Peter Drucker, management consultant, famously said: “Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.”
A pretty harsh statement, but there is a reason that Drucker is a renowned business writer and advisor.
One of the biggest challenges that we see at Black Ice is that client team members struggle when any one of these three management principles are missing:
• Intention
• Execution
• Production
If this sounds like a focus on strategy, it is. Is this another piece on the importance of execution? You got it. Do we believe strongly in operating your business against “the numbers?” Of course.
The process of developing this “three-legged stool” is progressive. However, the implementation of these three aspects of business management is simultaneous. And herein lies the rub: integrating all three of these principles in the day-in and day-out management of your business.
In this context and at a very high level:
Intention = What you do
Execution = How you do it
Production = Why you do it
Let’s drill down on the concepts of Intention, Execution and Production.
CONSTRUCTING YOUR THREE-LEGGED STOOL
Intention
What you do at the highest level provides your team with a sense of purpose and articulates your corporate DNA. This comprises the most basic reason for your being as a company and provides your team with the sense that they are working on something bigger than themselves. In turn, this encourages a teamwork-based approach to accomplishing business goals. This can be broken down to two discrete items:
• Your mission
• Your differentiation(s)
Execution
Once you’ve identified what you’re doing, you can game-plan how to do it:
• Integrate your differentiation into your competitive landscape to identify how you’ll compete
• Build your product or services roadmap to ensure that you are continually delivering what the evolving market requires
• Construct a channel strategy that will reach your customers with the product that they require to solve their business problems
• Prepare a marketing plan that will activate your channel strategies
• Begin building your sales funnel with high-probability targets, overlaying your step-wise sales process
Production
Production, and we don’t mean manufacturing, refers to the output of your executions and measurement of the success of your actions:
• Your financial model and operating targets (i.e., KPIs)
• The impact of achieving your financial goals on the value of your business
• Provide insight on the market share that you can target to be a #1, #2 or #3 competitor in your chosen market(s)
Consider all of the “isms” that we’ve been taught throughout our careers. Without a strategy, your business will flounder. Strategy without execution is a pipe dream. We must employ data-driven decision-making to minimize risk.
These three important principles are treated separately in many cases. Employ all three in your day-to-day leadership in order to optimize business performance.