All Posts in Policies and Procedures

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

I’ve found the perfect Mission Statement.

No, really. You’ve heard it too. Chances are you were too busy drinking beer (as was I) to recognize it as a mission statement at the time.

Here it is: “Less filling, tastes great.” It’s perfect.

Your mission is your brand, or at least it should be. Branding is often confused with name-recognition, but a well-managed brand is much more than that. When a business builds a brand, it’s establishing the expectations it wants customers to have when doing business with it. That’s why the best companies spend more time and effort managing their brand internally than they do with their customers. It’s to ensure that when marketing makes promises, the company will keep them.

Smart business leaders consider their mission and their brand to be nothing more than opposite sides of the same coin.

Imagine if IT professionals had been put in charge of Miller Lite’s brand. “We provide malt-based fermented beverages to the commercial and residential marketplace, delivering the highest quality and lowest caloric intake consistent with our profitability goals by optimizing our supply chain, standardizing the brewing process, and implementing a program of continuous improvement.” Aaaughhhh! It’s too horrible to contemplate. Think about the expectations you’d set … or perhaps expectorations is a better term.

What did you think, a mission statement has to be long and windy, with lots of bullet points? Nope. Those that are missed the golden rule of mission statement wordsmithery: Ban the word “by.” Once you put “by” into your mission statement you’ve moved beyond branding to the executive summary of a white paper on IT operations. Because once you say “by” you’re obligated to follow it with every strategy, tactic, operational technique and whim you might pursue in furtherance of your goals. “By” turns a taut mission statement into a flabby, boring list of bullets.

How about you? Right about now “Less filling, tastes great,” is a pretty good mission statement for many IT organizations — as useful for that purpose as it is for branding barley pop. Think about adopting that exact phrasing. Or if your corporate culture is less whimsical, change it to “Lower costs, better technology,” (assuming, of course, that this fits what you’re trying to accomplish).

Learn from the brand masters. When it comes to your mission, limit yourself to five words or less.

Then promote the daylights out of it … especially inside your own organization.

Comments

|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Thirty years of the U.S. economy at a glance: 1973 — it blows up. 1983 — it finally starts to improve. 1989 — downturn. 1992 — it picks up again, until 2000 when it dot-bombs.

Here’s another view. In the early 1980s, personal computers invaded American business in defiance of centralized IT. In the early 1990s, central IT gained control of the PC again. Sometime around 1993, business discovered the Internet and for awhile it seemed that everyone in the company was coding HTML except central IT. It took awhile for IT to catch up, but finally, in the late 1990s, IT slowly gained a measure of control over eCommerce.

Look at the dates. Is it mere coincidence, or does the economy flourish in direct proportion to IT losing control over information technology?

I introduced the Value Prevention Society (VPS) this year to spotlight a pernicious attitude prevalent in IT circles these days: “We won’t do it for you and we won’t let you do it for yourself.” It’s the pure version of centralized IT control. Most of the correspondence I’ve received on the subject has been critical of my position, but not one proponent of total PC lockdown has offered an alternative to my Productive Flexibility policy that escapes the inevitable conclusion that VPS members prefer pencil and paper to the use of information technology not sanctioned by the IT organization.

Is that really a position you want to take in public?

Not that utter chaos is especially desirable. Working from a well-designed and managed architecture provides too many advantages to the enterprise. So how should IT gain control over complete chaos?

Answer: View limited chaos as your friend. In particular, look for patterns. If lots of sales reps have installed contact management software on their laptops, it means the company is ready, and perhaps overdue for a CRM-centered sales force automation system. If lots of users have installed software for faxing direct from PCs, install a fax server and make it even more convenient and useful. Do you see a lot of “shadow systems” that use data re-keyed from standard reports into Access or Excel? Run, don’t walk, to the Business Intelligence store and buy a BI tool for them to use instead.

Encourage and support end-user innovation. By participating, you’ll gain an inexpensive, highly reliable way to discover many of the lowest risk, highest impact opportunities in the business. It’s your best course of action.

Especially since the alternative is to wreck the entire U.S. economy.

Comments