Culture is a Set of Shared Beliefs, Values, Goals, and Practices. Dharmesh Shah, co-founder of HubSpot, argues that culture is the operating system that powers a business. He takes an approach to building this employee-focused operating system that is similar to how they develop software products for their customers. He argues that a company will have a culture, whether by design or default, and advocates for actively designing and building the culture you love.

“Whether you like it or not, you’re going to have a culture… And I’m going to advocate if you’re going to have one anyway, why not make it a culture you love?” —Dharmesh Shah

And culture drives results. Disengaged employees cost US companies up to $550B each year. A strong culture improves recruiting, with 46% of job seekers saying culture is very important when choosing a company. And a culture that attracts great talent can drive 33% higher revenues. Shah offers that other businesses may copy your products, but they cannot replicate the unique culture that created them.

Actions to Create Culture

Start with safety. Great group chemistry isn’t luck; it’s about sending clear, continuous signals: we share a meaningful future, you have a voice, and we’re in this together. Everyone in the business should feel goals are personally relevant and motivating. Across levels, people should feel safe sharing ideas regardless of formal relationships.

Create or refine your culture principles. These are the beliefs, values, and practices your company is based on. They define how you work together and serve as guidelines to support your mission. NetFlix’s principles are reflective of Reed Hastings foundational ideals. HubSpot started by interviewing employees to find out what they liked most about their culture and created principles from this input. Who sets examples for others? What are attributes of other brands you admire? What makes employees want to come to work? Where can we improve any perceived weaknesses? The right answers shape your company culture in a way that motivates and engages your team. Here are the original principles from HubSpot:

Communicate your culture widely. In 2009, Reed Hastings, famously published a 125-page powerpoint on Netflix’s culture that has been viewed over 10M times. Its refreshingly direct tone struck a chord by focusing on values and performance over rules and controls. It set a culture that enabled their meteoritic growth. The HubSpot Culture Code and the Valve New Employee Handbook emulate this open approach to transparently communicating culture.

“Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex, intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple, stupid behavior.” —Dee Ward Hock, Founder of Visa

Put Culture into Action. Ultimately, culture is not the words you write on the wall or share in a handout, but the actions you take as a business. This means that leaders’ actions set the tone. Live those principles you want your team to embrace. Culture isn’t a static set of ideals, but a dynamic outcome from consistent actions, decisions, and behaviors that the business practices.

• Prioritize cultural fit in hiring: Invest time to find individuals who are not only high performers but also a strong culture fit. Communicate your culture clearly to potential hires to attract those who self-select to your principles. Likewise, ensure people continue to embody your culture. HubSpot states that cultural debt is crushingly worse than financial or technical debt. They screen candidates closely and shed mistakes quickly. Netflix uses the “Keeper Test”: Would you fight to keep this person if they wanted to resign? If not, let them go now.
• Empower your team: Minimize unnecessary controls and trust the judgment of employees who fit your culture. Your culture should set guidelines for building informal relationships and creating ways to resolve conflicts among subordinates, bosses, peers, and external players such as suppliers, regulatory authorities, and customers. Create a culture that guides good decisions, then address exceptions as they arise. HubSpot says, “Solve for the customer” and “Use good judgment.” At Netflix, everyone is expected to make big decisions without waiting for executive approval. If mistakes happen, they serve as learning opportunities rather than reasons for punishment.
• Recognize and reward the right behaviors: Ensure that promotions, bonuses, and recognition systems reinforce behaviors that matter most and align with your business values. Netflix and HubSpot explicitly state that their actual company values are shown by who gets recruited, rewarded, promoted, or released. HubSpot uses its HEART awards to recognize those who “live by their values every day and make us proud to work here.” Google-X, which values innovation, uses a rarely awarded “Audacious Award” to encourage risk-taking and offers those who shut down any project extra paid time off and a bonus.
• Create lore, rituals, and traditions. Enshrine stories and recurring practices that build cohesion and strengthen a sense of belonging and understanding of culture principles. Netflix’s “culture onboarding” ensures new hires are immersed in their values from the start. Stories of HubSpot’s founders’ early coding and regular reshuffling of everyone’s desks contribute to their team culture and sense of fun. These consistent actions and shared stories become part of the company’s identity and serve as ongoing reminders of what’s important.

Embrace iteration: Culture is not reserved for certain groups and is not written in stone. Resist the temptation to impose a top-down culture. Culture consists of living relationships working toward a common mission, built by collective actions and shared principles. Have quarterly culture reviews: What’s working? What’s outdated? Publicly share and discuss failures to create learning. Generate reflection and conversation, allowing the team to co-create a shared path. Shah suggests uncovering and tracking the ‘bugs’ in your culture code and he shares responsibility for fixes. Their culture deck has been updated at least 30 times. Great culture is always changing and evolving, requiring continuous adaptation and response.

Culture isn’t built overnight—it’s a deliberate, ongoing effort. Start with one or two small changes and scale up. The goal isn’t to copy Netflix or HubSpot but to adapt principles to fit your unique business.

Get a jump start on communicating your culture using HubSpot’s culture code template.

How are you building the culture you love?

Great strategies require multiple elements working together. Let’s explore the green flags that signal a robust and effective strategy—one that has the elements needed to deliver success.

Test that your strategy has these green flags

A great strategy:

Motivates People: Inspire Action and Energy

Your strategy gives you, your employees, partners, and customers energy to work toward something important to achieve.

Define something worth doing. Make that your mission. Create a vision that inspires working on that mission. Add values as guiding principles to help navigate the path. Understand that these are primarily to help guide and energize people. Positioning is the start to defining strategy, but not an end in itself.

Is Different: Chart a Unique Path

Your strategy guides you to a place that is worthwhile when you arrive there by uniquely creating value.

Michael Porter famously proposed the essence of strategy lies in choosing a unique and valuable position rooted in activities that are difficult to imitate. The book Blue Ocean argues that creating and capturing uncontested market space rather than competing head-to-head is critical. Relative to current offerings, decide what you will start and stop doing and what to emphasize and deemphasize to create a new market where demand is high, and competition is low to null.

Rides Waves: Diagnose Trends and Challenges

Your strategy has a diagnosis of key trends and challenges in your relevant business context with a hypothesis of what can propel you toward success or that you must crash through for success.

Diagnosis of business context is the start of strategy work. It creates an understanding of what is happening that is relevant to success. It allows for formulating ideas and hypotheses about specific things that can help or hinder your success. And importantly, it must find the causes that, when addressed, will lead to success. What trends propel you forward? Which hinder progress if not solved? What causes them? Which can you make progress on today? Five forces, SWoT, and customer feedback are some tools that assist with this diagnosis. But good, actionable hypotheses are needed for riding waves to great success.

Solves Problems: Tackle the Hard Stuff

Your strategy solves what makes success hard to achieve.

Work on the most important thing you can solve that moves towards your inspiring vision. Strategy is about solving the hard problem, issue, challenge, or opportunity uncovered in the diagnosis. It needs to implement policies and actions that move toward resolving them in ways directed by the best hypothesis for the underlying cause. Track and resolve other issues as they arise.

Stays Coherent: Align Policies and Actions

Your strategy outlines aligned, coherent policies and actions that work together to solve the problem.

Great strategies solve the and manage fit across all company activities over a sustained period. At their core, strategies are coherent action plans. Sequence actions appropriately. Recognize proper timing and avoid actions that are not aligned, cause friction with each other, or don’t address the real problem uncovered in diagnosis. Don’t do things that fight each other or are self-contradictory. For example, I’ve seen companies that want to pursue both growth and profit simultaneously which are usually at odds. Ensure your near-term actions support longer-term Themes.

Creates Focus: Choose a Few Critical Priorities

Your strategy focuses on only a few critical policies and/or actions that deliver the greatest impact.

A great strategy involves making trade-offs among activities to find the few key actions that should be executed. One CEO I worked with had a list of 17 strategic priorities. I was able to have him deprioritize only 3. They failed to find traction and were sold out of PE in an acquisition that failed to recoup investment. Steve Jobs, by contrast, allowed only three priorities to be discussed in strategy meetings at Apple and required choosing one by the end.

Uses Power: Leverage Your Advantage

Your strategy creates leverage using some advantage and continues to develop that advantage.

Discover and use strengths that create asymmetries from a distinct competitive advantage that can propel success and endure over time. Examples include unique skills or reputation your people or brand possess; being first with unique approaches or intellectual property; access to networks or relationships; or owning resources like data or raw materials.

Continuously Adapts: Improve as You Go

Your strategy is flexible with regular checkpoints and interim goals to adapt for what is and is not working.

Test and adjust regularly to ensure that the hypothetical waves you ride are moving you toward success. Milestones, goals, and metrics do not define strategy in themselves, but they enable routine tracking of progress toward important outcomes defined by the strategy’s coherent actions. Execute a meeting rhythm that creates time to continuously adjust with both incremental and disruptive improvements.

Aligns Interests: Work as a Team

Your strategy is supported by leadership and key contributors who first prioritize overall business outcomes.

Strategies fail when any individual or department prioritizes their success over that of the overall business. In the words of Patrick Lencioni, team success requires Trust, Healthy Debate, Commitment, Accountability, and Service to the overall vision and mission of the business. Ensure your strategy is created to overcome his 5 disfunctions. Use A.C.T. to ensure alignment across the business.

Generates Cash: Ensure Longevity

Your strategy generates the cash needed to be fully executed or is well financed.

Cash flow is the pulse of a business. Ensure you have a plan with the financial viability to not bleed out on the path to success. Find ways to preserve cash flow especially as you grow. Or have a fundable business model with actions to raise needed cash.

How does your strategy compare against the 10 green flags listed here? How can you improve your strategy to have more green flags? Let me know if I can help plant more strategy green flags.

Stay humble and adventurous!

Hire for fit

“Hire slow, fire fast.” — Jason Fried, Co-founder of Basecamp

If you never want to terminate an employee, start with a great process to hire, and develop people. Whether someone joins your team or not can be one of the most impactful decisions on their and your business’s future. Often leaders fail to create enough time and process for both parties to reach a good decision. Show respect for candidates’ time and move quickly, by building a streamlined process that allows a good evaluation of both fit with the company culture and fit for the role they will play.

The check for fit with culture should be through. You can train skills, but the fit is more ingrained. Harnish in Scaling Up reminds us that cultures can and should be like immune systems that spit out even capable people who don’t align. So, screen first to get the “right team on the bus” (Collins, Good to Great) even before we know where we want to drive it. Check for fit by ensuring alignment with your strategy and values.

Check for strategy alignment against your business mission and vision. Help candidates see how their role fits with this larger purpose of the company and ensure they are enthusiastic about helping to create your future vision. A simple question like ‘why do you want to work with us’ can uncover the difference between someone seeking a job for personal security and those who are motivated to have a part in creating the future your mission envisions.

Values alignment is a fundamental screen for deciding whether people are right. People who do not embody the company values create distractions by not getting along well with others, and making decisions that do not best support the vision. Value checks also ensure people can deliver the brand promises like customer service, or quality. Evaluate for Values; people either believe in the values in a way that adds value (+), subtracts from value (-) or is neutral (o). You should evaluate to ensure candidates are strong in all core values.

Next, check Wickman’s (Traction) criteria for fit with a particular role. He suggests the acronym GWC that stands for “Get it, Want it, Capacity to do it.” If any of these are a no, you have the wrong person. Each component represents:

• Get it: This refers to whether the individual understands the role’s responsibilities, objectives, and contributions. Create a mission for the role that supports the overall business mission and check for understanding. Can they explain why the job is important? Do they understand the day-to-day tasks while also seeing the big picture? They should have a clear grasp of what is required to be successful without the need to be told what is important.
• Want it: This pertains to whether the individual is motivated and enthusiastic about fulfilling the role. They should have a genuine desire to perform the tasks and responsibilities associated with the position. Explore what parts of the role excite them and why they want to do the work.
• Capacity to do it: This assesses whether the individual has the necessary skills, knowledge, time, and emotional intelligence to effectively carry out the role. Current skills are less important than the ability to build on experience and learn what is needed to deliver the right outcomes. You might also be able to create time for a candidate that otherwise has the capacity.

Finally, move the check for Capacity from qualitative to quantitative by defining a handful of specific and measurable outcomes that a role needs to accomplish in the next one to three years. This is different than a job description that lists what people will be doing (coaching sales reps, writing code, building relationships.) Instead, create a few key measurable accountabilities you want from the role within a timeframe that is reasonable. Use the hiring process to uncover whether capabilities, interests, and history suggest they can deliver these outcomes.

Make your hiring process as experiential as possible. This will give you opportunities to see candidates outside of a typical hiring interview to gain insights and perspectives. Candidates should also appreciate the chance to learn more about the potential future culture and role they would be joining. Add evaluation steps that:

• Incorporate work assignments: Have candidates complete a typical piece of work or check relevant work samples.
• Design team-based assessments: At George Group, we had candidates work together to create and deliver a mock presentation. It allowed us to evaluate their problem-solving skills along with soft skills and cultural fit.
• Create opportunities for interaction outside the workplace: Take candidates to coffee, meals, and other events where less formal interactions can further evaluate fit.
• Check references: Previous employers and co-workers can give good insights that otherwise are difficult to obtain. In the interest of time and respect for candidates’ privacy, some make offers that are contingent on satisfactorily completing these checks.

Have everyone involved in the hiring process evaluate candidates against your criteria. Come to a consensus around each category for each candidate. The goal is not necessarily to hire the best candidate. The goal is to hire only qualified candidates who meet all your criteria and who are excited about the culture and role at the compensation you can afford to pay.

Collins’ (Good to Great) first practical discipline related to hiring people and building a great business is: “When in doubt, don’t hire. Keep searching until you find the right fit. If needed, limit your growth based on your ability to attract enough of the right people.”

Set up Success

Once you hire, set everyone up for success starting on their first day. Do this by creating proper onboarding and continuing to develop people.

Onboarding new employees is a critical step not just for paperwork completion, but also for easing anxiety, fostering a sense of belonging, and setting the stage for long-term success. Here are some ways to enhance your onboarding process:

1. Celebration: A warm welcome can make all the difference. Consider a welcome package or a team lunch to celebrate their arrival. Zappos is known for its celebratory culture, making new hires feel like part of the team from day one.
2. Integrate Culture: Understanding company culture should be easy. Create a culture book or have a ‘culture day’ to immerse new employees in the company’s history, values, and mission. HubSpot and Netflix have famously published culture decks that create clear expectations around their norms and traditions. (I encourage all to study: The HubSpot Culture Code)
3. Training: Role-specific training is essential. Use a mix of hands-on, peer-to-peer, and formal training sessions to cover all necessary skills and processes. When I worked at Accenture, all new hires attended formal training at a former college they had repurposed for their internal training. The two-week program built skills, jumpstarted networking, and immersed new hires in the culture.
4. Tools: Ensure new hires have everything they need to succeed. From a place to work to laptops and access to software and knowledge bases, having the right tools from the start makes a big difference.
5. Accountability: Set clear, measurable goals with expected timeframes to help new hires understand responsibilities and accelerate growth. This can be done by agreeing to goals and rocks each quarter. Or you can be more formalized like the Ovative Group which delivers customized 30/60/90-day onboarding plans to set expectations and milestones.
6. Dehassle: Facilitate easy integration a transition to work as normal. Organize meet-and-greets, AMAs with senior leaders, and other programs to help new hires integrate smoothly into working on their team. Microsoft is known for pairing new hires with an onboarding buddy while they acclimate. Thrive is known for putting well-being at the center of its onboarding to help prevent burnout before it starts.

These are only the first steps in setting up success. Create ongoing support programs. All employees should get regular check-ins with their manager starting with onboarding. These include recurring 1-to-1 lightweight and ACT meetings that cover Accountability, Coaching, and Transparency to ensure a focus on career progression and professional development. An early start ensures any issues are uncovered and addressed before they hamper satisfaction and performance.

Beyond this, the best companies create tailored career development plans and access to: emerging leaders programs, industry and peer groups, apprentice certifications, webinars, and other continuing development.

Some formalize these elements with dedicated teams that deliver the outcomes. Many rush through them without giving them the thought and focus they deserve. When you consider all the effort that is needed to find the right person and the costs if you need to find a replacement, it only makes sense to take enough time to ensure everyone is set up for success. Don’t skimp on any of these points. Make them a priority. Err on the side of too much over too little.

By focusing on these elements, you can create a recruiting and onboarding experience that is welcoming for candidates and excites them to join, contribute, and thrive in their new roles. Remember, successful hiring, onboarding, and development lead to engaged employees and a stronger business.

Share in the comments any practices that help you hire the right people? How do you ensure they are fully engaged when they start working? What might you improve?

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I hope you find Passion, Joy, and Freedom in all life’s adventures.

Why Keep Score?

Scorecards are not a just a list of Measures that you think are important. Done correctly, they:

• Clarify Vision and Strategy: Ensure everyone is aligned by crystallizing the mission, vision, and strategic priorities (Themes) of the business to foster a unified understanding of vision and focused action across all levels of the business.
• Business Health: Create a quick, objective way to know whether current execution is delivering expected results, so you know whether additional focus from leadership is needed.
• Strategic Adaptability: Enable understanding of business progress to accelerate adaption to opportunities, changing market conditions, and emerging trends.
• Objective Decision Making: Identify trends, areas of needed improvement, and create other actionable insights that allow adding resources and fixing issues to accelerate success.
• Communication and Alignment: Serve as a common language to ensure that everyone knows how to translate strategy to execution with the right priorities, progress, and synergy.
• Performance Evaluation and Accountability: Foster a culture of accountability and continuous improvement and offer an objective, transparent way to reward good performance.

How to Create Powerful Measures

The steps are:

1. Clarify Business Positioning and Themes
2. Identify possible Measures for each Theme
3. Define each Measure
4. Select the best for your scorecard
5. Set good Target goals
6. Track and tune progress at Leadership Team Meetings
7. Integrate outcomes and refine

1: Creating good Measures for your scorecard starts with clarifying your business Positioning (Mission, Vision, and strategic Themes and Objectives. This clarity is crucial as it sets the foundation for the scorecard. The outcome of this exercise is your Shared Business Model captured on Your Vision Cheat Sheet including your strategic Themes. (see links for details)

2: Next, identify key Measures (Some call these KPIs or key results) that align with the strategic Themes. These Measures demonstrate how effective the company is at achieving key business Outcomes related to the Themes that deliver your strategy and vision.

For each Theme, give at least one descriptive Outcome and objective Measure that will indicate reaching the destination. This process helps make the Theme more concrete and allows the right focus of resources to reach the Theme. Themes’ Outcomes may be less tangible than specific measures in your strategic planning horizon. But it should always be possible to determine whether you are making progress and whether the Theme is eventually achieved or not.

Work your way up a strategy map from each core capability to create one or two Measures that can track whether you are making progress toward delivering the objective of that Theme. This bottoms up approach helps to identify leading and diagnostic indicators for your strategy. As you work up from additional Themes, you should find that fewer and fewer new metrics are added toward the top.

3: To ensure usefulness and shared understanding of each Measure, make their definition explicit. Spell out the following attributes for any proposed Measure:

• Name
• How it supports a strategic Theme
• Definition with formula and source of data
• Frequency of reporting
• Who will use it and the value they expect
• Who will collect data and report it
• The cost to produce it
• Any potential unintended consequences from its use

4: Once all Measures are defined, check to ensure it serves the intended purpose well and adds value beyond the cost and unintended consequences. Create a review process with your leadership team to ensure they will get value before adding any Measure. Keep it as simple as possible. Not every measure should make the cut and fewer measures are often more valuable.

5: Set Targets for each Measure to provide direction and benchmarks for success. Use the good goal setting approach to set and get agreement for TTS goals with a number for:

• Threshold (achievable with 85-90% confidence)
• Target (achievable about 50-60% of the time)
• Stretch (10-20% achievable)

6: After establishing these Targets, ensure that the scorecard is not just a measurement tool but also a management system that fosters continuous improvement. Create, update, and review your scorecard regularly. Reviewing them is an agenda item in your Leadership Team Meetings. Take actions that deliver your Targets:

• Create initiatives to drive goal achievement
• Identify and correct issues that are uncovered
• Review the why section above and take other actions to achieve those outcomes

7: Finally, periodically use a critical eye to adapt the scorecard to keep it relevant and aligned with the evolving business context. Raise issues any time you feel like a need is not being met. Your periodic strategy refresh meetings are a good time for these adaptations, especially if priorities or Themes change.

This outlines the why and how of creating a scorecard. The right metrics bridge the gap between strategy and execution, providing a roadmap for success. The scorecard becomes a living gage that guides the company’s strategic actions and decisions, ensuring that all efforts are aligned with the long-term vision of the business.

See related articles about: Envisioning Positioning, Vision Cheat Sheet, Creating Themes, Keeping Score, and Setting TTS Goals.

How will you ensure the Measures that track your business deliver powerful value?

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May you find Passion, Joy and Freedom in all your Adventures.

Strategy OS has 3 key activities:

• Envision: Define the enduring properties of the business and how they will be achieved in the medium and near term. This is where to start with StrategyOS and the focus of this article.
• Transform: Execute the strategy on a daily, weekly, and quarterly cadence to create changes that make progress toward the company’s strategy and positioning. This phase delivers business success as shared here.
• Adapt and Grow: Review progress regularly to assess success and improvement priorities and to understand what thematic changes are needed to grow and stay relevant. It includes an (at least) annual refresh of the Envision elements and practices to stay attuned to your business Context.

Definitions:

Before we dig into Envision, it is helpful to review a few definitions. Your StrategyOS must have a defined Business Model on which it works to implement, grow, and improve. The Business Model is first created in this Envision phase and consists of the following elements:

On the right side of the above diagram is the hierarchical list of elements that define your Business Model. As we go down the list, we are getting more near-term and more detailed.

• Positioning terms are the elements that are ten-plus years out and should endure time, technology, and people in the organization. They define why the business exists.
• Strategy terms are two to five years out and create a picture of how to build toward your vision within a timeframe that can be reasonably imagined.
• Plans are made annually and quarterly to guide what to do to achieve the Strategy through daily, weekly, and quarterly actions.

All of this projects on a shadow of the Context that impacts strategy through internal resources and capabilities relative to external trends like customer needs, competitive positioning, and social and regulatory limitations. Your strategy must define how you will compete to win within this Context through your product market fit, go-to-market activities, and resulting business processes and policies. More on this in the Go To Market Theme when we Tune Strategy.

The left funnel is the People Practices of the Business Model which I’ve previously detailed here.

Overall Approach:

When first starting to practice StrategyOS, I work with leaders across the business to define their Business Model in a Strategy Choices Workshop. This is a series of work sessions that allows leaders and influencers in your business to give input and share ideas. It produces a better result than any individual can create and builds needed buy-in through the process. If you’re working to self-implement, I suggest adopting this workshop approach. Some best practices are:

• Ensure ownership and commitment from the CEO or owner. He or she will have selected their strategy operating system in Step 1 and started sharing the approach with workshop members.
• Schedule in advance to allow pre-work and to clear calendars for the effort that is free from distractions.
• Allow 1.5 to 3 days to work through the Envision Steps with the workshop team.
• Develop the business model elements through group exercises like brainstorming, nominal group technique, and voting to generate collaboration and build consensus.
• Build time into the agenda to allow for transfer of information to the Business Model Worksheet and Score Card for review and wordsmithing.
• Allow time after the workshop to refine outputs and continue to execute StrategyOS.

A typical agenda for the workshop looks like this:

Following the Strategy Choices Workshop, I work with the leadership team to ensure they get good at the Transform phase. Daily and weekly progress on your business model is necessary to ensure priorities are a regular focus of the management team and that progress is not overshadowed by the daily running of the business. Through a Strategy Execution with Rhythm Audit leaders get insight and practice on how to establish a StrategyOS execution rhythm on a daily and weekly cycle. We then focus on running effective Leadership Team Team meetings and implementing the other 8 fundamental practices of StrategyOS.

Further support can come from Strategy Refresh Workshops to get practice on the regular checkups and renewals needed. In this workshop, teams review their progress from the last quarter, set new Rocks and Goals for the upcoming quarter, and work on important decisions and Issues to accelerate results. The annual workshop adds a review and refresh of strategy elements and annual planning.

Envision Phase Steps:

1. Commit to a System:

Much like in AA, the first steps to success are to admit you have a need and to accept that there are systems that have delivered the results you are looking to achieve. The strategic operating system that you choose must be made explicit to create buy-in, a common process, language and tools, and shared accountability to make the system work.

The idea of strategy as an operating system that links planning with execution and feedback is not new. The concepts have been developed and repackaged over the years by many academics, practitioners, and writers. Each has a little different focus and different terms, but share common elements. The most important factor to success is to create one that works for your business and people.

StrategyOS as presented here is borrowed and blended from tested ideas that fit most businesses that have at least a few employees and some customers. I typically modify it depending on company maturity and size as you might do for your business. Or, you might pick another author’s “pre-packaged” system. Popular options that are built into StrategyOS include:

• EOS from Gino Wickman’s Traction is a fairly lightweight way to add a common system.
• Mochary Method from The Great CEO Within documents an approach especially for companies that are starting to scale.
• Lean Strategy from Erik Reis’ The Lean Startup book revolutionized MVP and pivots as a path for startup success.
• Strategy Canvas from Kim & Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy offers differentiation ideas.
• Balanced Score Card from Kaplan & Norton’s book by the same name offers structure for mature companies.

Pick a system or modify one to fit your special needs. Agree to diligently follow it (at least among your executive team.) Publicly commit to it as your strategy operating system. Share it across the organization to create a common process, language, and tools. Follow it to communicate and hold each other accountable to an ongoing strategy process.

2. Define Positioning:

Positioning includes the business model elements that should be rock solid: Mission (sometimes called Purpose), Values, and Vision. These guide key choices and help to give direction when uncertainty arises. When you get them right, you can carve them in stone to endure beyond anyone’s tenure in the business.

You may already have positioning statements documented for your business. If they serve you well, you may not need to modify them. But, most businesses that are just starting to implement StrategyOS want to revisit them to ensure they are solid touchstones for at least the next 10 years and ideally indefinitely. If you are just getting started or stuck, look to other companies, brands, and people for inspiration. Here are a few examples:

To start, make sure you have a documented statement for each Positioning element as you start to implement your Strategy OS. Create your Values, Mission, and Vision in working sessions that allow key leaders and influencers in your company to give input. Document these in your Business Model Cheat Sheet. Test drive your positioning for a quarter and revisit whether it is serving the intent at the next quarterly meeting (Transform phase’s Execution Rhythm.)

When you have a couple of quarters with no changes, it is time to start making these statements the cornerstones on which StrategyOS is built and run. Publish them widely. Refer to them when evaluating all other components of your strategy and your people. Point to them for decision guidance.

3. Tune Strategy:

Strategy in this context refers to the dictionary.com definition: “a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim.” In this case, the overall aim is to achieve the Positioning created in the previous step.

A useful construct in creating your strategy is to organize around the major Themes that advance your Positioning. Themes are broader than plans or programs in that they offer guidance about what is needed without limiting possible plans of action or timeframes. They are destination statements describing in detail what the business looks like at some future date from a variety of perspectives. Since it is difficult to envision a clear future much further out than about 3 years, use this as your timeframe to create destination statements describing your major next achievements. Make these statements challenging and motivational but within the realm of possible outcomes.

These destination statements come from assessing how you can best use your business talents and unique capabilities to win given the business’ Context. SWoT analysis, competitive positioning, customer segmentation, adjacent markets, best practices, 5-forces, value chain, and internal gap analysis are some of the many ways to generate Theme ideas. Even more important than these approaches, get really good at talking to customers, employees, and partners. Regularly share issues, ideas, and insights about what can drive success or hamper achieving the vision from these conversations.

From the universe of possible destinations, group, prioritize, and focus on the top 3 to 5 (no more than 7) that can have the largest impact on success. Give them short titles that become your Themes.

Once you have your priority Themes, ensure they are well understood by giving each at least one descriptive Outcome and a Measure that demonstrates attainment of that Outcome at the end of the planning horizon (similar to OKRs, but start with a longer time horizon.) This process helps make the Theme more concrete and allows the right focus of resources needed to achieve the Theme. Be flexible; as the example suggests, some Themes’ Outcomes may be less tangible than specific measures in this planning horizon. But it should always be easy to determine whether the Outcome was achieved or not.

Every Strategy must include two specific Themes: Your “Go to Market” and “Financial” themes.

The Go to Market or marketing Theme is how you will sell and win business within your Context. If you need a structure, borrow from what is described by Wickman (pg 55-65.) The elements are summarized with examples below:

The Financial theme defines your revenue model and includes at least two associated Outcomes: revenue and net margin with associated Targets. As you learn key drivers of your financial results add them as leading Measures to give early indication of success. Elevate these measures to the Financial Theme and give them Outcomes and Targets matching your strategy time frame. Finally, you must ensure the company never runs out of funds to operate. Cash management and fundraising are essential parts of the Financial theme, especially for early stage companies.

Add these Themes, Outcomes, and Measure elements to your Business Model Cheat Sheet.

4. Annual Planning:

Annual planning, as the name suggests, involves envisioning the company one year out and setting Targets and Initiatives for the next 12 months. This step works much like the exercise in step 3, but the timeframe is narrowed to one year and more detail is added to create clarity of focus for the next year about key results that will work toward the strategy Outcomes.

Stay lightweight. Planning can be as simple as creating Initiatives and Targets for each Theme created in Step 3. From a brainstormed list of possibilities, group, prioritize, and focus on the top few Initiatives and Targets that can have the largest impact on success. Assign primary owners and give them a Budget that includes people and dollar allocations.

The outputs from Annual planning should be tracked regularly on the business’ Score Card. Themes are good for organizing your Targets. Have two or three of the most important metrics that show performance for each theme along with associated Targets and Goals grouped by Theme.

Create Goals and Rocks for the next quarter in the Strategy Choices and Annual Planning workshops (even though they are technically a Transform Step) so that you’re ready to start with Execution Rhythm the next week. Add quarterly Goals and Rocks related to each Theme to the scorecard. Showing Rocks color-coded indicates whether or not they are on track. Often reaching a Goal requires having a Rock complete. Each Rock and Goal has an owner. Each person on your executive team should own 1 to 4 in total. These are then refreshed in Quarterly (or more frequent) Recurring Refresh meetings.

All plans come with risks and uncertainties. Creating plans is a good time to raise known or possible Issues that could impact your ability to deliver them. The Issues list is a key tool for decision making, barrier removal, and problem solving. You might solve some high priority issues in your annual planning. Most Issues are managed by keeping a priority list that is worked on during Execution Rhythm meetings as discussed in the Transform phase.

What questions do you have about getting started? How well will the efforts in this year’s plan support your long-term vision? How prepared are you and your team to implement your plan at the start of the New Year?

Please feel free to reach out if I can help you build more rigor around delivering business success. I can also share exercises that your team can use to develop Envision elements for your business.

May you find Passion, Joy, and Freedom in all life’s adventures.

In this edition, I investigate why businesses need both functions and different people for each and how to build both into your business structure.

Almost since their founding, organizations have seen the need for two types of leaders filling different functions. One that focuses on leading itself. Another that focuses on managing. Many terms have been used:

• Leader = CEO = Entrepreneur = Why-Types = Visionary
• Manager = COO = Operator = How-Types = Integrator

One of the strongest ideas to come out of EOS is the concept that organizations should have the functions of Visionary and Integrator in their organizations. While this concept is not new, Gino Wickman has brought the concept mainstream in his book “Traction” and detailed it in “Rocket Fuel.” I’ll use these terms as the functions needed at the top of any business.

Wickman argues that companies that embrace both roles and understand how they best work together will grow faster and have higher profitability, more cohesiveness, freedom, fun, and a better culture. So, what are the differences and how do they best collaborate?

Visionaries

These leaders focus on what is often described as business leadership. The work involves recognizing, preparing for, and delivering change in uncertainty. Normally, this delivers growth or at least, prevents obsolescence. It creates the transformation needed to take advantage of market, technology, or other systemic shifts.

Visionaries are often founders. Their key strengths are:

• Setting Vision = 10 yr+
• Creating culture
• Alignment
• Growing Relationships (key vendors and customers, partnerships, potential acquisitions)

Integrators

These leaders focus on managing complexity. Good Integrators bring consistency and order that delivers better quality, value, and profits.

Integrators can be founders, but normally are more operationally focused and take fewer risks. Their key strengths are:

• Setting Strategy = 2-5 yrs
• Managing Operations
• Ensuring Profitability
• Developing People, Processes, and Systems

Comparing and Contrasting*:

Visionary Integrator

Solve big complex problems Identify and articulate the problems

Generate 20 new ideas per week Make the best ideas a reality

Are great leaders Are great managers

Are optimistic Are realistic

Are “outside people” Are “inside people”

Create the Vision Execute the Vision

*Wickman, Gino; Winters, Mark C.. Rocket Fuel (p. 67). BenBella Books.

Working Together

Working together starts with understanding the different strengths and weaknesses each type of person brings. Ensure the visionary and integrator functions are filled with people who have an innate desire and ability to fill each position.

It then involves creating understanding and alignment between the two functions. This requires consistent work to continue to stay coordinated and aligned. Wickman suggests 3 tools to keep visionaries and integrators working together:

1. The “Accountability Chart”
2. The Same Page Meetings
3. The 5 Rules

An Accountability Chart is a fancy org chart with roles listed for each function. Or, you can use an AOR = area of responsibility list as Matt Mochary suggests in “The Great CEO Within”: Create a document that lists all of the company’s functions, the areas of responsibilities for the function, and the directly responsible individual (DRI) for each responsibility.

The first step for coordinating visionaries and integrators is to have them agree to and document the roles/areas of responsibilities that each will fill in their respective functions. Be clear that there are no overlaps.

A visionary function’s five most common roles/responsibilities are typically:

• New ideas/R&D
• Creative problem solving
• Major external relationships
• Culture
• Selling big deals

The Integrator function’s five roles/responsibilities might be:

• Leading, Managing, and holding people Accountable
• Executing the business plan/P&L results
• Integrating major functions
• Resolving cross-functional issues
• Communication across the organization

Next, Same Page Meetings keep visionaries and integrators aligned. They should happen at least monthly and can take 2 to 4 hours or more. The objective should be to ensure agreement and alignment before the meeting is over. I suggest an agenda with these topics:

1. Check in – Personal, Business, and Role Effectiveness assessment and highlights.
2. A.C.T. to raise any issues that need to be addressed. Decide who should own each issue or if you should collectively address any.

– Accountability: Follow up on any action items from past meetings. Share key project milestones and deliverable status that are important to both.

– Coaching: Assess the state of the business. Share the good and not good about the state of the business. Areas to cover include RPM = o Relevance: Do we still have the right business model? o Progress: Are we making the right progress?  o Mood: Is everyone still onboard?

– Transparency: Share both ways – Like: “These are the specific actions that I like that you are doing.” Wish that: “These are the specific actions that I wish you would do differently.” Follow good feedback protocol.

3. Issue Resolution: Prioritize any issues raised above and any that are brought to the meeting by either person. Work all high priority issues to resolution using an appropriate problem-solving approach. Ensure ownership and timeframe for resolving action items.

The 5 Rules are developed by Wickman to keep the relationship between visionaries and integrators on track. They are mostly self-explanatory. You can explore details on pg. 105 of “Rocket Fuel”:

1. Stay on the Same Page
2. No End Runs – always defer roles/responsibilities back to the right function
3. The Integrator Is the Tie Breaker – except in very, very rare circumstances
4. You Are an Employee When Working “in” the Business – no special privileges
5. Maintain Mutual Respect – always

Does your business have people for both visionary and integrator functions? Should it? How do you stay coordinated and aligned between the functions?

Please connect, share, comment, like, and reach out if I can answer any questions or serve in any way.

May you find Passion, Joy, and Freedom in all your pursuits.

What’s the Difference

People with a fixed mindset believe that their intelligence, talent, and abilities are set. They see failure as highlighting their inabilities.

People with a growth mindset believe that they can improve through hard work and effort. They like new challenges and learn from their mistakes.

Research has shown that people with a growth mindset tend to be more successful, happy, and resilient in school, work, and life. Benefits include:

• Increased resilience in the face of challenges. 
• Greater willingness to take risks. 
• Greater satisfaction with life.
• Improved performance.

How do they get these results? People working from a growth mindset are more likely to:

• Be motivated by the mastery and growth they see in themselves and others.
• Seek out and work with people that challenge them in many areas.
• Seek out and challenge themselves to take on new things.
• Believe that they can accomplish anything they set their mind to.
• See mistakes and failures as opportunities to learn and grow.
• Celebrate success to reinforce that goals are achievable.
• Be open to feedback and critique.
• Persist in the face of setbacks.
• Make joy-based decisions that align with their values.

People with a fixed mindset are likely to do the opposite of the above. Fear is the opposite of joy for the last bullet. They see challenges as threatening because failure will show their limits. They need to prove that they’re worthy, even if it means taking shortcuts or avoiding challenges.

Everyone has Limiting Beliefs

I read the book and decided that the evidence suggests I work from the growth mindset Dweck describes. I’m destined to be successful and can move on. Wrong! Even the most enlightened and self-reflective among us have fixed mindset thoughts.

My big breakthrough and what many miss is that, although I normally tend toward a growth mindset, there are times and areas where a fixed mindset sneaks in. For example, I often tell myself I’m not a people person. With this fixed mindset, I shy away from some social situations with the idea that people might not like the introverted me.

Looking at this with a growth mindset reframes the idea to accepting that the more I do it, the better I get and the fear is likely unfounded. Starting with joy and a growth mindset, I can recognize that I have unique experiences and I am inquisitive and listen well to add value to most social interactions.

Sometimes I catch my inner voice sabotaging my growth mindset. There are lots of subtle ways this happens. Be on the lookout. If you hear yourself saying these or related things, you are probably allowing a fixed mindset to creep in:

• I’m not good at that one thing
• I’m an imposter
• I don’t know where to start
• It’s too hard
• I might fail
• I’m not as good as them
• I don’t know where to start
• What if I’m wrong
• There’s not enough time
• I need to know more before I start
• There must be an easier way
• Someone/something else got in the way
• I’ll feel awkward
• I’m too young/too old
• I’m not creative/outgoing/serious enough
• I don’t have a choice
• I’ll never be able to do that
• It’s not worth trying
• I might look silly
• People might not like/accept me

So, stay alert. Know that it can affect you and be prepared to take action. Here’s a process to overcome limiting mindsets:

1. Be aware of what a fixed mindset looks and feels like and be diligent to notice when it impacts decisions and behaviors. Encourage others to help point it out.
2. Identify and acknowledge when any version of fixed mindset or fear grips you. Give it a name. Be specific. This has a dramatic effect on taming the impact and moving forward.
3. Challenge any negative thoughts. Accept that you don’t want to fail, etc, but you don’t NEED to avoid the unwanted outcome. With a growth mindset, you will learn and get better from any setbacks. Review the bullets above about working from a growth mindset. Ask what you would do without fear, working from a growth mindset.
4. Take action in that direction. Focus on the process of learning and improving rather than only the outcome. Accept that you will make mistakes and learn along the way.
5. Notice and celebrate when you meet a goal you set from the resulting bold action. Use successes to reinforce that growth and achievement are possible with the right mindset.

Matt Mochary challenges the CEOs he coaches to shift from a fixed mindset and fear-based decisions by making a bet. He bets that doing the opposite will turn out great. He says he has never lost when he has challenged someone who was deciding while working from these limiting mindsets to do the opposite.

Once you do this a few times, you only need to be reminded of the destructive mindset you are working from to drive better decisions and actions.

Don’t be complacent. Everyone has destructive thoughts that can cause them to operate with a fixed, fear-based mindset. Learn to identify when it happens and shift to a growth mindset to accomplish whatever you want.

Please connect, share, comment, like, and reach out. Message me if I can answer any questions or serve in any way.

May you find Passion, Joy, and Freedom in all your pursuits.

Starting planning with a short-term perspective creates stress and can make it difficult to focus on the big picture. Teams lose motivation and prioritize the wrong actions that don’t work toward your ideal future. So, start long-term to give purpose and meaning to the smaller actions you take.

From a 50 thousand foot view, strategic planning is a repetitive process of setting focus along with defining resulting success by working backward from the long-term to the near-term. Using this process creates confidence about what is the best next action that moves your business toward ultimate success.

StrategyOS breaks this into three timeframes:

1. Positioning elements are ten plus years out set by Vision. They define why the business exists. They give purpose and inspire.
2. Strategy elements are two to five years out set by Themes that describe a picture of how to build the vision. They connect the action of nearer-term plans to the long-term vision.
3. Plans are made annually and at least quarterly to guide what to do next to best move your strategy forward. Rocks are set at least quarterly as the most important next thing to focus on delivering. They can be stand-alone deliverables, or milestones of longer-running Initiatives or Themes.

Start long-term to clearly define your Positioning. Create a focus and describe a result that are aspirational and unbounded:

• Mission: (a focus) Your business’ reason for being. What you are passionate about, can be the best in the world at, and can deliver an economic return.
• Vision: (a result) How your business will be described when you deliver you mission successfully. Describes how customers feel, the benefit they receive, and the impact you have made. “Vision” is a strong motivational phrase of purpose and is sometimes used in place of “Positioning” to describe the long-term outcome.

Once you define the future, make a clear assessment of where you are today. Evaluate your internal capabilities and the business context that can impact your business, including key trends that can accelerate or deter momentum toward success. Be honest about what you can exploit and what you need to overcome to build toward your vision.

Now you know where you are starting and have a clear picture of where you want to go, but it is too hard to follow a 10+ year path to delivering a vision without guardrails. Determining best actions with only a long-term vision, can be difficult to imagine.

So, pick a time in the future that you can describe with some clarity. This starts to put boundaries around how you will travel toward your vision. It can be between 2 and 5 years depending on how fast your business and industry moves. Most teams use 3 years out to create clear, descriptive pictures of envisioned success from a variety of perspectives. Use at least 4 important perspectives:

1. Financial outcomes for stakeholders,
2. Customer Value from your products and services or what problem you solve,
3. Internal Processes needed to create the value (including sales and delivery,) and
4. Unique Capabilities that allow the business to learn and grow. 

The most important of these descriptive statements become Themes (a focus) with descriptive titles. Add understanding by giving descriptive Outcomes (a result) with ways to measure progress for each.

strat·e·gy (n): a course of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim. — Oxford Languages

This creates the Strategy that is your focused course of action organized around trackable Themes. Themes define a waypoint on the way to achieving the long-term Positioning.

At this point, you have done two repetitions of creating focus and describing results: once for a 10+ year timeframe and then once for about a 3-year timeframe. Next, planning prioritizes deliverables that drive action. Planning suggests that you repeat the cycle two more times: for a one-year timeframe and for no more than quarterly iteration time-frame.

Annual planning is a norm in business and allows for a good medium-term focus. A quarter is about as long as a team can stay on task without the need to re-assess progress and understand impact of new learning, so iteration planning should happen at least this often.

In each of these planning cycles, as you did for the first two cycles, prioritize what to deliver (a focus), and how to quantify success (a result). In #StrategyOS, for annual planning we call the focus items Initiatives and the results Targets. For quarterly iteration planning, we call the focus items Rocks and the results Goals.

Starting from the long-term ensures that near-term actions are the most important next steps to work on. Keeping Vision and Themes in mind makes sure delivering iterative results stays aligned and leads to ultimate success.

You can find more detail about delivering your strategy in this newsletter on Transform Phase.

Please connect, share, comment, like, and reach out. Message me on LinkedIn if I can answer any questions or help address a specific need you have.

May you find Passion, Joy, and Freedom in all your pursuits.

The StrategyOS works with these fundamentals by creating a process to execute them as part of your daily work.

This super post overviews and links to detail posts on each practice.

Shared Business Model; Your Vision Cheat Sheet

Be Great at People

Organize around Themes

Keep Score

Refresh Cycle: Quarterly and Annually

Iterative Rocks Build Greatness

Great Leadership Team Meetings

Problem Solve for Success

If you found this helpful, consider a share, like and subscribe below.

Reach out from the about page or on LinkedIn or Twitter if I can answer any questions or help with a specific need.

For more about #StrategyOS, read this overview. Or search the blog for specific topics.

Follow your Passion and create Joy and Freedom in your work to pursue all of life’s priorities.

The military teaches that leadership is about caring for those in your charge. Yes, that’s me on the far left as a new army Lieutenant with my first platoon on a field exercise in Korea. Here are 8 lessons I learned to better care for others on your team:

1. Empathy: Really listen to those on your team to gain understanding of their challenges, needs and experiences. Build inclusion, diversity and collaboration across your team.

2. Encouragement: Inspire and motivate others with joy. Give recognition and credit for achievements to the team. Acknowledge fear, but don’t let it limit you or others.

3. Ownership: Accept that ultimately, failures and mistakes are your responsibility and look for ways to build team capabilities that deliver success.

4. Transparency: Seek feedback while communicating openly about why decisions are made and acting fairly to build trust.

5. Commitment: Always be on time and an available team member when needed. Always work to help the team reach goals even in the face of difficultly and setbacks.

6: Coaching: Provide opportunities for growth and development and help grow team members, both professionally and personally.

7. Support: Provide resources needed for success including people, budget, tools, and training.

8. Health and wellness: Encourage and support team members’ physical and mental well-being. Set an example through your own actions and team policies.

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