How to define a business development strategy and implement it

Choosing a further path is almost always a difficult decision for company leaders. It may not be entirely clear where to go next and how exactly.

Norman Wolff, founder and CEO of a consulting firm, offers to look at the problem a little differently: to imagine that the company is a living organism. This means that its mission and values, energy and abilities of employees are important. While this approach seems unexpected, many businessmen praise it, such as the CEO of Patagonia.

Wolf's book, Living Organization. Business transformation on the way to outstanding results ”, was published in Russian by the publishing house“ MIF ”. With his permission, Lifehacker publishes an excerpt from Chapter 12.

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Does the strategic development of your company imply the progressive improvement of current business processes - or are you betting on an innovative approach to customer service? These two paths differ significantly, including in the way they are executed.

The difference is best understood by thinking of the company as a simple production pipeline. The conveyor is designed specifically for the production of a specific product, and the maximum effective way. When there is a need to produce another product, the conveyor is stopped and reconfigured in accordance with the new requirements.

Your company, like a conveyor belt, is set up to produce goods and services for customers. Every aspect of the company's activities - from technical development to finance, from operations before sales - changed over time until it became optimal for the production of these specific goods and services.

Certain norms and rules, indicators and corporate culture were formulated that contributed to success. Achieving a company's operational goals is analogous to achieving production goals in the conveyor metaphor.

If the implementation of development plans does not imply a significant change in the usual way of working, then the company only needs to progressively improve the existing "production line".

You can add a new tool, such as an enterprise management system, or improve the process employee training in different departments, but the fundamentals of the company's operations will remain unchanged. Strategic planning in this scenario will be in the nature of progressive improvement of existing business processes.

Let's consider another type of strategy - innovative development. Examples of an innovative development strategy can be increasing the value chain, reaching other customer segments, offering recruitment goods and services with higher added value, the transition from the production of goods to the provision of services (or vice versa).

These changes in strategic direction will require a shift in how the company will conduct business going forward. For example, if she moves from selling technical product to specialists to selling technical solutions to company executives, she is likely to it will have an increase in the duration of the sales cycle, new approaches to the definition of the "roadmap" of the product, new methods of entering market.

Perhaps even the profit-making model will change. In fact, it will require a change in all the norms, rules, structures and business models that it has applied before.

In the context of our metaphor, there will be a need to reconfigure the company's “production line”. However, unlike the production process, the company does not have the opportunity to close for "maintenance". The implementation of an innovative development strategy implies the re-tuning of all business processes, while the company continues to operate.

Who is responsible for the change

The strategy is aimed at improving business processes and introducing changes. Whether the development strategy is innovative or progressive, as shown in the figure, execution strategy management is change management.

As you can see in the diagram, even the forward strategy curve has a slope, which means that it also requires change management. Operational changes are always necessary to improve productivity over time. Although it is obvious that the change management process will be much more serious in the implementation of an innovative development strategy in comparison with a progressive development strategy.

For many companies, strategic planning is essentially a progressive development and is very similar to operational planning. Most of these plans relate to improving operational efficiency and expanding the existing business model. When implementing an innovative development strategy, an attempt to manage strategic execution in a similar way will not give positive results.

The innovation strategy depends on the degree of change that needs to be made to the underlying business model.

This model includes For a detailed description of the business model, see article from Harvard Business Review Reinventing Your Business Model, by Mark W. Johnson, Clayton M. Christensen, and Henning Kagermann, Reprint R0812C. norms and rules, indicators and processes that contribute to the creation of results by the company.

Since an innovation development strategy stimulates a change in business fundamentals for a particular company, it requires a different focus. The innovation development strategy should take into account the forces acting mainly below the surface at the level unconsciousthat set the existing boundaries, comfortable for everyone. While the strategy of progressive development concerns mainly the forces in the field of action, the strategy of innovative development requires a revision of the boundaries of the context field and a new definition of the field relationships.

It is during innovative shifts in strategy that the field of context and the field of relationships have the greatest impact. To overlook this is to work against the company. However, if you apply a specific strategy to change them, it can set the company up for success.

To manage the implementation of the innovation development strategy, it is required to identify specific initiatives with objectives and targets. This provides the ability to track aspects that were previously considered the “soft” side. business.

Now the soft aspects can be measured. Very often, tiny changes in the energetic patterns of the relationship field and the context field that define the meaning and purpose of a company, lead to significant changes in results.

What's your horizon

Strategy is a process of evolutionary development. This means that in order to be successful in the future, you need to lay the foundation for concrete action already in the present. A simple example is the difference between business development and sales. As you know, sales are focused on a specific time period - day, month, quarter, year, as well as looking for opportunities and closing deals.

Process business developmentinstead, it focuses on building opportunities that will lead to future sales. For example, one of my clients in the education field was looking to expand internationally. market and set a goal: the turnover of its branches in other countries should be equal to the turnover of the company inside country.

The company did not have experience in the global market and experience in building international channels. The first strategic decision was to hire a business development director with international experience. For the development director, a three-year period was set, during which he had to build the necessary relationships, develop the necessary channels and create opportunities. Each of the elements of this development plan logically followed from the previous one.

In this plan, three time horizons were identified: H1 - current activities to be implemented this year; Н2 is a transitional stage that will come in two or three years; H3 is the point in the future at which the company will achieve the desired result, which may happen in three, five or more years.

To achieve the goals at stage H3 (the volume of revenue in the international market is equal to the volume of revenue in the domestic market), it is necessary to set intermediate goals for stage H2 (develop channels and create opportunities), as well as goals that will lay the foundation for future success, at stage H1 (involve the director of development).

For most people, this seems obvious. Unfortunately, not for everyone. Too often, companies build long-term goals for Phase H3 without thinking about what needs to be changed today to start moving in their direction. They are too confident in the fairness of the expression: "Set a goal for yourself, and the rest will happen by itself." Of course, this is the case with some people and some companies, but not all. There are people who come to understand this themselves, but there are others.

Moreover, this is not due to the difference in the level of intelligence - it is due to the difference in maturity.

Individuals who are higher on the conventional scale of development and maturity cope with everything on their own - this may seem intuitive. It is not so obvious that a person with developed spiritual intelligence (SQ) and not too high functional skills is able to more successfully work with broadly defined goals and objectives than a person with good functional skills but a low level of spiritual intelligence. The same is true for companies.

Proper preparation requires proper development and ordering of the three energy fields. Consider the above example with an educational company. Before you change the action field, you need to change the context field. The context field has the lowest rate of change, followed by the relationship field. Changes are most likely to occur in the action field, provided that the other two fields support those changes.

When developing strategic initiativesaimed at preparing the company for the future, for time horizons 1, 2 and 3 it is necessary to determine appropriate goals and objectives from the field of action, the field of relationships and the field of context and recognize them interdependence.

Don't waste your words

Formulating a set of initiatives to prepare a company for the future is one thing. And it is quite another thing to be firmly committed to following these initiatives. The seriousness of the intentions is usually confirmed by the allocation of resources.

Ask any HR professional about strategic development employees. How many times have you yourself attended meetings on strategic development, where as one of goals declared “creating conditions for the development of personnel, since people are the most important asset company "? However, if it is necessary to cut costs, the budget items for employee training are the first to fall under the knife.

Most companies seem to be infected with the urgency virus. Time after time, when "urgent and urgent" issues arise, they prefer to address them at the expense of what is important in preparing the company to achieve future goals. And one of the side effects of this virus is that it affects memory, so that we are absolutely unable to understand why we are failing to achieve our goals.

There are four important steps in the "Decision" phase:

• identification of strategic initiatives;
• streamlining these initiatives;
• selection of indicators and setting goals;
• resource allocation.

When it comes to resource allocation, it is important that there is a well-defined budget for strategic initiatives, especially in planning horizons 2 and 3. The concept, which was developed on the basis of a balanced scorecard and which we have implemented in real-time execution system, is to allocate a budget for strategic investment (StratEx).

An analogy can be drawn between StratEx and CapEx (capital investment). Most companies recognize that they need a separate capital budget. It usually covers the cost of purchasing new equipment and maintaining existing funds.

Likewise, the StratEx budget must ensure that resources are targeted towards the required investments to carry out strategic initiatives. Without this, the company can quickly lose sight of the strategic development goals and return to the usual practice of growth through the management of the "crisis of the day". Top managers Strategic planning meetings will begin to be viewed as enjoyable and not practical.

Who invented it

As already stated, strategy is the process of creating the future. You can consider the future as a continuation of the past or as a creative decision as we want this future to be. Practical experience shows that living organisms are focused on creation, this is what distinguishes them from machines.

A person dreams of what he would like to create, and then makes his dream come true. The formulation of one's own vision of the future sets in motion the mechanism for realizing this dream. Any entrepreneur will confirm: opening his own business, he dreamed of creating what others considered impossible. Dreams and following for dreams they fill the world with colors. This is true for you and this is true for your company.

The process of defining the future is a creative process in which the ability to refer to the past plays a very important role.

By understanding the past, one can better understand the driving force and direction of the flow of energy that moves into the future.

Based on the basic premise that everything that exists is energy, it can be concluded that the current reality is energy converted from the energy of the past. Trends are the driving force behind energy; they indicate in which direction it will move. The more the driving force behind the trend, the stronger the energetic pattern and the more energy it will take to change it.

Most people admit that sometimes idea able to get ahead of her time. This can be explained as follows. Early on, an idea can be compared to a seed planted in the energy field of current behaviors. If the seed carries in itself "reasonable, good, eternal", it will attract more and more energy.

As this happens, it begins to create new patterns of energy that are expressed in new patterns of behavior on the part of people commonly referred to as innovators. If an idea proves its worth, it attracts more and more energy, and at a certain turning point, it will seem like a new trend has formed.

Understanding the trends of the past helps you determine how much energy is required to transform the current reality into the future you want to create. The future is never defined by the past. The past only dictates the amount of energy that will be required to create a more successful future.

When choosing a strategic direction, create a combination of current and new trends for yourself and follow it.

The ratio in this combination will depend on your deep goal. If you are essentially a technical innovator, it is obvious that you will be prone to new trends. If you are quick to grasp ideas, then you will prefer to focus on existing trends.

Your beliefs

Whichever role you choose, when it comes to defining a set of strategic initiatives, your decisions will be based on your beliefs. Since the strategy is about creating the future, then all decisions will be based on assumptions regarding past and future trends. It is very important that all beliefs are taken into account. Too often, companies can be observed to make decisions based on assumptions that only they believe reflect reality.

Over time, this selective perception of reality becomes more and more difficult to see what is really happening. This slows down the company's response or, even worse, prevents the formation of an adequate response to environmental changes. By regularly monitoring beliefs and checking their adequacy at the analysis stage, the company will be able to more effectively respond to the dynamically changing conditions of the outside world. As you know, one should not unconditionally take everything at his word.

Camera, motor!

Now that we've identified the corporate story theme and written the script, it's time to get started. It's time to step on the stage of life and make everything planned come true.

As with any good performance, actors need to understand their roles and artistic design director. The emphasis in the process shifts to organizing the entire company, so that it acts in a single direction.

At the same time, the work itself is better considered improvisation, and not a clearly written script.

The modern world is characterized by a high rate of change, so it is almost impossible to prepare a "troupe of artists" for what they will face and program their reaction. Rather, each participant must understand their role and have the necessary skills to perceive the events of the surrounding world, and his response should contribute to the development of action in the right direction.

This is the basic principle of improvisation: at any moment, no actor knows what his stage partner will say or do. They act according to the way the story unfolds. If something happens, the actor reacts to it. He accepts any proposed action and adds something of his own to it, the next does the same, and thanks to this, the idea develops.

If you want to look at your company in a new way, Living Organization will help you with this. Norman Wolff details the spiritual principles that should underlie a successful business.

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