I’m a strong advocate of building a one page plan, either for business or personal use. It’s just a document that outlines what you value and how you’re planning to get to your hoped-for future. Here are some sample categories. Choose those that are relevant for you, fill in the blanks, and use it at management team meetings to align your team. There are lots of duplicate ideas, don’t use them all.
- Purpose: Why do you exist?
- Why, How, What?: Why you exist along with how you do your thing and what you do exactly. Also called mission and vision.
- Core Values: How should people around here behave?
- Pillars: What do we believe deeply?
- Brand promise: What can our customers count on us to deliver to them every time (no more than 3)
- Unique Selling Position: Same idea as above
- Our perfect customer: By demographic and psychographic
- BHAG: Our ‘big hairy audacious goal’ 10+ years out
- SWOTT: Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats and trends
- Top strategies: For the year, for 3-5 years
- SMaC list: Our ‘specific, methodical and consistent’ recipe for success – rules we will not violate as an organization
- Key habits: That the organization will practice
- Top corporate goals: For the year, for 3-5 years
- 20 mile march: Our consistent growth goal. Not a dream, but the law
- Key measurements: By year, by quarter. No more than 6 measures that indicate the health of the organization
- Challenge game: Some organizations play quarterly games to align the team
- Parking lot issues: Things to remain on the radar that we can’t deal with right now
- Sandbox: What is the scope of our operations (geographically or by product offering, or…?)
- Personal Accountabilities: What is each person on the team accountable to do by (insert your time frame here)
Every organization must know where it plans to go, how it plans to get there, and what each person’s role is in making that happen. Does yours?
