Continued success.....
“The biggest challenge any organisation will face is…..its success.”
At the age of 30, Christina took a risk: she decided to set up her own business. Since childhood, she had been fascinated by food. She grew up in a household where she was lucky enough to be given meals full of colour, variety and goodness. When she visited her friend’s houses after school, she was often given food that was dull and plain. Being a curious child, she asked her parents why this was. They explained that for some families, the prices in the local greengrocers were just too high. They had to go elsewhere for their groceries, and the quality and choice were not as good. This stayed with Christina throughout her childhood and early adult life, even whilst she was working hard in her ‘dream job’, teaching. She had a constant niggle in the back of her mind - can I do something to change this? Fast track 15 years, and Christina is now the successful owner and Managing Director of a business that has transformed the delivery chain of fresh food from source to greengrocers, making fresh, colourful, nutritious produce much more available to all not just across her neighbourhood, but her entire country.
Fast forward 25 years, and the business has failed. Christina left the business a few years after we last checked in on her, and the decline has been swift and brutal.
So what’s going on?
How to maintain momentum, and ensure long term success, is a key issue for many leaders, whatever sector your organisation operates in.
Let’s look at three core areas: purpose; people; and strategy.
PURPOSE
Simon Sinek is a well known author and motivational speaker; his book Start with Why examines this conundrum around long-term success. The quote at the top of this piece comes from him. In his book he maintains that clarity of your WHY (your cause, your belief) is what drives success. And that where this gets ‘fuzzy’ is when decline tends to set in.
Christina was very clear on her WHY when she set her business up. She wanted to bring fresh produce to the masses. However, as the business grew, and once Christina stepped away, this WHY first of all became fuzzy, and then became totally lost. Instead of decisions being taken on the basis of their WHY - to bring fresh produce to the masses - more focus was put on the WHAT the organisation did or HOW it did it. A company obsessed with bringing fresh produce to the masses became obsessed with achieving its goals.
Sinek provides some brilliant examples of these in his book, from the rise and fall of Wal-mart, through to the long term success of Southwest Airlines. And he expands this idea of the centrality of purpose, or a ‘just cause’ in his latest book, the Infinite Game.
PEOPLE
What pitfalls might there be on the People side with long-term success?
expectations get higher and people don’t cope with that;
staff might become comfortable; and
every other competitor organisation that hasn’t achieved the same level of success will be forensic in looking at where they can improve.
The All Blacks provide a useful case study here: they are the most successful sporting outfit of all time. Whilst there have been bumps in the road (notably in the early 2000s), the All Blacks have worked hard at ensuring sustained success.
‘Going for the Gap’. The famous All Black phrase boils down to this: when you’re on top of your game, change your game. They believe that:
organisational decline is inevitable unless leaders prepare for change, even when standing at the pinnacle of success;
the best form of attack is a continuous feedback loop, and this process is best when it involves your people; and
sustainable competitive advantage is achieved by the development of a continuously self-adjusting culture.
STRATEGY
Which brings me nicely to my final area: strategy.
A 2017 HBR article brilliantly captures the importance of viewing strategy completely differently in today’s fast-paced world. https://hbr.org/2017/11/your-strategy-should-be-a-hypothesis-you-constantly-adjust Rather than setting a strategy and then rigidly implementing it, the argument is that your strategy is just a hypothesis that you should be constantly testing and adjusting. So your process moves in a continuous loop from forming, executing and monitoring, all underpinned by extreme listening. The article provides examples of famous recent slip ups, including Wells Fargo’s cross selling strategy, and Volkswagen’s emissions test debacle. If these organisations had adopted the ‘strategy as learning’ perspective, senior leaders may have interpreted the early signs of gaps between results and plans in a more productive way. Volkswagen’s stated aim was to become the largest car company in the world. This meant they had to conquer the US market. To help VW stand out and win the US market, its executives formulated a strategy of developing so-called clean diesel vehicles that leveraged the company’s core competence. As time went on, they ignored the evidence that the claim that the diesel technology could comply with environmental regulations was too good to be true. In this way, VW leaders lost out on the opportunity to revisit and update the strategy. Meanwhile, engineers had developed software to fool the regulators - postponing the inevitable.
As Amy Edmondson and Paul Verdin state in the article, strategy as learning requires senior executives to engage in an ongoing dialogue with operations across all levels and departments. People who create and deliver products and services for customers are privy to the most important strategic data the company has available. And the strategic learning process involves actively seeking deviations that challenge assumptions underpinning current strategy. Deviations and surprises must be welcomed for their informative value in adapting the strategy.
Strategy as learning also requires an open and ongoing dialogue with other stakeholders and entities within your ecosystem. The sports sector is currently proving an excellent illustration of this approach, under the auspices of Tim Hollingsworth and Sally Munday as CEOs respectively of Sport England and UK Sport. Sport and business can learn huge amounts from one another, and it’s fascinating to see how Tim and Sally’s approach is mirroring to a large extent that taken by Satya Nadella when he took the reins at Microsoft.
Purpose, People and Strategy - all key to driving the continued success of your organisation. For more information on this or any other aspect of leadership, please get in touch at info@sportandbeyond.co.uk