Examples Goals And Objectives
You must collect two critical categories of information to produce clarity concerning your current condition: strategic positives and strategic negatives.
Know Your Strategic Positives
Strategic positives are the strengths you possess that most powerfully impact your ability to succeed. There are five areas to explore that will help you identify those strengths, described in the following paragraphs.
1. Competitive advantage: This consists of the factors that make you or your company or your products or services unique and determines your market share and overall success. It is a combination of the available resources (intellectual, human, financial, material/physical, etc.) and your organizational capabilities, which combine to form your (or your company's, or your business's) distinctive competencies. Ideally, these distinct competencies form the basis for the value you want to create in your product or service. Examples of resources are:
- Intellectual: Patents, trademarks, proprietary knowledge, and unique processes
- Human: Talented staff, strong leadership, low turnover, and thorough training
- Financial: Brand presence, solid credit, available capital, customer satisfaction, and a positive reputation
- Material/Physical: Geographic location, inventory strategies, quality products, and other tangible aspects
The capabilities of your business center on its ability to maximize its time, deploy human resources, and communicate your message.
A great example of an organization that consistently succeeds in maximizing its capabilities is FedEx. Since 1971, it has been the leader in just-in-time delivery services, with a strong reputation, a huge fleet, and a widely recognized series of logos and taglines that all support its vision.
2. History: This factor comprises whatever has produced the foundation of your success. Over time, many things can happen to move you away from those things. It could be that market conditions have changed and the things you used to do are now outdated. Or it may be that changes in leadership have caused your organization to lose sight of what made it great. Being aware of those historical success factors is important, and you need to evaluate their current relevance.
Returning to the FedEx example, the ability to be nimble has been a hallmark of the company's success. It was the first carrier to start using computers to route packages in the late 1970s; it began shipping internationally in the 1980s; it provided tracking to its customers in the 1990s; and in 2003 it acquired Kinko's. All advancements have increased the company's relevancy and customer offerings, ensuring sustainable success.
3. Satisfaction: This comprises the opinions and beliefs your customers and employees have about you, your offering, and its value. Customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction are directly related because your employees and associates create customer satisfaction. If your employees and associates do not support and believe in your product or service, neither will your customers. I consider this to be one of the most important building blocks for positive growth.
For example, as a public speaker, I end each event with a satisfaction survey to determine what I did well and what I could improve. As a success coach, I close every session asking participants to consider the strengths and opportunities they discovered during the session. This helps me understand the specific value they received during our time together. And as an employer and mentor, I regularly "huddle" with my staff and colleagues to make sure we're all on track, together, and working toward mutual success and satisfaction.
4. Strategic principles: These are what drive your business, efforts, and long-term success. For example, my primary philosophy in my business is to always provide value that exceeds my customers' expectations. Another is to complete tasks and projects ahead of schedule. And another is to create and sustain a highly consistent brand that reflects the value my customers will receive. These three principles translate into the following actions:
- Providing value by giving my customers access to all of my resources, connections, processes, libraries, and more
- Hiring and partnering with individuals who have specific expertise that will benefit my clients
- Delivering the final product as quickly as possible
- Continually expanding and refining my offerings to have a greater positive impact on my customers' personal and professional lives
All of my strategic principles, and indeed my brand itself, can be summarized as follows: "Give value: Do more than is expected. " These are the core principles that have made my business successful through the years.
One of my clients is a manufacturer of construction and mining equipment. I worked with this company to support its human resource efforts across more than twenty-five business units by providing training strategy and presentation delivery expertise, to be cascaded to many of the company's eighty thousand employees. The head of the HR department had this to say:
Thank you for your commitment, flexibility, and passion for customer delight. You've set a new standard that other service providers must now try to achieve. We truly had a great return on our investment.
You can see that these principles make the difference in winning and losing, and they can create the tipping point in your customer's mind that consistently comes down in your favor.
5. Strategic opportunities: These are roads that have opened up and become apparent by achieving clarity about your vision. These are choices you should pursue that will add value to your product or service, capitalize on your gifts and strengths, and better meet (and exceed!) customers' needs. Sometimes taking these new roads leads you in a completely different direction than you had originally intended, with favorable consequences.
Here's a great example: In 1927, a young married couple started a hot dog and root beer stand called The Hot Shoppe in Washington, D.C. Over the next two decades, they continued to expand their business, opening many more successful stands and restaurants, and offering food services to large organizations. In 1957, when the American highway system opened up the country and car vacations became a way of life, the couple decided to jump on the opportunity and pursued a slightly different direction. They built a motor lodge, or motel, the success of which enabled them, over the next fifty years, to grow exponentially in this new direction.
The couple? J. Willard and Alice Marriott. The company? Marriott International Inc., which in 2007 – eighty years after the first hot dog was sold – generated more than fifty thousand reservations per day at nearly three thousand properties in sixty-seven countries, and had revenues of $13 billion. Capitalizing on strengths and changing your vision as the needs of your customers change can indeed open up incredible opportunity. To learn more, you can check out Examples Goals And Objectives.
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