here. Then
provide key measurement figures for the particular business and show how these are forecast over the life
of the strategy. A bullet point list of the “Action Steps” required to make the forecast come alive is
useful, and again, you can pull this right from your strategy document.
Next up is a slide on the “Transformation” the strategy is expected to bring. This is basically a “We are
here” and “We will be there” graphic, utilizing the key measures, usually numerical, that make sense to
consider for your business. This is a powerful slide and puts the impact of your Big Idea in the forefront
of your audience’s mind. With a solid Big Idea, you will be making a difference. The experience of,
“When I got here it was like this, and now its way better, like this”, is arguably the most satisfying
element of working. I have never been involved in architecture or construction, but I imagine it is
extremely satisfying for people in these fields to pass by their completed projects and reflect on the
process of going from an idea to a completed structure. Coaches are generally hooked on the beauty of
“every year is a new year”, and the chance to build something special from a group of players showing up
on day one, to champions at the end of the season. So, this is your slide on how your “Big Idea” makes a
champion. Make it a good one with the transformation clear .
There are some useful terms that are hard to love. For me, one of them is “Key Performance Indicator”,
(KPI). I know the idea works, but for some reason never have enjoyed bandying about the term. So, if
you have a better idea for a way of saying “things that you measure that really tell if you are going in the
right direction and doing the right things”, please let me know and we can incorporate it.
In the meantime, your next slide is your “KPIs”. Take them from the key measurements of your particular
business’s success. These can be positive or negative ratios, specific numerical targets, rankings, hits on
an ad, clicks on a banner, size, weight, volumes, and any other set of measures. The important thing is for
your KPIs to be roundly accepted by your audience and industry as the very things they want to see in
order to measure progress through the implementation of the strategy.
We are almost done, so hang in there! Now we need slides on the “Short Term” and “Long Term
Objectives”, again taken from the information provided in the preceding slides, which were derived from
your strategy document.
For each of the Short and Long Term Objectives, the process is simple: Make a spreadsheet with
columns for the “Objectives”, “Person(s) Responsible”, “Due Date”, “Completion Percentage” and
“Comments”. From there, you simply fill in the blanks with the comments reflecting the performance
against the objective. If you are 100% completed prior to the due date, your comment can be something to
the effect, “Completed, no further action necessary”, or “Completed with whatever follow up is
necessary”. When not done by the Due Date, a full explanation must be provided and reflect the
discussion at the meeting.
When the “Objective” is not met, it is time to put on the honest evaluation hat again. There is no benefit
derived from a willful refusal to dig into what went wrong. Only by accurately stating the reason for the
missed Objective can you make the necessary modification and take the steps required to get the strategy
back on track. This may well include an admission the economic environment, availability of resources,
management support or other dynamics no longer sufficiently support the attainment of the Objective.
You may be thinking that your strategy could simply be “wrong”. I agree this is possible, however, with
your process of developing the strategy, particularly the use of Logical Proofs to test your ideas, it is far
more likely the Action Steps did not occur and/or required resource allocation did not materialize.
In most cases, the Review of the Strategy will result in minor modifications of Due Dates, changes to the
Person(s) Responsible with Comments reflecting the reasons for these changes. However, should the
situation and market dynamics lead to the Review calling for significant change, you can make slides
reflecting this. These slides would be finalized after the Review in most cases, and then circulated to the
Review team.
For meaningful changes to the original strategy, first create a slide showing the “Modifications to the
Specific Areas of Strategic Change”, in the same format as the slide in the presentation, listing any
changes. Then, you can repeat the “Strategy Summary” slide with the modifications incorporated.
Finally, the impact on the numerical projections, using the graphs and charts in the original presentation
updated to reflect the impact of the modifications. For example, if your strategy is aimed at developing
increased business for riverboat cruises on the Mississippi River, and a once a century level of excessive
rainfall causes the river to flood in year two of your strategy, you will need to reassess and lower the
number of passengers and all numerical measures associated with fewer paying customers, for that year.
Preparing these slides is useful work and proactive since they will be the basis for the next Review. In
any case, it is a must do step, even if you are the only person reviewing your own work. Think of a golf
swing. Anyone who plays golf will tell you of times when everything is going fine and suddenly, a
controlled fade becomes a slice or, worse, your lovely draw turns into a terrifying duck hook. When your
swing goes off the rails (“you can talk to a slice, but a hook won’t listen”), the only thing to do is hit the
practice range, get some good advice, and tweak the swing until you are back on track. Likewise, a belief
in the review and tweaking process as a vital component of effective strategy implementation is key to
your success as a Big Idea resource.
I know the Review process may seem like a lot of work to prepare. However, I have put the
recommended slides at the end of this chapter (feel free to modify them), and you will see by doing the
exercise the information comes right out of your Strategy document. Most of them come directly from the
slides we discussed in the chapter on “Presenting the Strategy”.
Well, congratulations are in order at this point, for pushing through this book and adding to your quiver of
knowledge and skills to help you succeed. I am hopeful you have already tried out some of the concepts
and tools from previous chapters and experienced the benefits this can bring. You have new and
applicable capacity at your disposal. Use it right away and start developing strategy that works!
Format for Strategic Plan Regular Review (PowerPoint)
Scorecards like this can also be applied to individual business lines
 Afterword, (or “Some Parting Thoughts”)
As stated in the introduction, I sincerely want the process outlined in this book to improve your life and
the lives of those that depend on you. With this in mind, to close the book, I would like to pass on a few
thoughts in regard to attitude and approach.
First, what is a “job?” In its purest sense, a job is toil to provide the necessities of life. If you are a
Bible thumper, you know the Garden of Eden included no “work”, but once people were kicked out of
Paradise, the deal changed and we were told, “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food”.
The point is, work is a fact of life and should be embraced accordingly. Personally, I love to work and
find great fulfillment in brow sweat. I believe a job is not a form of insufferable pain to be avoided and
denigrated, despite that look on the face of an aspiring actor “temporarily” waiting tables in L.A. I
believe a job is a gift, and with that gift, as any other, comes gratitude and an obligation to treat the gift
with respect. Gratitude and respect lead to effort, and, at least in my mind, a job deserves your best
effort.
Your best effort can be thought of in many ways. From my point of view, part of the effort, derived from
respect for the job, is to treat the position held with two concepts: Stewardship and Servanthood. I won’t
go into a long explanation here, but suffice it to say that Stewardship calls you to treat your job as a
caretaker of someone else’s property. Your responsibility is to do the best you can, not for yourself only,
but for everything, and everybody touched by your work. Striving to fulfill your own agenda at the
expense of others or contrary to the job description’s objectives is intrinsically wrong because it fails to
honor and respect the job as a gift and your role as a steward.
Servanthood is simply understanding that your job, particularly if you are a supervisor, should be directed
toward paving the way for others to succeed and achieve their goals in their respective roles. We have
all been frustrated by bosses who don’t understand this fundamental responsibility. I will agree that many
people do indeed advance by focusing on the people above them more than the people working for them.
However, this is at a tremendous cost of poor productivity and a career spent trying to be one more butt
kissing sycophant. Who wants that as a legacy? Not you, I hope.
Again, my comments here are my opinion, and you can take them or leave them as you wish. Nonetheless,
I firmly believe the way to daily enjoyment of your work life is the development of an attitude that
includes:
• Recognizing that everyone needs to work or live off someone else who is working
• Your job is a gift, enabling you to provide for your necessities and those of others dependent
upon you
• As a gift, your job should be honored and respected by giving it your best effort
• The way to give it your best effort is to apply the concepts of Stewardship and Servanthood
More thoughts you say? Sure, why not. The First Law of Thermodynamics is the Law of Energy
Conservation. This is an amazing concept, a fact, fundamental to the way our universe works. Basically,
the Law of Energy Conservation states that no energy can be made or lost, but that it can be transferred.
For example, hot water loses energy as it cools, with that energy transferred to the air around it.
Eventually, the heat is diffused so that you cannot feel it, but it still exists in the same quantity. The hot
water got its energy from the electric burner, which in turn got its energy from the electricity wired into
the stove, with the electric generators somewhere near or far producing energy through the consumption of
coal, oil or the vast amount on energy holding uranium atoms together.
One of the tenets of Energy Conservation is that heat moves to cold. Without a new heat source, the hot
item will go cold and stay cold. Also, heat itself is not all that is needed for warmth, it helps to be alive
as well. For example, our sun provides the energy base the life on our planet depends upon. The sun on a
living plant is a component of its growth. However, the sun’s rays on a dead plant hasten its decay.
You are scratching your head and thinking, “Hey, I thought this was a business book!” Ok, I will turn the
corner so to speak. The point is this: You, your job, the structures in place at work, etc. operate under the
Law of Energy Conservation. If something is to get done, someone must transfer their energy to that task;
it will not happen on its own. For you to keep transferring your energy to other tasks, you need to get
replacement energy, be reheated, if you will. This is through basic health and nutrition of course, but also
through excitement, creativity and a work environment that reenergizes you as you use your stored-up
energy.
There is an often-used analogy that asks us to consider a pond with no inflow or outflow. Soon it
becomes stagnate, polluted, loses its oxygen level and is unsuitable for fish. On the other hand, a pond
that has an outlet for its excess water, and has a steady inflow of fresh water, remains clear, clean and
teeming with life. The point is, only by releasing and giving up water through a continuous outflow, can
life-giving inflow occur. Most of us would agree that people who demonstrate tangible support of others
seem to have a greater level of energy, and people in turn helping them, than do individuals unwilling to
see an outflow of their resources.
Referred to earlier, the second Law of Thermodynamics is the Law of Entropy. Basically, this
fundamental law of the universe holds that everything wears down and decays over time. There are no
observed cases of increased complexity and no perpetual machines.
What does this Law have to do with business? Just this, every structure, team, business line and model
put in place will start to wind down, rust and decay over time. Just like a Bentley Flying Spur (I don’t
have one, but what a great name for a car!). At some point that beautiful car will be a patch of oxidized
metal. Have you ever wondered why some business units or long term production lines work so well for
a while then became useless and ineffective? It is the Second Law at work; nothing lasts and if left alone
any structure will fall apart, crumble and decay.
A failure to recognize these Laws are at work in business leads to eventual failure. New energy is needed
to compensate for energy lost, and constant caretaking, tweaking and stewardship is a must if entropy is to
be delayed. In a very real way, an important element of a manager’s job is to understand and compensate
for the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics.
One last thought. Most of us are focused on our own success, and, depending on one’s age, level of net
worth, health, and career stage, are working hard to build up positive work-related experiences. In other
words, resume building. This makes a lot of sense since people generally benefit from previous
accomplishments, used as stepping stones and credibility for meriting additional responsibilities. By
responsibilities, we usually mean income.
So, what most of us seek to do is pursue jobs, develop success stories and verifiable accomplishments
that convince someone to award us the opportunity to develop more success stories and greater verifiable
accomplishments and the pay that goes with them.
This goes on and on until you retire and subsequently die. For most people, the time between retirement
and death contains moments of reflection, including the “deathbed” review of one’s life. It is often said
that at that stage of life, rarely will anyone look back and think, “If only I had worked a bit longer and
harder to get that promotion to Sioux City, which would have increased my salary by 8% and added a
word or two to my job title.” No, that does not happen. Instead the looking back is said to almost always
focus on people and relationships, with the warm memories more around helping others, time spent with
loved ones and making a difference in other’s lives.
In consideration of this, my recommendation, to myself anyway, is to work at least as much on your
obituary and what someone will say as a eulogy to you, as you do on your resume. Most of us have been
to funerals filled with people, all with wonderful things to say about the deceased. We have also been to
those where everyone is there through some form of coercion.
I cannot say what this means for you. However, as it relates to work and your job, take all the crappola
with a grain of salt, worry a little less about adding to the resume and see what you can do to pad that
eulogy.
Let me add some color to this concept. My father coached my baseball teams when I was a Little
Leaguer, and later some of my youth basketball teams. He did not have first-hand experience with these
sports since his father focused on the outdoors: hunting, fishing and camping.
One year, my dad coached a Little League team my brother and I played on while working full time and
going to college full time. It could not be done, but he did it and all of us remember those South
Scottsdale Little League Giants as one of our family’s most remarkable years. Hey, we won 19 straight
games during the season. You can look it up.
Later, as a 32-year-old new father, I was shooting baskets at a local park and it started to rain. Most of
the guys drifted off but I stayed to see if it would pass. An older guy was there watching his High School
age kid shoot around and the three of us sat under a tree to wait out the rain. We started talking about his
son and his commitment to his basketball development. He then said something like, “Nothing can beat
coaching your kids in sports.” I said, “I’m sure, but my job, (as an international banker with significant
travel and responsibilities), will not let me do that when my son gets old enough to play.” He simply
said, “Don’t let that stop you.” I thought if he knew my situation he would not have said that.
I could not stop thinking about that conversation and how, in my own life, my father’s sacrifice was so
meaningful to me, my brother and our family. Of course, if you asked my Dad, he would say, “What
sacrifice?”
So, that day I decided to always coach my kids’ teams and otherwise be there as needed. My daughter
danced classical ballet for many years, something I could not coach. Nonetheless, I determined to be
there to see her dance and offer the emotional support needed in the face of the demands and pain of
ballet.
In fact, I did coach my two son’s baseball teams until they reached High School, where I reluctantly
handed them over to the Varsity coaching staff. Looking back, I would say that it was impossible for me
to coach these teams with the work schedule and responsibilities I had. How could I attend every one of
my daughter’s performances of the Nutcracker? But I, and a lot of other dads and moms with jobs just as
demanding as mine, did just that. You may be saying it is impossible for me to spend that kind of time
away from my job, and I agree, since it was impossible for me also.
Here is the point. My obituary, and for sure any words spoken by my children at my funeral, will
assuredly touch on the impact and family closeness developed through those on the field times and around
the stage and just as definitely will have nothing to say about the times I should have gone out for dinner
with my boss, or should have traveled a day earlier to Buenos Aires, or ought to have stayed a day longer
in Hong Kong.

And for my own reflecting back, I simply cannot think of any of my daughter’s ballet performances or
theatrical performances without emotion. I would hate to think back on a list of missed events and
performances, and am very happy I do not have to.
Your eulogy writing may have nothing to do with sports, but I would bet it will have something to do with
family, friends, relationships and so-called sacrifices. I say, “so-called sacrifices” since they are hardly
that when you are the one who benefits most! So, please, sit and think for a while, talk to someone who
cares for you and consider what you can do to get tons of people to your funeral, with all of them eager to
share a moving story about how you loved, lived and made their lives a little better.
Let’s put these thoughts together in a simple vision statement :
“I, (state your name), will, from this day forward, see my job as a gift, requiring me to be a good steward
and servant to anyone reporting to me and to expend maximum effort in my role to merit the gift. Further, I
will work on my eulogy at least as much as my resume through a greater emphasis on family, relationships
and helping others reach their goals.
Finally, I know that the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics have direct application to my job.
Heat and energy flow from hot to cold and if left alone, everything slows and decays. Therefore, I
resolve to be a source of heat and energy and will constantly strive to make the changes and enhancements
necessary to keep my business fresh and sustainable.”
Thank you for the gift of your time it took to read this book. I sincerely hope it works to your benefit.

All the best for your business and career,

Mark
Comments on strategy, strategic planning and related topics: info@north-creative.com
To discuss how North Creative, LLC can help you or your company create Inspired. Logical. Strategy
That Works.: strategy@north-creative.com
North Creative, LLC website: www.north-creative.co m