Catalyst Strategic Consultants

There are functions of Presidents I spoke of in an earlier post this month.

Then there are functions a company as a whole must get right. Of course these should totally preoccupy the Head of the House as she/he is focuser of company attention. And what interests the President should just fascinate the hell out of those next in line.

I’m in the process of becoming a Gazelles Coach. We deploy the Vern Harnish one page strategic plan detailed in “Mastering the Rockefeller Habits”. When I say we, I mean TAG – Team Alberta Gazelles. I am associated with some great fellow Coaches in extending Gazelles in Alberta – Ken Larson, Abhay and Rick Holbrook****. Soon I will join them in offering to pull one of these great guiding frameworks into your world!

Mr. Harnish laid out the Habits right out of the gate: Priorities, Data and Rhythm. More about actioning these in a later post. The book is also marvellous at portraying the array of domains a company [or even a division] must pay attention to, not unlike the Competencies of Successful Presidents I related recently. I’d like to tell you about my version.

I want to direct your attention to the fundamentals a company must get right. To make it, the enterprise must win here, in these domains.

Now these are internally facing – in the same sense as I talked of Inside / Outside Presidential tracks. There is a smaller but no less fundamental Outside list.

And you already know about TEC 217 – the hyper strong peer advisory group of Presidents I lead – and my [and our!] effectiveness lab. So I’ll talk about how we – the 14 members and I – attack these domains.

Here is the Inside List [and some core approaches we use in TEC 217 to meet them]:

– Strategy: This is the forward plan of the company, the vectors it proposes to follow to get from here to the goal. That presumes you have Goals – as part of a robust Vision package [see The 5 Dimensions of Vision what must be in a fully satisfying Vision package to cut it]. But as to how to frame and built strategy, we in TEC 217 are all over “Escape Velocity” by Geoffrey Moore as our guide – and it is deeply useful and totally applicable to midsize companies

– Staff: Nothing can drag an enterprise like inappropriate staffing. We employ Requisite Organization concepts of Eliot Jacques – best detailed simply in Tom Foster’s “Hiring Talent” to guide how we design our organizations and who we look for to fill those senior slots. Oh, and profiling. We feel understanding the people you are onboarding is fundamental. Many use the OAD profiling tool. Mistakes here condemn a company to the slow and draggy path. It takes a long time to get over a bad egg. Get the right hire on the right seat of the bus – as Jim Collins would say – and business life becomes worth living. These tools are the way to get that done. Now the bus can go somewhere! Like where the strategy dictates…

More on Systems and Supply – the other internal building blocks – later.

Sincerely,
Doug Bouey
Catalyst Strategic Consultants Ltd.