Over the 23 years of working with medium sized businesses to improve their performance, the activities have all come from 5 common buckets.
- Financial Literacy
- Strategic Literacy
- Operational Literacy
- Business model Literacy
- Revenue generation Literacy
Every action, strategy, and tactic employed comes from one of them, but importantly has flow on effects on all the others, sometimes in unanticipated ways. In those cases, having the performance measures in place that show up the outcomes early enables you to double down on those that work, and back off those that do not.
Business improvement is an iterative process, ideally a tightly managed one, but iterative none the less. It also needs to provide the opportunity to incorporate ideas, insights, and new information that comes to light. What I call ‘Loose Tight’ management.
Similarly, each bucket has a hierarchy supporting it, and the more you go into the weeds with the detail, the greater the apparent interdependence they all have.
However, thinking of them as buckets that require a series of decisions or actions helps to organise all the disparate things that get in the way of performance. You are able to sort out at each level in the supporting hierarchy which actions are important and which are not, which deserve the focus of resources over the others, recognising that you simply cannot do all the things that may seem sensible and important, no matter how big you may be. It also enables project management, timelines, cascading KPI’s and individual and group accountability to be clear.
You have to make choices, and the choices in one arena inevitably impacts on those in others.
Add them together and you get superior performance as an outcome. The whole is always greater than the sum of the parts when done well.
