Kevin W. McCarthy

The Professor of On-Purpose

corporate culture

Are Business Plans Still Relevant?

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What’s your business plan?

What? Don’t have one? Don’t put it off much longer!

With the ever-increasing speed of business, can business plans keep pace? In this On-Purpose Business Minute, let’s explore the shift in the nature and the need of business plans.

We’re in an era of people and speed—two generally opposing forces.

Most of us don’t embrace change readily or easily. This resistance slows down the speed of the organization and growth that is so sought by the organizational leadership and demanded by the marketplace. By embracing this basic understanding of human nature and the inherent conflict you’ll be wiser and smarter about what to do.

Armed with this insight about the change–speed challenge, the logical question is What to do about the need for speed and change.

  • First, accept it.
  • Second, manage it by going to the deep strategy—purpose, vision, mission, and values. These “clinical” understandings of the corporate culture need to be communicated via strategic stories that infuse and educate the team about why what they’re doing makes a difference. In other words, resistance to change falls by the wayside when the opportunity before us is contribution to a greater good. In fact, we get anxious (in a good way) and excited to see it come about. Now speed is what the team wants.
  • Third, make the connection between a traditional business plan and the purpose of your organization.

Much is written these days about corporate culture.

  • But what is it really?
  • How is it shaped?
  • What needs to happen to create and sustain it?

Deep strategy is the start in the form of an elegant business plan.

If you are a start-up or small business with ambition, then get ahead of the curve today by planning your corporate culture. If you’re leading a larger organization, then you can truly get big gains by going deep. It is more complicated the larger the business, but it is all manageable.

Do you have the “deep strategy” strength and clarity in place to engage and inspire your team so they’ll advance and accelerate the organizational goal?

Need help? Contact me.

Hey! Can You Keep A Secret?

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There's a reason dirty little secrets are called "dirty." No, I won't keep you in suspense wondering why. They are dirty little secrets because they leave us dirty regardless of whether we are the recipient or the teller of secrets. 

Feeling dirty is the personal effect, but there's a larger, more devastating corporate consequence that pulls down innocent victims of these simple acts of foul play. In the end, we begin to ask, "Can I TRUST You?"

Today's On-Purpose Business Minute will hopefully get you to reconsider your participation in the act of dirty little secrets.

Be On-Purpose!

Kevin

P.S.: Here's something we don't want to keep secret. RE:CALIBRATE!

If you're in a season of trying to make sense of life and searching for direction and meaning, yet you're unsure what's right for you, then it is time to RE:CALIBRATE.  Here are 8 power-packed sessions of personal leadership development with Kevin W. McCarthy that is sure to help you go while raising the trajectory of your life and work. Click the logo to learn more.

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Business Strategy > Corporate Culture > Branding

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Let’s connect the dots today on three aspects of your business as mentioned in the title of this posting.  Over the years, I’ve been amazed at how compartmental I find these "functional areas" are in most businesses.  Let’s break the code on the "functional areas" and put it in terms of people.

  • Business Strategy is code for "Senior Management / Shareholders."
  • Corporate Culture is code for "People" inside the business or "Administration, Operations, and Sales."
  • Branding is code for "Customers" with experience with the company’s service and products. 

Senior Management is responsible for writing business strategy plus creating and supporting a corporate culture to execute the strategy.  In turn, the customer experience is a direct result of the output of the corporate culture.  Alignment of all three "functions" isn’t simply a matter of putting together gears in a wheel.  The physical stuff needs to happen for sure, but that’s the easy part in reality.

Business is all about the people.  The true challenge is getting the people aligned, communicating, similarly motivated, and prepared to perform their jobs with excellence.  Unfortunately, I’ve watched a "Fake it ’til you make it" approach of branding ourselves into the appearance of alignment.  Marketing is asked to fix a world of sins within the company by portraying the company as something it isn’t able to deliver.   This short-lived approach can actually produce results and fool the customers and team into believing they’re something they aren’t – successful.

Eventually, the hypocrisy emerges.  High integrity people realize the problem and attempt to fix it in their functional area of authority.  Unfortunately, the addiction to the quick fix has set in and so begins the battle between the long term thinkers and the short term performers. 

Who wins?  Nobody wins because the house is divided. 

Whose fault is it?  Senior management is ultimately to blame because they set the corporate culture in motion, they have the authority to fund and fix the necessary changes to bring integrity to the system.  This alignment pays dividends and makes the flywheel of success spin effortlessly and profitably.  If management hasn’t done their job then the entire system underperforms.

Sadly, the battle is most often won by the short term, numbers people, who milk every penny out of the system that steadily kills the golden goose. A subtle, but significant series of departure begins.   The people with true integrity battle within their functional area for doing right.  Dependency on short term cash flow builds to such a degree that the situations become so desperate that the "only option" is the short term fix.  In time, the people taking the high integrity approach depart frustrated because they’re unwilling to continually make and fail to keep promises to co-workers and customers.  As the people of low character "win," the company grows disreputable over time and falters.  Like rats on a ship who ate away at the very rigging that holds it together, the rats jump ship in droves to work their "magic" somewhere else.

So what’s the solution?

[Read more…] about Business Strategy > Corporate Culture > Branding