Dan Schneider

Choosing the Right Business Performance Discipline for Succession Success
April 10, 2008

In the movie “City Slickers,” Billy Crystal asks Jack Palance about the secret of happiness. Palance looks at Crystal, holds up and index finger, and gives him the answer. “One thing.” Crystal asks “What’s that?” and Palance replies “You’ll have to find that out for yourself.”

He might just as well have been talking about business performance disciplines and excellence. As said in the opening article of this series, you can be excellent in one thing. The secret is deciding which is right for you, your management team and your organization.

Remember, you can’t be a market slug in any of them. But, if you want to be an overall market leader, you must choose an excellence model and begin investing in the infrastructure required for whichever model you decide to go after.

Your choice will drive critical business strategies such as:

• Size and growth;
• Profit and Return;
• Customer Needs;
• Products and Services Offered;
• Method of Sale;
• Management Synergy and Teamwork; and,
• Recruitment and Retention.

To pick the business performance discipline that’s right for you, consider your answers to the following questions:

• Can I live with people closest to the customer making decisions that may affect the bottom line?
  • If the answer is no, you may have trouble with a customer intimacy model.
• Can I live with turning down business that doesn’t fit our processes and procedures?
  • If the answer is no, you may have trouble with an operations efficiency model.
• Can I live with getting to the marketplace second or third, or with a product knock-off, or a product declining in popularity? 
  • If the answer is no, you may have trouble with a product leadership model.

Of course there are more questions, and we’ll revisit this topic later in the year.  But for now, consider your answers to the questions above. Go back to your strategic plan and revisit your mission, vision, and values. They are the clues as to which discipline is right for you. If you don’t have a strategic plan, then you will have a difficult time choosing a business performance discipline. That can compromise your succession success, lose your legacy, and leave you in an animated state of creeping mediocrity. You deserve better than that. So do the generations coming after you.

Posted by Dan Schneider on April 10, 2008 | Comments (0)