The ARNO Group » Growth Management

Achieving Strategy and Living Values — One Cannot Exist Without the Other

David Rocchio — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 17:28:15 +0000

Through the years of consulting with businesses on strategy I have concluded implementing strategy has three components: acting on tasks, goals and culture.

The first two – tasks and goals – are captured through thinking deeply about what needs to happen to turn a strategy into reality. People within an organization can then agree on who is responsible for which tasks and can articulate a concrete goal or set of goals from a strategy. Measuring performance against the metrics developed is then fairly straightforward (if not fraught with difficulties).

The third part of the equation, however, can be elusive and is often undervalued. Articulating the what of a project is often much more straight forward than articulating the how of a culture. (For example, how many of us can identify with a comment such as this? “Geez, Jim is sure good at closing contracts but I cannot stand to be in the same room with him!” It is important to understand the real negative impacts of misaligned behavior and to know how to deal with people exhibiting ‘counter-culture’ behavior.) Identifying the values and styles of an organization – and then devising a system to create alignment to that culture – can go a long way to achieving a strategic goal and make hitting targets, tasks and goals easier. Think of the companies or organizations you value most – I suggest it should then be pretty easy to visualize the positive behaviors of the people working within those companies. I want to suggest that the culture around a company plays as big a role in achieving strategic goals as does completing all of the tasks on a list. It is worth creating a performance management system to measure not only objective completion of tasks and hitting of targets but also whether a person lives the values and fits the culture of an organization.

Working with companies to help them articulate their vision and values (not trying to impose one from outside), helping clients align teams to the articulation of a shared vision and values and building the measurement systems to ensure the words are lived, not simply posted on the wall, provides immediate, tangible, positive results.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately both because of some work opportunities as well as some direct observation. An airline employee rolling her eyes at me – quite a different perspective than the one given by the airline’s expensive advertising – compared to an employee at a local chocolate factory making my visit and purchase easy and valued. Eye contact, smile, conversation, respect. Brings me back every time. Another local shop where the employees enjoy each other but do not seem particularly to like the customers – hmmmm. An on-line retailer where the customer service representative sounded like she was doing a crossword, not focusing on my purchase.

It is deeply rewarding to help build systems to articulate, communicate, train and measure performance against corporate culture. If you are interested in the conversation, please let me know by either emailing me at drocchio@thearnogroup.com or calling me at (802) 253-7804.

David Rocchio

Sustaining Vision = Sustaining Value

David Rocchio — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:27:51 +0000

Here is a scenario: A young couple starts a small business with a unique position in an industry. It becomes a labor of love. They are on the cutting edge in the industry and become experts. They take care of their employees, inspire deep loyalty, and they each occupy a hallowed place in the business as it grows. The founders’ personas become so embedded that in reality the mission of the business is simply to support the founders as they grow the business.

Fast forward to the twilight. The couple’s children are out of college and decide to come home and work in the family business. Soon they are making preparations to take over. The transition is bumpy. Morale sinks, production slides and the founders linger, trying to preserve their legacy, equity and effort. Without intending to, mixed messages emerge for the employees and the ability of the new team to drive growth and value is eroded. This also assumes that the new team – the founders’ children – has the skills, training, attitude and capacity to take the business to the next level.

Quite often for people who have built their own business their vision for the business is intuitive. When that is the case, for the rest of the team, the mission becomes a game of follow the founder and objectives are set by their instincts.

Companies face the greatest risks in times of transition. The departure of founders is just such a transition. When founders leave, the alignment around the values, vision and mission of the business will often leave with them, because the founders personify the vision.

Sustaining the vision may sound simple, but it is never as easy as we expect it to be. There is the very hard question of whether a next generation is – or can become – adequately developed to take over a business or whether a better approach is to develop professional management or consider a merger, acquisition or sale to realize the founders’ vision. But for any course of action to succeed, there is a need to take the personification of the vision and articulate what is intuitive to the founders and those around them. There is a need understand what it is about the founders that brought home the mission for all the employees.

Having the mission and vision clearly articulated at the moment of transition builds confidence, and allows the decisions of the new leadership to be strategic, either grounded in history, or a deliberate and conscious departure from that history. As long as that choice is grounded in the vision, the hard work of succession planning and execution can build a strong foundation for a business to sustain its value through these difficult transitions.

Maximizing Offsite ROI

David Rocchio — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:52:51 +0000

Good companies are founded on an original vision but great companies continually refine that vision again and again to ensure they remain competitive in good times and bad. A powerful technique for ensuring that your corporate vision receives the attention it deserves is a strategic offsite.

But successful offsites require unique skills usually not found in the typical corporate setting. Worse, all too often companies depend on chief executives to create and manage the offsite – the very people who should in fact be temporarily liberated from day to day responsibilities so they can take a fresh perspective on things. To maximize your ROI, to ensure critical objectives are met, and to ensure your time and money are well spent, we’ve created a free white paper to show you how to pull off the successful offsite meeting. Download our free white paper here.

Building A Team

dougrek — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 09:44:22 +0000

The worst time to hire people is when you need them. Here’s what we mean.

We find the most dangerous times for a client is when they are about to go on a hiring spree. It does not matter what type of person a company needs – engineers, project managers, sales and account managers, IT – it matters the type of person a company is willing to hire.

We want to share our deep belief, born out by data, of what our hiring strategy should be whenever a company makes a hire. This approach will generate the strongest growth and success over time. The approach is hardest to manage during times of strong growth, which is also when the it is most important to follow the approach. It is hardest to manage during times of growth because it is during these times companies cannot be patient in hiring; they commonly believe they must take what they can get and throw bodies to the work.

We advise clients to always look for only the best people for all of the positions they are about to hire for even if that means everyone must work harder in the short term until we find the absolute right person to join our company and culture. The approach is critical to any long term prospects of going from “good to great,” to borrow from Jim Collins, who has written and worked on issues of building greatness his whole career. To be proactive, our core philosophy is every hire must be a superstar.

Superstars are the rare segment of the population who have the ability to excel at every turn. They excelled both academically and in their extra-curriculars — it does not matter at what extra-curricular — at every step in life from high-school through college and into the job market. They are life-long learners who possess a powerful mix of brains, emotional intelligence, curiosity, and rapid assimilation of new skills. Their work experiences and history is exemplary. They are rarely looking for work — they must be found.

Frankly, these are the people who are better than we are (and we can’t be threatened by this fact). A true superstar picks up new things so fast, we don’t have to spend too much time analyzing whether or not they have the direct skills for the specific job we are hiring them for. Yes, in an ideal world when you hire a new sales guy for example, it’s great if they have sales experience. But give a top manager a woman who graduated top of her class at every level, played sports, plays in a band, writes for newspapers or books, won a Rhodes scholarship, or climbed Denali (all just examples), and we guarantee she can learn how to sell. Obviously, there are limits to what we are saying (you can’t take a great person and turn her into a surgeon without sending her to med school). The thesis holds, however; if you hire a brilliant mind to open the mail at your office you will have a potential CEO within your ranks for that time in twenty years when you want to retire.

Here is the good news. You can spot a brilliant person a mile away. They simply have an aura, which you can learn to identify. The hard part is being patient and thoughtful in hiring to find and capture those who have the smarts, fortitude and values to not only join your team but to thrive on your team. By taking the time to find top talent a company will be more valuable, more successful and more fun to work with.

There are volumes of research to support this approach but if you want just one quick thing to read, we suggest Chapter 2 of Good to Great by Jim Collins. Companies that recruit in this manner simply outperform, by a wide margin, companies aiming only to find people to fill slots on the org chart.

We are interested in your views of this position. Obviously, many excellent people cannot be screened based solely on credentials. How did you find the best performers without simply being knee-jerk elitist in recruiting and screening? How do you make superstars of people with the capacity but who had not been stretched (and then thrived when you gave them the chance)? How did you capture the best to join your culture and company?