Welcome to the latest edition of Great Results, the e-zine from Stuart Cross of Morgan Cross Consulting. My aim is to give you provocative ideas and practical tools to help you make a real difference to the performance of your organisation.

This edition is called……..

Does your strategy help you take action?

Can you articulate your company's key strategic objectives? If so, do they provide clear and unequivocal guidance to you and your team about what is required to achieve success over the next few years?

Too often companies' strategic statements are a mix of platitudes and hubris. For example, a strategic objective to deliver the 'best customer service in the world' is likely to receive nods of agreement from around the board table but is simply not precise enough to be delivered by the organisation.

At its heart strategy is about trade-offs. It is about choosing to invest time, resource and money in one area at the expense of another. If you are not specific about the trade-offs you are making do not be surprised if you don't achieve the results you want.

Once you move away from platitudes to specific objectives, you will create the focus, alignment and momentum to deliver significant growth. Take a couple of UK grocers, for example:

• In the 1990's Asda created its George clothing brand on the back of a goal to develop a serious, £1 billion clothing offer by 2000. The Asda leadership didn't just say they wanted to offer clothing, they said they were serious about it, identified a specific - and at the time, hugely ambitious - performance goal, and created a timetable for delivery.
• For the last 5 years or more Tesco has set a goal to be as big in non-food as it is in food. This decision has meant that, in some instances, more resources have been allocated to non-food teams than to the traditional food teams, which has created a stream of innovation in areas including clothing, electrical goods, retail services as well as its recent launch of Tesco Direct.

I am currently finishing a client project where we have identified a few, big priorities for future growth. The work we have done will help the business deliver substantial profit increases, but we have also created a set of strategic objectives that, above all, are specific and actionable. We did this in three stages:

1. We identified the key drivers of value for the business. We took the time and the data to get behind the 'noise' and the various opinions to really understand what will best drive the organisation's future success and profit growth. From an initial list of 20 hypotheses we identified four key priorities that were immediately actionable and would have the biggest impact on their business.
2. We determined the level of change required for each of the priorities to make a material impact to the bottom line. For example, we are proposing 50% improvements in the performance of certain areas of the business over the next few years.
3. We validated our performance goals through internal and external benchmarking to provide management with the evidence that the scale of change we are recommending is both possible and necessary.

The bottom line

Creating clear, precise, and actionable strategic objectives can have a profound effect on the focus, energy and performance of your organisation. Where does your strategy need to become more specific?

Stuart Cross

Morgan Cross Consulting
Tel: +44(0)1636-526111
www.morgancross.co.uk

Morgan Cross Limited, registered in England and Wales No. 5886141
Registered Office is 12 Bridgford Road, Nottingham, NG2 6AB

About this e-zine

You are free to use material from the Great Results e-zine in whole or in part, as long as you include complete attribution, including a live web site link. Please also notify me where the material will appear. The attribution should read:

"By Stuart Cross of Morgan Cross Consulting. Please visit the website www.morgancross.co.uk for additional resources on driving profitable growth."