Quick question for a CEO - what is your company's identity?

As a CEO, here is a quick question for you.
What is your firm's identity?
Is it about the core capabilities. Is it about what you actually achieve - like West Jet that serves its employees first and then its customers. Looking after the social capital in the company will yield results.
It is about your passion.
One of my client firms is an engineering business with awkward geeks selling high level skills.
What was interesting is that they know they are sophisticated engineers passionate about using other people's technologies in new ways to create dazzling machine parts.
Even though their website did not give their capabilities a fair shake, their advisory board could all articulate within seconds the company's purpose.
Passion wins through but passion must be articulated and described.
Funny how once that is done, the strategy unfolds within each division.

Great leaders create value - both economic AND social

The point of human resources is to boost the energy levels in the organization.
Building up the employee enthusiasm while also directing their daily work in a similar enough direction is enormously challenging.
Even with Wikis or other wonderful technology, doing strategy with the top 300 people still is the more laborious but absolutely essential method.
Humans need the face time with their leadership and strategy done together is far more powerful.
It seems like busy work. Many believe their time would be better spent on a golf course.
But it is amazing how getting 3 objectives for the year does focus the company. The  Chinese leadership in government use a five year strategy and they have achieved more economic value than any other economy in the history of mankind over these past 30 years.

Follow up rigouros strategy sessions with free flowing, fun activities where people can talk quietly in small groups. The strategy will be more likely to take rot and grow.

MIX STRATEGY & GOLF

Keep focused on the "why" of your pitch

The goal of an elevator pitch isn't to close the deal.

The point of the 2 minute pitch isn't even to give a short, accurate, Wikipedia-standard description of you or your project.

Using jargon words to craft a mission statement that is safe and could be applied to similar businesses misses the mark.

No, the purpose of an elevator pitch is to describe a situation or solution so compelling that the person you're with wants to hear more even after the elevator has stopped and the doors are opening.

There be Monsters - the story of family business succession planning

Lawyers for family businesses are often accused of not speaking frankly to their clients about the need for business succession. At the Globe and Mail Business Summit, I chaired a panel on business succession where the panel spoke about the lawyers not being informed enough or preserving their business rather than helping the owner begin to think about transition.
The real secret is that not even the owner's wife or sons or daughters will broach the subject of succession first.
Why?
If you ask that question, you have not raised the issue with a business owner.
You will observe first a slight red flush and then it could rise up into a more heated discussion and maybe a full scale rage.
Everyone else will be looking down at their papers, especially the family members. No one will come to the rescue. This owner has such a level of power over their financial well-being and future. For a lawyer, why go there and risk being fired?
There be monsters.
That is also the sad story why family businesses do not grow beyond the owner. We will leave that topic to another day.

This model is a key tool used by Private Equity

Strategy sounds hard but it is actually wonderful and business teams are always motivated once they have taken the time to hold a discussion.
Don't be put off by the complex diagram. we are going to look at this one box at a time.
This model is a key tool used by Private Equity to see the attractiveness of a business. Hotels and Airlines are under far more pressure than say a chain link manufacturing company. That will impact on the value given to the business.
If you are a business owner, if you can show you know how to deal with each of the forces affecting your business, you will get a much higher price for your business and be able to persuade private equity to accept a higher mulitple.

If the forces are intense, as they are in such industries as airlines, textiles, and hotels, almost no company earns attractive returns on investment. If the forces are benign, as they are in industries such as software, soft drinks, and toiletries, many companies are profitable. Industry structure drives competition and profitability, not whether an industry produces a product or service, is emerging or mature, high tech or low tech, regulated or unregulated. While a myriad of factors can affect industry profitability in the short run—including the weather and the business cycle—industry structure, manifested in the competitive forces, sets industry profitability in the medium and long run.