Welcome to the second part of Blue Chip You – a new personal development program which aims to use the tools, frameworks and models that drive successful blue chip businesses, to help us all become more successful people.
In my last post, we discussed our Group Structure – effectively we were detailing where we are in our lives right now. This time we will look at where we want to be in the future. To do this we will use the framework used by management consultants and corporate strategists to define where household-name blue chip businesses want to be, and how they plan to get there.
Corporate strategy separates businesses’ future into a number of tiers. These allow the designers and users of the strategy to add colour, and to be able to use that strategy throughout the organisation. I’ll go through the key tiers below, and then see how Bob from Part 1 applies these to himself:
Mission – we have all heard about mission statements, and they have fallen out of favour in the last ten years following much bad press. No longer do people plaster their mission statements on letterhead or business cards. But while a formal public statement may be out of vogue, all successful business will still have a mission agreed with and between management and shareholders. Why? For no other reason than this is the statement which defines why the business is there. For example Google’s mission is to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Everything they do must have this in mind.
Vision – this may seem pretty close to ‘mission’, and it is true that the two are often mixed up incorrectly by experienced consultants and strategists. But they are very different beasts – a vision is a state of being that a business is aiming to be in in the future. For example, Yahoo’s mission statement is “Yahoo! powers and delights our communities of users, advertisers, and publishers – all of us united in creating indispensable experiences, and fueled by trust.” whereas its vision is likely to be nearer “Surpass Google as the largest and most respected information source on the web”.
Goals - these are what you need to do to be able to make your vision a reality. If your vision is to teach fifth grade, then your goals mights be ‘get a place on a teacher training course’, ‘get my finances in order so I can go back to college’ or ‘move nearer the city where there are more jobs available’.
Strategies/Control – strategies are what you are going to do to get to your goal – often in business this is the hardest part of the process to complete, and the area into which much thought (and money) is sunk. It is relatively easy to decide where you want to be, and not to hard to identify what you might need to achieve along the way. But mapping out how you are going to succeed with these goals is often a challenge – in the above example, what is your strategy for getting your finances in order? Controls are how you know your strategy is working – the checks and measure you can put in place to plot progress, and are often overlooked to the detrement of the business. If your goal is to get your finances in order, and one part of the strategy is to save 10% of your income each month, your control might be to have $1,500 in your savings account by the end of 6 months.
I have already started to bring the terms from the business context towards the personal development context above, but lets take it the full way by looking at what this all means to Bob:
Mission – to be happy and successful at both work and home.
Vision – to work in a role he enjoys that pays enough to cover his mortgage and expenses, but does not demand he work so hard he can’t spend the evenings and weekends with his family and playing golf.
Goals - to find a new job; get household expenses to a minimum.
Strategies/Control – search on monster.com (control = apply for 2 jobs before the end of the year); speak to his boss about a change in role (control = to do by November); remortgage house now that interests rates have fallen (control = save $100 per month); change energy suppliers (control = save $50 per month).
We can see from the above that this is a pretty powerful framework despite its simplicity. Bob probably hadn’t even thought he might want to change jobs never mind have drawn up a plan of action to get a new one!
The framework should always be an organic item – that is, something that is constantly evolving with time. The mission statement will remain the most constant as that defines your values and feelings, but the further you drop down the tree, the more the parts move. And the framework should not only be applied to the whole picture – each Business Unit will have its own mission, vision, goals and strategies – in a later post we will see how we can use these to pick what we should be doing with our time, and what we as a person will get the most out of.
