Compass

This framework is based on an article from the Harvard Business Review, December 2011 (link) titles “The Power of Collective Ambition,” by Douglas Ready and Emily Truelove. It profiles, among others, the Four Season’s Hotel chain, who survived the latest recession remarkably well. The authors argue that these companies found a sense of purpose based on collective ambition, spelling out a number of elements that they see as critical to success:

• Purpose: your companies reason for being. 
• Vision: the position or status your company aspires to achieve within a reasonable time frame.
• Targets and milestones: the metrics you use to assess progress toward your vision.
• Strategic and operational priorities: the actions you do or do not take in pursuit of your vision.
• Brand promise: the commitments you make to stakeholders concerning the experience the company will provide.
• Core values: the guiding principles that dictate what you stand for as an organization, in good times and bad.
• Leader behaviors: how leaders act on a daily basis as they seek to implement the company’s vision.  Not revolutionary new stuff, but I find the visual to be a nice way to document all these key things. Brand promise ranks highly, and not surprisingly, the companies portrayed in the article include Four Seasons Hotels, Sephora, HSBC and Danone. For B2B companies, this element is probably somewhat less important, although it should not be ignored altogether. One other important element that the article talks about is the concept of “glue and grease:” Shaping a collective ambition is not only about a nice visual. Companies should undertake efforts to engage as many people as possible (the glue), but also launch initiatives focused on disciplined execution (the grease).