January is my favorite month. It is the time of new beginnings and new possibilities. It is that wonderful season when we all look ahead at a brand new year filled with hopes and plans. It is the one time of year when I sincerely believe that I will actually lose those 15 extra pounds and quit drinking so much coffee and exercise three times a week.
This year I dutifully wrote out my 2004 New Year's resolutions and then, in a moment of pure folly, I shared them with a group of friends. I greatly compounded my folly when I asked my friends to help hold me accountable to my new goals. (What was I thinking?)
In a somewhat more formal way, we just finished going through this same exercise at our company. What we came up with at work we call a Strategic Plan rather than New Year's resolutions, but it is in large part the same thing.
The most significant thing about our plan is that is it contains a series of tasks with actual names and dates next to each. Furthermore, our management team agreed to meet twice a month to monitor progress against our plan and to hold each other accountable. (Likewise, what were we thinking?)
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Strategic planning is a lot like love. It is something in which most people want to participate, but it is a term that is frequently misunderstood. Over the past two decades I have introduced myself as a strategic planning consultant on numerous occasions. My approach to the business world is quantitative and biased towards finance issues.
Therefore, I think of strategic planning as an exercise that focuses on the analysis of financial statements, and the creation of asset reallocation strategies and multi-year cash flow projections. I have often tended to look down my nose at less quantitative or "less rigorous" approaches to planning.
Displaying a consultant's arrogance, I have been reluctant to let an outside consultant come in and take a look at my own business. This year, in a moment of weakness (or highly elevated sanity) I agreed to bring in an outside consultant. Bill Dann at Professional Growth Systems led us through a very impressive process that was not quantitative but was extremely valuable.
During the process, we didn't look at a single financial statement or didn't once mention asset reallocation. However, we did figure out how we could make a lot of money.
Bill's process focused on a reality that people like me sometimes forget: Corporations are made up of human beings. Bill brought a rigor to the analysis of human interactions and productivity issues that matches the rigor and precision that I use in my highly-quantitative strategic planning approach.
He began the process by having each employee fill out a detailed questionnaire. This questionnaire data was then analyzed using a highly-respected methodology that generated an assessment of where we are in our development as an organization.
Our management team then began identifying key productivity and efficiency issues based on this assessment document. The next step was to create a wish list of specific productivity improvement projects. We then narrowed this wish list down to the three most critical improvement projects that we wanted to attack in 2004. We also identified the three most critical new business development initiatives.
The final stage in the process was to create plans for each of these six strategic projects. This included the daunting act of attaching one of our names and a completion date to each of the action items in the plan.
At this point, we stumbled into what was probably the most productive element in the whole process. We had a discussion of how we each were going to help the other team members attain the goals for which they are responsible. We also talked about how to constructively hold each other accountable.
Maybe it wasn't really folly to write down my new year's resolutions and share them with my friend. Likewise, it was a good idea to have the company write down its goals and share those goals among friends.
David Hoffman is the president and chief executive of Alaska Growth Capital, a firm which is involved in commercial lending, equity investments and business consulting. He can be reached in Anchorage via e-mail at dhoffman@alaskagrowth.com.
