“The trouble with most business planning is that it is full of visions, goals, missions and ambitions – in other words, what we want to have happen – and completely lacking in how we are going to make it happen”  David Maister

January is a great month for setting resolutions and goals.  Unfortunately, we begin the mourning process for both as soon as February rolls around. 

Like many well-intentioned people with ambitious New Year’s resolutions, organizations often spend huge amounts of time and money establishing wonderful goals only to fail to accomplish them.  And that’s the group at the top – would you believe that most companies do not even set improvement goals?  It is impossible to create a high achievement culture in any organization without a solid track record in first defining and then accomplishing both strategic and improvement related goals.  It sounds like a simple formula, and you might even be asking yourself, ‘well, how tough can that be’?  Yet many companies find themselves floundering in a sea of good intentions and inertia, routinely failing to produce measurable results.

Yes, there are a few barriers (eight to be exact) that get in the way of you creating a dynamic future for your organization.  If we really want to move forward in significant ways, then we must understand the process required to do so.  Only by removing the barriers can you move your organization closer to excellence.

How do you remove them?  Start by elevating your vision, and begin measuring yourself by your own vision rather than your competitors.  When you measure progress, develop a systematic way to keep tabs on your own development toward that vision (key performance indicators for this measurement need to be much more than financial numbers.)  A twelve month cycle is what you’ll shoot for.  Next, standardize every process (quite literally, you are no better than your repeatable business processes).