Core Ideology and Envisioned Future

When the signals are faint and yet gut feeling points towards a certain direction ... trust your instinct and take a step back and think.Take an instance of an assignment of reviewing the strategic planning process of a specific business model. When it becomes apparent that there are significant misalignments and there is no coherent theme, red flag should immediately be raised.

When collaborative evidence abounds e.g.
- business model persistently pursues new built with little or no ownership of the tasks,
- presentation provides mere palliatives, highlights of hardware without a golden thread that ties in all components into a whole,
- probable outcome a somewhat disjointed expose of brick-and mortar issues, customers are made to decide ( at their own costs ) based on information that can be best described as incomplete,

it is time to take remedial action, and to do it fast.

The first task is to enquire - what ails the system?

At this stage, strategic planning is of limited use until we tackle the higher order of the problem. We need to re-look its core ideology ( or the lack of it ). Core ideology covers a purpose and a set of core values. Only when this is well underpinned would it be possible to articulate an envisioned future which will stimulate progress. This should incorporate a long-term Big Hairy Audacious Goal ( BHAG ). Once this has been successfully transplanted, the tasks of ensuring continuity of management, purposeful evolution etc become feasible.

Keywords: quality, value systems, trust, domain knowledge, technology, networking, maven traps, speed of trust, lifestyle

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