In our opening stories covering EPIC, we explained that strategy is a simple process, but it’s not easy. We highlighted the goal is not to create a plan, but to actually do the things in the plan – execute. And to understand the challenges around executing the plan, we often looked to analogous situations that would help us better understand how we can overcome them.
Permit me a few more analogies to explain how we might want to consider organizing ourselves to ensure we have a better chance at successfully executing the strategies we build. It involves concepts from military science, grade 7 math, and finally traffic engineering.
I had the privilege of playing high school basketball for a great coach and mentor named Tom Tagami. He was tough. Every season he would set goals for us on how we would play, what our stats should be as a Team, how we were expected to perform. One of the most important principles he instilled was that you couldn’t always control how many points you scored, but everyone – regardless of talent – could play tenacious defense. When you and your opponent are both exhausted in the 4th quarter, the only edge you could have was your fitness level. You may not be as talented, but you WILL have more strength and stamina. To that end we trained hard. We ran before school, at lunch, before practice and the toughest was finishing a ‘set of lines’ at the end of practice. To this day I don’t believe any of us have been in better condition.
A force multiplier is a factor that enables an effort to work more efficiently and effectively. In athletics, conditioning and being in great shape is a force multiplier. There are no circumstances that being in better shape doesn’t help. Fitness was the “force multiplier” for our basketball team.
In business, there are many potential force multipliers…a lower cost base, better teamwork, stronger communication, deeper trust! The presence of any of these will increase an organizations’ effectiveness and productivity and accelerate strategic execution.
Just like facing an opponent in the 4th quarter, if you somehow have a more ‘efficient’ organization and a lower cost base…you have an advantage (Note: being low cost doesn’t mean you will be low price). But if you can create and sustain a cost advantage and have improved margins – just like being more fit – you have spare capacity to invest and still be competitive. There are no strategies that are not enhanced by having a lower cost.
And to go a little deeper…costs come in many forms, not just the expense lines in the P&L. As organizations evolve – especially as they grow – they tend to add complexity: People. Processes. Policy. Technology. Office Space. Culture? We are actually wired to default to addition to solve problems (and for this, check out the book ‘Subtract’ by Leidy Klotz).
Often it’s inevitable to add these things. But there is a reason we have to be mindful on the ‘costs’ and internal volume we add and maintain in our business – particularly if it eats away at one of our identified force multipliers key to executing our chosen strategy!
We’ll explain why this is important in our next story….
