Kindle Notes & Highlights
Started reading
October 24, 2018
1. What is our mission? 2. Who is our customer? 3. What does the customer value? 4. What are our results? 5. What is our plan?2
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WHAT IS OUR MISSION? Peter F. Drucker • What is the current mission? • What are our challenges? • What are our opportunities? • Does the mission need to be revisited?
changing lives is always the starting point and ending point. A mission cannot be impersonal; it has to have deep meaning, be something you believe in—something you know is right. A fundamental responsibility of leadership is to make sure that everybody knows the mission, understands it, lives it.
“Our mission is health care.” And that’s the wrong definition. The hospital does not take care of health; the hospital takes care of illness. It took us a long time to come up with the very simple and (most people thought) too-obvious statement that the emergency room was there to give assurance to the afflicted. To do that well, you had to know what really went on. And, to the surprise of the physicians and nurses, the function of a good emergency room in their community was to tell eight out of ten people there was nothing wrong that a good night’s sleep wouldn’t fix.
The effective mission statement is short and sharply focused. It should fit on a T-shirt. The mission says why you do what you do, not the means by which you do it. The mission is broad, even eternal, yet directs you to do the right things now and into the future so that everyone in the organization can say, “What I am doing contributes to the goal.” So it must be clear, and it must inspire. Every board member, volunteer, and staff person should be able to see the mission and say, “Yes. This is something I want to be remembered for.”
MAKE PRINCIPLED DECISIONS One cautionary note: Never subordinate the mission in order to get money. If there are opportunities that threaten the integrity of the organization, you must say no. Otherwise, you sell your soul.
WHO IS OUR CUSTOMER? Peter F. Drucker • Who is our primary customer? • Who are our supporting customers? • How will our customers change?
“Who must be satisfied for the organization to achieve results?” When you answer this question, you define your customer as one who values your service, who wants what you offer, who feels it’s important to them.
IDENTIFYING SUPPORTING CUSTOMERS
information is not enough. It doesn’t capture the quality of the customer experience. Simply managing data about customers is no substitute for ensuring that the customers are satisfied with their experience of the company. An old Chinese proverb says, “If you cannot smile, do not open a shop.”
WHAT DOES THE CUSTOMER VALUE? Peter F. Drucker • What do we believe our primary and supporting customers value? • What knowledge do we need to gain from our customers? • How will I participate in gaining this knowledge?
Leadership should not even try to guess at the answers but should always go to the customers in a systematic quest for those answers. I practice this. Each year I personally telephone a random sample of fifty or sixty students who graduated ten years earlier. I ask, “Looking back, what did we contribute in this school? What is still important to you? What should we do better? What should we stop doing?”
Everything exemplary leaders do is about creating value for their customers.
So, what does the customer value? Clearly customers value an organization that seeks their feedback and that is capable of solving their problems and meeting their needs.
customers value a leader and a team who have the ability to listen and the courage to challenge the “business-as-usual” environment, all in service of the yearnings of the customer.
WHAT ARE OUR RESULTS?
How do we define results? • Are we successful? • How should we define results? • What must we strengthen or abandon?
Progress and achievement can be appraised in qualitative and quantitative terms. These two types of measures are interwoven—they shed light on one another—and both are necessary
whether overall school performance improves
ASSESS WHAT MUST BE STRENGTHENED OR ABANDONED
Do we produce results that are sufficiently outstanding for us to justify putting our resources in this area? Need alone does not justify continuing. Nor does tradition.
your job is to invest your resources where the returns are manifold, where you can have success.
To abandon anything is always bitterly resisted. People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete—the things that should have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are. They are most attached to what in an earlier book (Managing for Results, 1964) I called “investments in managerial ego.”
Abandoning anything is thus difficult, but only for a fairly short spell. Rebirth can begin once the dead are buried; six months later, everybody wonders, “Why did it take us so long?”
Question 5 WHAT IS OUR PLAN?
Should the mission be changed? • What are our goals?
The plan encompasses mission, vision, goals, objectives, action steps, a budget, and appraisal.
every mission statement has to reflect three things: opportunities, competence, and commitment. It answers the questions, What is our purpose? Why do we do what we do? What, in the end, do we want to be remembered for?
planning defines the particular place you want to be and how you intend to get there. Planning does not substitute facts for judgment nor science for leadership. It recognizes the importance of analysis, courage, experience, intuition—even hunch. It is responsibility rather than technique.
GOALS ARE FEW, OVERARCHING, AND APPROVED BY THE BOARD
If you have more than five goals, you have none. You’re simply spreading yourself too thin. Goals make it absolutely clear where you will concentrate resources for results—the mark of an organization serious about success. Goals flow from mission, aim the organization where it must go, build on strength, address opportunity, and taken together, outline your desired future.
a vision statement picturing a future when the organization’s goals are achieved and its mission accomplished.
Here is an example of the vision, mission, and goals for an art museum. Vision: A city where the world’s diverse artistic heritage is prized and whose people seek out art to feed their mind and spirit. Mission: To bring art and people together. Goal 1: To conserve the collections and inspire partnerships to seek and acquire exceptional objects. Goal 2: To enable people to discover, enjoy, and understand art through popular and scholarly exhibitions, community education, and publications. Goal 3: To significantly expand the museum’s audience and strengthen its impact with new and traditional
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Building around mission and long-term goals is the only way to integrate shorter-term interests. Then management can always ask, “Is an objective leading us toward our basic long-range goal, or is it going to sidetrack us, divert us, make us lose sight of our aims?”
“One prays for miracles but works for results.”
Your plan leads you to work f...
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FIVE ELEMENTS OF EFFECTIVE PLANS
Abandonment: The first decision is whether to abandon what does not work, what has never worked—the
“If we were not committed to this today, would we go into it?” If the answer is no, say “How can we get out—fast?”
Concentration: Concentration is building on success, strengthening what does work. The best rule is to put your efforts into your successes. You will get maximum results.
Concentration is vital, but it’s also very risky. You must choose the right concentrations, or—to use a military term—you leave your flanks totally uncovered.
Innovation:
What are the opportunities, the new conditions, the emerging issues? Do they fit you? Do you really believe in this?
Risk taking: Planning always involves decisions on where to take the risks. Some risks you can afford to take—if something goes wrong, it is easily reversible with minor damage. And some decisions may carry great risk, but you cannot afford not to take it.
If you are too conservative, you miss the opportunity. If you commit too much too fast, there may not be a long run to worry about. There is no formula for these risk-taking decisions. They are entrepreneurial and uncertain, but they must be made.
Analysis: Finally, in planning it is important to recognize when you do not know, when you are not yet sure whether to abandon, concentrate, go into something new, or take a particular r...
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BUILD UNDERSTANDING AND OWNERSHIP The plan begins with a mission. It ends with action steps and a budget. Action steps establish accountability for objectives—who will do what by when—and the budget commits the resources necessary to implement the plan. To build understanding and ownership for the plan, action steps are developed by the people who will carry them out. Everyone with a role should have the opportunity to give input. This looks incredibly slow. But when the plan is completed, the next day everyone understands it.
NEVER REALLY BE SATISFIED
The organization must monitor progress in achieving goals and meeting objectives, and above all, must measure results
You must adjust the plan when conditions change, results are poor, there is a surprise success, or when the customer leads you to a place different from where you imagined. True self-assessment is never finished. Leadership requires constant resharpening, refocusing, never really being satisfied. I encourage you especially to keep asking the question, What do we want to be remembered for?
