What you have

The productive capacity of every individual and every organisation consist of three elements. Intent, Energy, and Intelligence.

The mix of these elements is what determines the quality of our products, our competitive advantage, and our ability to service our customers.

Intent is the desired reality the organisation aims to achieve. What difference do we want to make? How do we want to influence our customers? How do we want to inspire our customers to be their best? This is your strategy. This creates a vision and unlocks energy. The leader defines Intent and focusses all the energy of the organisation in this direction.

Energy is all the resources of the organisation. Capital, assets, networks, time, goodwill, etc. Energy is spent on activities we believe will bring us closer to our intent. Our desired reality. This is a limited resource. It includes an opportunity cost. All the more reason to ensure our Intent is accurate.

Intelligence is the collective intelligence of all our employees and our organisational processes. How well are we using the capacity of our employees. We are spending Energy (salaries) on acquiring access to their intelligence. Are we using it effectively and efficiently? We also want an ROI on all this Intelligence spend. The best way to ensure this happens is to transfer Intelligence of people into the intelligence of a process.

If all your people leave, how much is your business worth? That is the value of organisational Intelligence.

What are you doing with what you have? Most importantly, how does your customer benefit?

Originally posted here.

Two fundemental questions

Are we going as far as we possibly can with the fuel we are using?

Are we headed in the right direction?

The first is a question of efficiency. Input vs output. ROI, cost versus benefit, etc. This is easy to measure but difficult to achieve. Every system, collection of processes, or organism experiences this. The inherent friction caused by the moving parts. This friction should be as low as possible.

Your business is somewhere between a rusted motor with no oil, and perpetual motion. This could make business very painful, draining experience. It forces you to spend your limited energy on creating momentum that impedes your future performance.

The second is a question of effectiveness. Are you delivering on your purpose? This is challenging to define, and hard to determine. How much of your output is used to get you down the road you want to be traveling?

Even autopilots in commercial aircraft are never on course. The system makes constant corrections for the duration of the journey. If you are not intentionally doing this with your strategy chances are you are not heading in the right direction. All your energy is spent, very efficiently, taking you in the wrong direction.

The trick is you can never answer the one without considering the other. They are two sides of the same coin. Co-essentials.

Successful strategy secures efficiency, successful management secures efficiency. Both secure sustainability.

Originally posted here.