Winning Without Competition: How to Break Out of a Commodity ...

• Establish the critical success factors: core competencies, accomplishments,
management decisions and organizational characteristics that are critical to
executing strategy and achieving the vision. These summarize what needs to
happen for the organization to succeed.
• With this, you can then identify Balanced Scorecard measures, i.e., units of
information (financial or non-financial) that provide meaningful feedback to
strategy execution and, with this, success towards achievement of the critical
success factors.
Balanced Score Card measures are usually developed for four categories:
• Financial
• Customer
• Operations
• Innovation
You can, however, develop other categories that reflect your overall areas of
emphasis in building a winning company. Within each category, you then select
leading (i.e., early measures) and lagging (i.e., late measures) of outcomes. For
example, awareness levels may be a leading indicator of sales, with win rate the
lagging indicator. Balanced Score Card measures are established at the company
level. Then, each team or functional group level creates measures that stem from
the company measures, but better reflect what the smaller group can directly
influence. E.g., suppose one of the organizational measurements was win rate.
The sales department measures related to this measure could be:
• Consideration rate
• # hours in front of existing customers
What must the leadership team accomplish working as a team to
enhance the capacity of the organization to succeed?
Pamphlet Two focuses on the role of the senior leadership team and Pamphlet Six
on developing strategic leadership skills. Reading about leadership is useful.
Becoming a differentiated supplier requires you to translate awareness about
leadership’s role and a desire to improve leadership skills into a plan to improve
leadership skills throughout the company, starting with the senior team.
Otherwise, dreams exist, but there is no change in reality. Slowly but surely,
ambitions start to shrink and rose-colored glasses are used to convince yourself
that today’s reality is really not that bad. (See Sidebar F: Most of us choose to
ignore the crossroads we face, choosing slow death over deep personal change.)
The leadership team plan outlines the work activities of the leadership team (as a
team, not as individual managers of different parts of the organization) over the
coming year. Like other key teams, there should be objectives and action steps
and milestones. The work of leadership development and personal change is a
Pamphlet #5 Page 214