THE 5 ESSENTIAL BUSINESS QUESTIONS

There are 5 questions that business leaders need to be able to answer in order to run a business successfully:

1. What do we need to do?
2. Why do we need to do it?
3. How long will the benefits take?
4. What will the cost be?
5. How can we truly execute?

These are simple sounding but actually very tough questions when considered fully. But they can be addressed is a structured way, and lead to deliver predictable and measurable business performance improvements.
Let’s dig in and explore each one in turn to expel the myths and surface opportunities.

What do we need to do?

Companies set strategic objectives and map actions in the form of business functions and processes to them accordingly. They often then look at resource requirements and set key performance indicators to measure the return on investment. But this approach misses a fundamental and business critical question:
What are the capabilities that we need to build or borrow within our business?
To miss this point is to ignore the root causes of performance success and to leave success down to a strategy of hoping the competition screws up worse; to be the lesser of evils in the context of their solution. Companies need to map capability templates to their business goals and assess or transform their operations in the context of them.

Why do we need to do it?

Every action and capability within an organisation needs to be clearly reconcilable to the creation of customer value, as it is only the ability to do this that will consistently beat the competition and generate the required revenues. If we take the capability template discussed earlier, and identify gaps and weaknesses, we can then identify and map actions to each one to fill the gaps and strengthen the weaknesses. Only after doing this can we truly say with hand-on heart that we know what needs to be done.

How long will the benefits take?

Another schoolboy error is to not factor in the lead-time-to-benefit for the actions we take in business. I wager that, like me, you have all done it though and probably more than once. I always make sure that for every action I plan in business it carries the key attributes of not just cost but lead-time-to-benefit, otherwise it does not get approved by the executive team. Not to complicate matters too much at this stage, but it is important to also consider how sustainable the benefits are, but I will leave that for another post on another day.

What will the cost be?

I mentioned in the previous section that all actions carry cost and lead-time-to-benefit attributes. Therefore, it is possible to model the return on investment at certain time intervals by tracking them to actual revenue generated by the actions. The screen shot below shows this happening in the Excellence Platform’s transformation dashboard.

How can we truly execute?

True execution is about assigning clear ownership and responsibility to the required actions and conducting a rolling review to ensure the required benefits are materialising and that the actions are delivering them. Organisations are attempting this, but with various degrees of success, as the key issue seems to be that they are trying to use 1990s technology in the form of Excel amongst others that is just not able to map the variables in real-time. It is exactly this lack of effective enabling technology to simplify the whole process above that we created the Excellence Platform at C-View Technologies