“If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.” Seneca
Strategy is all about vision and knowing which port one is sailing. But sometimes it’s hard to identify the key strategic goals that will guide our company to success.
Here are the 3 key questions we have always asked ourselves when setting the long-term goals of our company.
What will you see in three/five/ten years time once your company is successful?
Imagination is one of the most powerful tools we have. And we can use it to identify our vision of success. Take some time, relax and imagine: how will success look like?
If you find it hard to make it concrete, do the following exercise: Imagine you are reading the newspaper and you find an article highlighting how successful your company has been. What will you read? Now, go and write this article.
What is our Unique Value Proposition (UVP) today, how will we improve it in the future and how can we properly deliver it along the way?
Every time we have discussed the answer to this question we have realised:
- We don’t have a clear UVP and this is why the business is not succeeding… or…
- We have it, but our tactics are not that clear when building everything around this UVP.
If you have used Ash Maurya‘s Leancanvas or Alex Ostwerwalder‘s Business Model Canvas you already have discussed about your UVP.
If not, you should write down a UVP that states what your product or service is, for whom and why is it better than competitors’.
You might start trying to answer this innocent question and end up drawing a competitors’ landscape analysis. If so, maybe it means you had to. 🙂
What motivates you and your organisation most when thinking about the future of your company?
Yes, we know, maybe this is not the kind of question you were thinking of when setting your long-term goals, right? But still, this is probably one of the most important questions to answer.
As a leader, do you want to invest your energy and your team’s efforts on something that is not interesting enough?
If you have done right, probably you already have good answers to the previous two questions, but still you need to focus to set an even clearer direction.
Use motivation to chose the most interesting piece of your business and to discard the rest.
At the end of this exercise you should have a maximum of three long-term goals to communicate to your team.
P.s. If you liked this post, then two things come next:
1) Leave a comment and tell me how do you set your long term goals. We love comments!
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