Reflections on True North

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Strategy begins with our strategic & philosophical Purpose, also known as True North.

True North comprises:

1. a "Hard" goal, usually entailing critical end-of-pipe measures, e.g. Revenue, EBIT, fatalities, and,
2. a "Broad-brush" goal (hoshin), a few words defining our purpose, vision, commitment

I encourage leaders to draw a picture of where we want to be, how we’ll get there, and how we will go about our business.

The business chessboard is foggy, multi-dimensional, and unpredictable. Why bother to define a distant, uncertain future?

Because doing so forces us out of the rut of our current thinking. We engage dormant neural pathways thereby, and begin to see the clear blue sky of what's possible.

True North is also the ‘tie-breaker’, to which we turn for guidance at critical moments. “Is this who we are? Is this where we’re going and how’ll we get there?”

True North will tell us. For example, imagine we are a designer & manufacturer of high-end lighting solving challenging technical problems in high-margin niche markets. Our hoshin is Speed Style Invention. Now suppose a major automotive company, say Toyota, approached us and said, “We’d like you to manufacture lighting for our next Lexus model.”

How would we respond? The answer is clear, no? “We’ll have to decline, with great respect, because that’s not what we do, that’s not who we are.”

Our annual plans will be simple & modular one-pagers that express our hypotheses. We’re often wrong, but we adjust quickly. Life never goes according to plan. Clear hypotheses & modular plans enable the rapid PDCA cycles that’ll dispel the fog & get us closer and closer to True North.

Strategy Deployment is messy, humbling, intuitive, a marriage between the Right & Left brain, between intuition & logic, art & science.

I'm reminded of Jack Nicklaus, perhaps the greatest golfer ever, whose swing routine always entailed imagining the perfect shot.

Or of Michelangelo seeing the perfect sculpture in the marble block.

Have a good summer, all,

Pascal



In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look…

Frontiers - Lean & IT
Getting the Right Things Done in a Digital World
On Big Data
Why Lean Outside the Factory?

Reflections on True North

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

A New Year, and a new strategic cycle. Strategy begins with our strategic & philosophical Purpose, also known as True North.

True North comprises:

1. a "Hard" goal, usually entailing critical end-of-pipe measures, e.g. Revenue, EBIT, fatalities, and,
2. a "Broad-brush" goal (hoshin), a few words defining our purpose, vision, commitment

I encourage leaders to draw a picture of where we want to be, how we’ll get there, and how we will go about our business.

The business chessboard is foggy, multi-dimensional, and unpredictable. Why bother to define a distant, uncertain future?

Because doing so forces us out of the rut of our current thinking. We engage dormant neural pathways thereby, and begin to see the clear blue sky of what's possible.

True North is also the ‘tie-breaker’, to which we turn for guidance at critical moments. “Is this who we are? Is this where we’re going and how’ll we get there?”

True North will tell us. For example, imagine we are a designer & manufacturer of high-end lighting solving challenging technical problems in high-margin niche markets. Our hoshin is Speed Style Invention. Now suppose a major automotive company, say Toyota, approached us and said, “We’d like you to manufacture lighting for our next Lexus model.”

How would we respond? The answer is clear, no? “We’ll have to decline, with great respect, because that’s not what we do, that’s not who we are.”

Our annual plans will be simple & modular one-pagers that express our hypotheses. We’re often wrong, but we adjust quickly. Life never goes according to plan. Clear hypotheses & modular plans enable the rapid PDCA cycles that’ll dispel the fog & get us closer and closer to True North.

Strategy Deployment is messy, humbling, intuitive, a marriage between the Right & Left brain, between intuition & logic, art & science.

I'm reminded of Jack Nicklaus, perhaps the greatest golfer ever, whose swing routine always entailed imagining the perfect shot.

Or of Michelangelo seeing the perfect sculpture in the marble block.

Have a good year, all,

Pascal

Reprise - More Reflections on True North

By Pascal Dennis

Is there anything more demoralizing than being cut off from Purpose?

A good way of driving a person mad is forcing them to do purposeless activity over and over.

Strategy Deployment begins with True North, our strategic & philosophical Purpose.

True North comprises:

1. "Hard" goal, usually entailing critical end-of-pipe measures, e.g. Revenue, EBIT, fatalities, and,
2. "Broad-brush" goal, a few words defining our purpose, vision, commitment

We also encourage leadership teams to draw a picture of where they want to be.

Our image will show our hard & broad-brush goals, and how we will go about our business.

But the business chessboard is foggy, multi-dimensional, and unpredictable.

Why bother to define a distant, uncertain future?

Because doing so forces us out of the rut of our current thinking.

We engage dormant neural pathways thereby, and begin to see the "clear blue sky", i.e. what's possible.

Rapid experimentation in accord with the Plan-Do-Check-Adjust cycle dispels the fog.

We get a little better every day.

Strategy Deployment is messy, intuitive, imprecise, a marriage between the Right & Left brain, between intuition & logic, art & science.

I'm reminded of Jack Nicklaus, perhaps the greatest golfer ever, whose swing routine always entailed imagining the perfect shot.

Or of Michelangelo seeing the perfect sculpture in the marble block.

Cheers,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Aussie & Kiwi Reflections

By Pascal Dennis

A Simple Twist of Fate

As you may know, I was in Oceania for almost a month.

Among the highlights was meeting my Aussie cousin, Chris Stavridis, in Melbourne, during the Australian AME Conference.

My mother had told me we had Aussie family and I'd emailed Chris in advance. A cold call, in effect, and I wasn't sure if anything would happen.

On the third day of my visit, just after the day's end Speaker Panel, my cell phone rang.

A loud Aussie voice rolled out, big as a beach ball!

"HOW ARE YOU, COUSIN!? DON'T GO ANYWHERE. I'M ON MY WAY!"

Soon we were sitting on bar stools beside the Yarra River, shooting the breeze like old mates.

My maternal granddad, Stavros, and his, Fotis, were brothers, born in Kastoria, a lovely, ancient town in northern Greece's lake district.

One side of the family came to America. The other took the month long voyage through the Suez Canal, across the Indian and Pacific Oceans, into the Great Southern Ocean.

This took guts - I took the Great Ocean Road west of Melbourne, aka The Shipwreck Coast. The sea seemed a boiling cauldron.

Like me, Chris has three kids. He's proud of his heritage, yet is 'as Aussie as they come'.

We had dinner on Bridge Street in Melbourne's Richmond neighbourhood. Chris regaled me with stories of the neighbourhood's working class roots, and strong Greek contingent.

After dinner, I met Chris' extended family, looked at old photographs, so similar to our families, and told stories.

But for a simple twist of fate, I'd have been born & raised in Melbourne.

"How did our grandfathers decide which continent to settle in?" I asked Chris.

"I think they flipped a coin," he responded.

I love Toronto & North America, but Melbourne would have been just fine.

Our families are now connected by Facebook, of course, and our world has gotten bigger.

Yiasou Chris,

Reflections on Greece - Part 2

By Pascal Dennis

Last time, I shared my thoughts on some roots causes of the Greek malaise - government, governance and special interests.

Each makes it impossible to do anything. In Lean terms, they impose intolerable waste on the simplest activities.

Forget about the primary purpose of business - creating value & prosperity for customers & society.

Here's another root cause -- an absence of skill in, and appreciation of, manufacturing.

Making things is good for the soul - and the economy.

A few years ago my family visited our ancestral home, the lovely Roman town, Kastoria.

Beneath the beauty, there was blight.

My dear old aunt Hariclea shook her head when I asked her about it.

"There are no factories here, my dear..."

It didn't have to be that way.

In the 1980's and 90's major international firms were looking to invest in the eastern Mediterranean.

Greece - with its well-educated, multi-lingual workforce, its deep water ports, and many ties to Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia -- was well-positioned to benefit.

But Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, who'd been educated in America and had an American wife, was virulently "anti-imperialist".

Rather than beating a path to corporate headquarters in Toyoda City, Stuttgart, Munich, Detroit, Fairfield CT and so on, Papandreou forged alliances with - wait for it - Gaddafi, Arafat and the Soviets.

Toyota, GE, Audi and other major internationals ended up investing in Turkey.

A generation of young Turks learned how to cut & shape metal, how assemble & test complex machinery, how to form & manage teams, how to solve problems and so on.

And another generation of talented Greeks, seeing little future, emigrated.

We are now in the midst of another Greek brain drain.

Next blog - what to do?

Best,

Pascal