Unit 5: Course Project: Strategic Analysis 2 MBA695
Step 3
Name Your Critical Success Factors
“Success is where preparation and opportunity meet.”1
—Bobby Unser, Three-Time Indianapolis 500 Winner
You have created an ambitious, glowing vision, but perhaps it seems far off and out of reach. So now what? How do you go from dreaming to doing? The key is to examine the elements that set your vision aglow and to list everything you need to bring it to life. By writing it all down, you are taking a tangible step toward making real progress. This is a very brief but essential step. By accomplishing this simple task, you build positive forward momentum that moves you in the right direction before the glow dims and you go back to doing things the way you’ve always done them.
What You Need to Succeed
You already know where you’re headed. If you were sketching out a map, your destination would be the vision you’ve so carefully created. It is time to get specific about what you need so you can figure out how you will make it happen. So, first things first: you will make a list. This step seems so obvious that many people skip right over it. But pausing for a moment to make sure you’ve documented what you need improves the odds that you will put everything in place to get where you’re going.
You can’t make a suit without taking careful measurements, creating a pattern, and procuring fabric, notions, and a sewing machine. Your list of success factors will also help you assess the distance between where you are and where you’re headed. In turn, that will help you see how far you have to travel and how long it might take to arrive.
Let’s look at Raymond, the would-be concert pianist we met in earlier chapters. What would he need to fulfill that vision? With his ambition to be a musician of worldwide renown, here’s a decent list of what he might need:
• Access to a piano
• A concert-level piano teacher
• Space to practice
• Aptitude for the piano
• Money to pay for the piano, space, and lessons
• Membership with an ensemble to practice with other musicians
• Knowledge of music theory
When Your Vision Seems Impossible to Achieve
Diane is a primary care physician at a highly traditional academic medical center. She came for some coaching as she considered the options for advancing her career while reserving ample time to spend with her two young daughters. As always, we began her planning with her creating an inventory of her strengths, interests, and values, and then she wrote her mission and vision statements. Thinking about how she could fulfill her vision overwhelmed her because she didn’t have any role models who had done what she hoped to pull off for herself. She simply couldn’t picture how to make it happen. Her vision included her cooking with her kids several nights a week and enjoying family dinners that they’d created as a team. Her husband, a busy attorney who shared this desire, was willing to commit to being home for those meals and offered to take on cleanup duty. That part seemed doable.
But Diane wanted to establish herself as a national thought leader in medicine, which, following the traditional career path, would require her to set up a research group, secure grants, and publish scholarly articles in prestigious journals. The problem with that scenario is that it didn’t fit well with her busy primary care practice, to which she was passionately committed, and her active home life. Securing research funding is highly competitive and requires long hours in order to excel. Her ambition to have a soaring career while being an involved parent seemed impossible when held up against the realities of her chosen field.
I reminded Diane that until she fully explored all of her options, it was too early to dismiss her ideal as impractical and settle for something less. She was game to move forward, if not terribly optimistic. So I asked her to continue suspending disbelief for a while longer and just list what she would need to have in place for her to achieve this seemingly unworkable balance. She thought it might be more feasible to pull off this feat if she were able to do some of her work at home, so she came up with this list:
• A home office setup, with computer
• A morning clinical schedule that allowed her to be home after school hours
• Deep expertise in an issue of importance to her medical peers
• A platform to communicate her ideas
• The support of her division chief
• Salary for her nonclinical hours
Just committing her list to paper made it seem less overwhelming. While she still couldn’t see how she would make this happen, she could begin to imagine how she might set some goals to further refine her vision. We’ll meet up with Diane in the next step.
When You Don’t Know Where to Start
If your vision is multifaceted, you may want to break it down into separate sections and make an inventory of success factors for each one. Organize them in whatever way works for you. I find it helpful to use different color markers to highlight the various parts of my vision, such as relationships, work, community, and mind/body/spirit pursuits. However, you choose to approach this, make sure to include the joy notes that will make working toward your vision a pleasant journey.
Because my own vision encompasses many disparate yet harmonious activities, I have broken it down into projects and made a list of success factors for each one. For example, writing this book is one aspect of fulfilling both my personal and professional visions. I needed some obvious things:
• A computer
• Time, time, and more time to review and organize mountains of materials
• Welcoming work space
Attractive office with soothing colors
Clean, orderly desk
Inspiring photos
Pots of tea
Music
• Scheduled breaks for exercise and human contact
• Interviews with clients and program participants
This was also an opportunity to get some good “twofers”—activities that serve you in more than one way. Reviewing my vision statement was a great way to see the potential. When I rethought my writing schedule so that I could help my son prepare for his bar mitzvah, I had planned to get back on track by “going underground” to spend some concentrated time writing free from the competing demands of family, consulting projects, and coaching clients. A review of my vision statement reminded me that spending time in nature is critical to nourishing my spirit. Connecting with cherished friends is also central to my well-being, and is a particular challenge given the solitary nature of writing. So, I added to my list of critical success factors:
• Getting “off the grid” for five days
• Time in nature
• Good company for breaks
Just to show you where this is all leading, I’ll jump ahead a couple of steps and demonstrate how this list of success factors led me to a strategy that fulfilled my whole list. I knew from past experience that trying to write for sustained periods from my office was a setup that would lead to distractions and frustration. Blocking off a few hours a day is usually doable, but the time required to get back on schedule meant that wasn’t feasible. So, I decided to rent a cottage on Cape Cod for a few days and invite my sister to join me. The cape is very quiet and beautiful in the autumn and I was able to find a perfect space at off-season rates.
It was a magical time. I had the concentrated periods of quiet time I needed to reimmerse myself in this massive project and I had scheduled breaks for exercise and time in nature when we walked the beaches in the cool breeze. We were delighted by the rare opportunity to spend so much time together and we had the special treat of watching seals playing in the surf. The invigorating walks renewed me for a few more hours of writing. Then we capped off the day with dinner out. We made a point of testing the cosmopolitans in each restaurant we tried, so we accomplished some important research as well. Most important, I made up for lost writing time and returned home with renewed focus, successfully reconnected with this intense project.
Hopefully, it is now clear how listing your success factors will form a basis for creating strategies that are likely to help you achieve your goals. And, as important, to enjoy the process as much as is possible. So remember to add some spice and make your main course as delicious as it can be. Consider these factors as the ingredient list for your recipe for success.
EXERCISE
Make Your List
Pull out your vision statement and take a look all the individual aspects that comprise your ideal future. Grab your notebook and simply make a list of those things that need to be in place for you to fully occupy the picture you’ve drawn for yourself. Be as thorough as possible. In the next step, you will take an inventory of those factors that you have in place and those that you will have to acquire. The more detail you can develop here, the better your chances of getting them in place.
Step 4
Find Your Sweet SWOT
“When I . . . use my strength in the service of my vision, it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”1
—Audre Lorde
With your list of critical success factors in hand, it is natural to ask with some trepidation: Do I have what it takes to get there? A strategic plan doesn’t leave you wondering. It gives you a clear, calm, and brilliantly easy way to find out. It’s called a SWOT analysis. I don’t have much use for business jargon, but I make an exception for SWOT, an acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. You can use your SWOT to size up what you have to work with—or work around—as you move into action on your project. With a clear picture of your assets and liabilities, you will be in a great position to figure out where to invest your efforts and resources so they will return the greatest dividends.
Size Up Your Position
Now comes a little reconnaissance. Is your vehicle the right one for the trip you want to take? Are there obstacles to steer around or particular routes that will send you flying toward where you want to go? A SWOT analysis will tell you, so you can plot out your next moves in a way that’s custom designed to boost your chances for success.
The great thing about SWOT is its simplicity. It gives you a wealth of information by having you focus on just four key areas:
• Your strengths—the skills, talents, and resources you’ll use to fulfill your vision.
• Your weaknesses—factors that could impede your progress. A weakness could be a skill or resource you need but don’t have. It might also be a behavioral pattern that holds you back or a tendency to undermine yourself by doing things like thinking too small.
• Your opportunities—situations that could give you a chance to leverage your skills and talents.
• Your threats—outside factors that could get in your way.
You’ll start by looking internally, at your own strengths and weaknesses. Next, you will scan your environment for potential opportunities and threats, the external factors that are out of your control but may have an impact on your success. Once you’ve recorded what you find, you’ll be able to test how well your mission fits with your talents and circumstances, and evaluate the potential for challenges ahead. Armed with this information, you can set goals that will make the most of your assets and opportunities, fill in gaps, and mitigate potential threats.
Putting everything on a grid like the one below makes it easy to assess advantages and risks, and provides you with a checklist you can use when you set goals and create strategies to achieve them. Once again, by documenting key information, you reduce both the odds that you will forget something important and the anxiety that goes along with worrying that you’ll drop a detail.
Internal Factors External Factors
Strengths Opportunities
Weaknesses Threats
Will your trip toward your vision be easy or difficult? Your SWOT will reveal that at a glance so you can put yourself on track for success.
SWOT in a Nutshell
To see a SWOT in action, let’s look at how Raymond’s circumstances line up with his mission, vision, and critical success factors. Here’s his list once again:
• Access to a piano
• A concert-level piano teacher
• Space to practice
• Aptitude for the piano
• Money to pay for the piano, space, and lessons
• Membership with an ensemble to practice with other musicians
• Knowledge of music theory
Strengths Opportunities
I live right down the street from conservatory The conservatory has world-class instruments,
Practice space, and faculty
My musical talent qualifies me for admission and It has an ensemble orchestra for regular group
A scholarship practice and the camaraderie I need to enjoy
The process
Weakness Strengths
I lack the manual dexterity to play intricate pieces Federal funding for the arts may be cut
Threatening my scholarship
Especially after working through his critical success factors, Raymond knew a lot about himself and the environment surrounding his vision. That intelligence is pulled together here.
When he looked at his SWOT, Raymond was reassured that he had the skills to be a great musician, and the fine conservatory recognized and rewarded his talent. But the SWOT forced him to consider a weakness he hadn’t focused on much in the past; he didn’t have the skill to play the piano at the level that would allow him to give full expression to his musical genius. As his fictional luck would have it, he learned he had arthritis and his fingers just couldn’t fly over the keyboard at the speed needed to play Chopin concertos in allegro. Now what? Is his music career over? He felt surprisingly calm when he received the diagnosis.
This analysis drove Raymond to look at his options. He could try treating his condition and seek occupational therapy to shore up this weakness. Or he could go back and review his other strengths, and examine his mission and vision for alternatives. No wonder he was unruffled by his diagnosis. His mission “To beautify the world with musical harmonies that soothe the soul and ignite the spirit” did not require him to play the piano to fulfill it. Furthermore, when he looked at his vision statement, he was reminded that it is working with other musicians to create exquisite harmonies that really excites him. Finally, when he looked at his skills inventory, he recalled his unique ability to interpret great works and to imagine how to blend the many orchestral instruments to create arrangements that thrilled his audiences and fellow musicians. As he mused on his situation, he realized he’d been swept along by his father’s expectation that his gifted son would have the piano career that had eluded him. That didn’t fit with the authenticity that should define his own vision of his future. Here’s what he realized when he revisited his vision statement to make sure it reflected his own definition of success:
I see myself surrounded by musicians and creating beautiful music with pianos, but, son of a gun, I don’t need to be sitting at the piano to do that. As a conductor, I could blend magnificent harmonies and even a ham-fisted guy like me can wave a baton. My rhythm and timing are impeccable. What else do I need to succeed as a conductor and how do my strengths play into that? How would this shifted role play to my strengths? In addition to my great ear, it turns out I have a real knack for imagining how dozens of instruments can be layered on top of one another to create the most exquisitely nuanced version of a concerto the world has ever seen. Voilà! That is my true personal genius at work. My work will bring classical pieces alive and make fine music more accessible to the masses. The classical music industry, once in decline, has a shiny future, thanks to me. And to think, I once only wanted to play the piano.
Raymond’s SWOT provided him with a reality check and an opportunity to make sure his ambitions really matched his passions and abilities. It offered him a chance for an early course correction that saved him from wasting precious time and effort pursuing an avenue that would never fulfill his vision of playing on the world music stage. In other words, he could choose a path that is likely to make the most of his strengths and give him some success to build on. He could also take advantage of the opportunities the conservatory offered and make contingency plans for alternative funding sources should his scholarship money dry up.
Notice that, as you move through the strategic planning process, you get steadily more concrete, attaching more detail and more analysis that’s aimed at increasing the odds that the journey toward your vision will be full of wins and pleasure. The process is all about success.
EXERCISE
Swift SWOT
If you’re a person who likes to skip the manual and get straight to assembling the furniture, feel free to do a preliminary SWOT of your project now, following the instructions in the exercise below. You can refine your SWOT as you move through the rest of this section. Draw a SWOT grid like the one above in your notebook or download a copy from joyofstrategy.com.
1. Take a look at your vision statement and your critical success factors. What strengths can you draw on that will position you for success? List them in the Strengths space.
2. What do you need to be successful that you don’t have? List those missing ingredients in the Weaknesses box. Are you doing anything (or not doing something) that undermines your objective? Add that as well.
3. What’s happening around you that could present a great opportunity? Mark that down.
4. Do you perceive hazards in the environment that have the potential to blow you off course? Make a note of those issues in the Threats space.