About 50% to 70 p% of business improvement efforts fail according to many studies, yet I’ve discovered under approach that is delivering a 70% success rate on my improvement work. In this video, I’ll share one piece of the puzzle that has helped make this success possible. Hi there, Matts Rehnstrom here, Shaper of Business Excellence. In this video I’m going to talk about your business base model.
Business Excellence Components Relationship Chart
Let’s deep dive into this poster. The poster is the Business Excellence Components Relationship Chart. A long name for showing all the components that are very important for working with business improvement and the relationship between them.
We’re going to start from the beginning, which is a good thing I think. So it says start here at the business base model . What I see out in different organizations is that they don’t really understand these components so they miss out on a lot of opportunities to improve.
Some think that working harder with their own components will compensate for the lack of understanding of the relationship to others’
They have people in certain departments like IT, marketing, finance, that works with improvement, but they aren’t aligned because they don’t see the other people’s vital components and they don’t understand the relationship between them. They think that by working harder with their component, everything will be fine in the end. But that’s not how it works. You need all the components and you need it to work together.
It’s like taking a net. If you have a net laying here and I take one of the knots of the net and I pull it up, I will not lift the whole net. I will only lift that knot. Maybe some of the other knots will follow along, but not the whole net. But when we’re working together, it’s like taking this pizza sheet, or something, a large one and putting it under the net. And we’re raising everything up, which means that we’re lifting all the knots at the same time instead of one and one and one because that will never succeed.
Business Element #1 You need a business IDEA to tell you what you deliver to whom
Let’s go back to the business based model and we’ll talk about these seven different key elements. The first element is the business idea, which also is a component in this chart. You need a business idea to understand what it is that you’re going to deliver and to whom.
For example, if we say that we’re going to deliver lesser shoes to the modern woman, that it could be one business idea. I don’t say it’s perfect, but I make it as an example. We can have that. We, we sell lesser shoes to the modern woman or we sell shoes to everyone. That’s a difference because in the first one we have put women as one and two lesser shoes was one.
So we don’t sell the finest shoes to them. We sell the lesser shoes. But in the second model we talked about selling shoes. Whatever shoes we can have, whatever shoes and to anyone. Maybe not the best business idea, but the business idea is there, it’s vital that you have it.
Business Element #2 You need a VISION that tells you where you are heading
The second element here is the vision. You need a vision to be able to know where you’re heading. If you have the business idea and you have the vision, the business idea will tell you where you’re heading. The vision is like a shining beacon in the night, showing you in what direction you’re about to head. So what do you want to do with your business? Selling shoes, again, it will say that we have a shoe store in every large city in southern Florida.
In that case we said what we want to achieve in the long run, not the long, long run, but fairly long as your vision is not really a goal, but it is something that we worked towards.
Business Element #3 You need strategic GOALS to drive you towards your vision
The third things is strategic goals. You need to have goals that are not goals on detail level, but on a strategic level because the strategic goals will show you that you’re reaching towards the vision. So you have your business idea, you have the vision that tells you in what direction to fulfill that business idea, and you have the strategic goals that will show that you’re on the right path, towards the vision or fulfilling the vision.
Business Element #4 PROCESSES are the base form where you produce value for your customers
Then you’ll have in the middle processes, because processes are the value creation of whatever you do in your business.
That’s where you create the value for your customers. The other form you do it is in projects. Projects or processes are the only two forms of work where you create value for your customer.
Basic Element #5 You need basic VALUES stating how you treat people in and outside of your business
Underneath here we have them values. You need values in your organization. Basic values for how we treat people, how we treat each other, and how we treat our customers.
You can see different organizations out there that have very strong values and that they excel in everything they do because people are aligned in those values and values are connected to the WHY that I talked about in an earlier video.
Basic Element #6 You need LEADERSHIP to be able to reach your goals, take care of opportunities and handle the challenges
Then we have leadership. You need leadership in your organization in order to take advantage of opportunities that will arise along the way, but also to handle challenges that are coming your way.
Then you need people, formal or informal to take leadership. You also need people that has leadership based on your values. You can have leadership in an organization, but if it’s based on the wrong values it will not succeed.
You will need to base the leadership on the right values. And the formal leader, that’s someone that is appointed a position to be a manager and then hopefully becomes a leader by having people following him or her. But an informal leader they’re someone that step up in the moment when it’s needed. They don’t have a formal assignment to be a leader, but they take the responsibility to be a leader and they do what needs to be done in a certain situation. And you need those leaders in your organization based on your values.
Basic Element #7 You need STRATEGIES that will guide you in your day-to-day work
You need strategies as well because strategy is something that is going to tell you how you’re going to act in different situations. Strategy is s like the backbone that you know exactly what to do in a certain situation.
Strategy guides you in your day to day work and the strategies with the leadership according to your values and working within the processes will then give you a fulfillment of the strategic goals. And taking one goal after another ensures that you’re on the right way towards the vision that will fulfill the business idea.
I hope you understand how everything there is connected. So what will happen in the coming videos is that I will take this poster and we will go over the different components that these are pointing to. So for example, strategies, it goes out to the strategies and we will talk more about strategy. Business idea the same. We’ll talk more about business idea. So with that said, you need to again understand all these components in order to excel in your improvement work.
What elements do you work with today?
And I like to know from you, which of these seven key elements do you work with today? Which one do you find most valuable for your improvement work? If you can select one. Otherwise, select them all, but leave a comment below so we can have a discussion about which one you find of most interest. If you like to have this poster and to be able to follow along in that case a click here and you will go to a page where you will find it and you can download it for free. And with that said, good luck. And let’s go and shape our businesses for excellence.
