The book Simple Rules by Donald Sull and Kathleen Eisenhardt has a very interesting chapter on strategy, which tries to answer the following question: How do you translate your broad objectives into a strategy that can provide guidelines for your employees from day to day?
It’s the last bit there which is particularly important — getting everyone on the same page.
Companies don’t seem to have a problem creating broad objectives (which isn’t really a strategy). Your company might not call them that, they might call them “mission statements” or simply “corporate goals.” They sound all well and good, but very little thought is given to how we will actually implement these lofty goals.
As Sull and Eisenhardt put it:
Developing a strategy and implementing it are often viewed as two distinct activities — first you come up with the perfect plan and then you worry about how to make it happen. This approach, common through it is, creates a disconnect between what a company is trying to accomplish and what employees do on a day-to-day basis.
The authors argue that companies can bridge this gap between strategic intent and actual implementation by following three steps:
- Figure out what will move the needles.
- Choose a bottleneck.
- Craft the rules.
1. Moving the Needles
The authors use a dual needle metaphor to visualize corporate profits. They see it as two parallel needles: an upper needle which represents revenues and a lower needle which represents costs. The first critical step is to identify which actions will drive a wedge between the needles causing an increase in profits, a decrease in costs, and sustain this over time.
In other words, as simple as it sounds, we need an actual set of steps to get from figure a. to figure b.
What action will become the wedge that will move the needles?
The authors believe the best way to answer this is to sit down with your management team and ask them to work as a group to answer the following three questions:
- Who will we target as customers?
- What product or service will we offer?
- How will we provide this product at a profit?
When you are trying to massage out these answers remember to use inversion as well.
Equally important are the choices on who not to serve and what not to offer.
Steve Jobs once pointed out that Apple was defined as much by what it didn’t do as by what it did.
2. Bottlenecks
Speaking of inversion, in order to complete our goal we must also figure out what’s holding us back from moving the needles — the bottlenecks standing in our way.
When it comes to implementing a strategy of simple rules, pinpointing the precise decision or activity where rules will have the most impact is half the battle. We use the term bottleneck to describe a specific activity or decision that hinders a company from moving the needles.
You may be surprised at the amount of bottlenecks you come across, so you’ll have to practice some “triage” of your issues, sorting what’s important from what’s really important.
The authors believe that the best bottlenecks to focus your attention on share three characteristics:
- They have a direct and significant impact on value creation.
- They should represent recurrent decisions (as opposed to ‘one off’ choices).
- They should be obstacles that arise when opportunities exceed available resources.
Once we’ve established what the bottlenecks are, it’s time to craft the rules which will provide you a framework in which to remove them.
3. Craft the Rules
Developing rules from the top down is a big mistake. When leaders rely on their gut instincts, they overemphasize recent events, build in their personal biases, and ignore data that doesn’t fit with their preconceived notions. It is much better to involve a team, typically ranging in size from four to eight members, and use a structured process to harness members’ diverse insights and points of view. When drafting the dream team to develop simple rules, it is critical to include some of the people who will be using them on a day-to-day basis.
This probably seems like common sense but we’re guessing you have worked at least one place where all information and new initiatives came from above, and much of it seemingly came out of nowhere because you weren’t likely involved.
In these situations it’s very hard to get buy-in from the employees — yet they are the ones doing the work, implementing the rules. So we need to think about their involvement from the beginning.
Having users make the rules confers several advantages. First, they are closest to the facts on the ground and best positioned to codify experience into usable rules. Because they will make decisions based on the rules, they can strike the right balance between guidance and discretion, avoiding rules that are overly vague or restrictive. User can also phrase the rules in language that resonates for them, rather than relying on business jargon. By actively participating in the process, users are more likely to buy into the final rules and therefore apply them in practice. Firsthand knowledge also makes it easier to explain the rules, and their underlying rationale, to colleagues who did not participate in the process.
It’s important to note here that this is a process, a process in which you are never done – there is no real finish line. You must always plan to learn and to iterate as you learn — keep changing the plan as new information comes in. Rigidity to a plan is not a virtue; learning and adapting are virtues.
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There’s nothing wrong with strategy. In fact, without a strategy, it’s hard to figure out what to do; some strategy or another must guide your actions as an organization. But it’s simply not enough: Detailed execution, at the employee level, is what gets things done. That’s what the Simple Rules are all about.
Strategy, in our view, lives in the simple rules that guide an organization’s most important activities. They allow employees to make on-the-spot decisions and seize unexpected opportunities without losing sight of the big picture.
The process you use to develop simple rules matters as much as the rules themselves. Involving a broad cross-section of employees, for example, injects more points of view into the discussion, produces a shared understanding of what matters for value creation, and increases buy-in to the simple rules. Investing the time up front to clarify what will move the needles dramatically increases the odds that simple rules will be applied where they can have the greatest impact.
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Still Interested? Read the book, or check out our other post where we cover the details of creating your simple rules.