The magical 10 minutes – part 5
Strategy Alignment Check in just 10 min.
This is the 5th post in the series “The Magical 10 minutes”.
How long does it take to check if your management team is pulling and pushing in the same direction?
10 minutes!
The first blog post explained how you could ask yourself and each member of your management team to prioritize the 6 sources for financial growth.
The second blog post dealt with assessing the competitive environment.
The post #3 was about how to check if you all agree on what is your Customer Value Proposition.
In the post #4 we started sharing some real life examples of internal misalignment on priorities for sources of growth.
In this post #5 we will look at how a management team viewed the competitive situation of their company.
The market situation
You will recall the 4 simple questions about you market situation:
- How is demand expected to develop over the next 12 months?
- How is the level of competition expected to develop over the next 12 months?
- How are market prices going to develop over the next 12 months?
- How has your company’s market share developed over the last 12 months compared to the previous 12 months?
There are 5 possible answers to each question:
- Significantly increase
- Increase
- Stay the same
- Decrease
- Significantly decrease
I assume we expect that the Board of Directors and the executive management team will review these 4 fundamental market situation parameters from time to time. Take a look at the outcome of answering these questions in a recent project we did for an Independent Software Vendor with a 9 person management team:
What is our market situation?
You wouldn’t think that they worked for the same company. Now two of the team members were working on a new international software project and answered the questions from this perspective rather than from a general company perspective. However, they didn’t have the same perception of the market situation either!!
I believe it is fair to assume that you, as a management team and/or Board of Directors, would take quite different measures if the market in which you operate is “increasing significantly” as opposed to “stay the same” or even “decrease”. I assume you would expect to get a unison answer on the development in your market share? Well, in this case the management team was of very different opinions. Clearly the management team did not have an eye on the development in their market share.
This series of blog posts on alignment uses concepts from the ValuePerform strategy framework.
