This week’s book review is REMOTE by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson.
REMOTE defines a business model that embraces a structure where employees do not work from the traditional corporate office. They can work from home, from Starbucks, while traveling, or pretty much anywhere that has high speed internet! It is full of great examples, ideas, tools and techniques to make the “remote employee” model work for any knowledge based business.
Over the last few posts, I introduced my Ebook 12 Steps to Business Transformation and I defined Vision, Mission and Values, which are the first 3 steps of the 12 transformational steps. This week we are going to talk about Business Strategy.
Defining the Business Strategy for your business is step 4 in my new Ebook “12 Steps to Business Transformation.”
Business Strategy considers all the internal and external market forces, your business strengths and weaknesses, your vision, mission and values, the service and/or product your business sells and the marketplace that you are selling into. The Business Strategy pulls all these divergent thoughts, ideas, conditions, and concepts together and defines a high level plan to engage successfully in the marketplace.
Without a clearly defined business strategy, your business is destined for decline and failure. This does not mean you need a 10,000-page business strategy document that takes years to write and now just collects dust on a shelf in your office.
What is needed is a simple, concise, focused and nimble plan that you constantly refer to, communicate from and measure progress against.
“If we sense that our structures are rigid, inflexible, or bureaucratic, we must bust them open – without destroying ourselves in the process.” – Ed Catmull
To be successful in today’s highly competitive marketplace, your business must be flexible, innovative and customer friendly. Businesses that are inflexible and difficult to do business with are destined to fail.
Quite a few years ago, I was called by a client and asked to take over an engineering project that they had awarded to one of our competitors. This competitor was not meeting the requirements of the contract and not delivering on schedule or on budget. Once I got involved with the project and did some investigating, I discovered the biggest reason for their failure was they were stuck using their rigid project execution processes that added cost and complexity without returning any value. This competitor was stuck in their rigid, inflexible and bureaucratic structure and could not find a way to break out of it even though they were self-destructing!
