Vision, Mission & All That Jazz

What a bad time to start my blog. On the 2nd day of my blog the cables went down due to the earthquake in Taiwan & I have had such a difficult time posting. The last 2 days I could not even access my blog & could not post....arrrrrrgh! One of my friends almost threw her notebook out the window. I felt like that too.

Its been rather quiet these last few days tech & entrepreneurship wise. I guess everyone is on leave & taking a break from the rat race. As for me I have been busy planning a Growth Strategy for one of my clients. As part of this I had a meeting with the Company Chairman who wanted to share his "Strategy Platform" with us so that we can develop a great plan for the Co. Well all I can say is that I was very disappointed.

We spent all of 30 minutes running through the usual conceptual "This is Strategy" thinggy which includes the usual run of the mill Vision, Mission, blah blah blah. Of course he had to throw in Prof. Michael Porter's Competitive Positioning as well as McKinsey's Technology Lifecycle. Its all well & good but he probably did not know that I taught strategy for 2 years at the Univ of Edinburgh so I was already familiar with "the usual suspects".

I have also come to realise, after studying many cases of growth & successful companies, that much of this is purely conceptual and often not really applicable in real life for small technology companies. Perhaps it would be applicable if you were a large multinational. The reason for this is simple - small firms don't have the luxury of spending months researching markets, trends and competitors and secondly they rarely have the personnel to do this. Most small firms are very 'thin' when it comes to the management team & already have a tough time just finding customers.

Yes it is valuable, but who is going to do all this research & planning? Most firms don't even have enough sales people. Then we have the Vision, Mission Objectives stuff. Do any of you ever really follow your VMO ...really really follow it? From my experience almost none do. This is only ever done because VCs or Investors request it. For small tech firms the environment changes so often that the VMO may not make any sense 6 months later what more on the long term. So all these conceptual stuff is only good for the McKinsey's & BCG's & is not the reality for small tech firms.

I would rather have a real "get your hands dirty" strategy which is actionable & achievable. Every firm must have quarterly & annual objectives with fixed KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). There must be real action & responsibilities given to each individual.

There must be a clear strategy, something we can bite & do & see. Not the conceptual mumbo-jumbo. Do you really think Bill Gates or Larry Ellison or Michael Dell had this VMO stuff and did all those Porterian stuff? Don't bet on it.

So forget all that stuff. Just set some specific targeted objectives , give your firm a real direction, find an appropriate strategy and execute like crazy. BTW thats the only way to achieve success, make sure you have a strategy that can be executed and make sure you have targets against which it can be measured. That is a real strategy.