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To resolve the tension between operational proximity and strategic distance, entrepreneurs have various options, such as enriching the team, creating strategic committees, and seeking external expertise. Action-learning sessions with your peers can also help broaden your perspectives and prioritize actions. The article proposes a structured approach analyzing your company’s history, value proposition, value architecture, financial equation, as well as shared values, management, and governance. This diagnostic framework helps identify the main challenges of your company and leadership issues, contributing to the formulation of a robust development plan
E. Krieger
An enterprise is a complex organization in perpetual motion. Through constant involvement in operational aspects, its leaders often find themselves deeply immersed in day-to-day tasks. However, it is their responsibility to “think about change rather than just changing the bandage” to paraphrase the aphorism of Francis Blanche.
Proximity to operational challenges fosters incremental innovation. However, to reinvent its business model, taking a step back is essential. Several options address this paradoxical need for both proximity and distance, starting with enhancing the existing team through new associates or employees, emphasizing diversity in backgrounds and cultures.
The creation and management of a board of directors, a strategic committee, or even a scientific council also contribute to gaining perspective. Engaging various experts in ideation, qualitative and quantitative studies serves the same purpose.
Gaining perspective through peer exchange
Finally, action-learning sessions also offer significant benefits. Entrepreneurs enrich themselves with the experience of their peers, complementing the teacher’s expertise. The teacher often plays the role of a catalyst for strategic discussions among leaders who share similar challenges: talent recruitment and mobilization, impact, digitalization, innovation, and growth financing.
The following discussion framework is by no means exhaustive, but it summarizes the themes addressed during these diagnostic sessions and the resulting decisions. Similar to a photographer revealing your personality through a particularly expressive snapshot, an experienced teacher contributes to revealing situations and aspirations that allow you to diagnose and deduce priority areas.
1] History, needs, and target markets: The way you narrate the genesis and development of your company sheds light on the motivations and values of the leaders. Describing the addressed needs and characteristics of the target market helps understand the company’s raison d’être, its ability to address needs not well satisfied by existing offers. This preamble is essential for understanding the characteristics of the market addressed by your company.
From value proposition to shared values
2] Value proposition and ecosystem: Who are the main stakeholders in your company? Describe your customers (those who pay) and consumers who may not necessarily be payers. Also, describe other stakeholders interested in your activity: suppliers, influencers, administrations, etc. Explain how they interact with your company. What is your value proposition in summary? Can you qualify and quantify it?
3] Value architecture: Focus on the business model and key processes. Your analysis will first cover the primary process, centered on understanding customer expectations, their ‘recruitment,’ product and service development, production, and customer follow-up. You will then analyze support processes: knowledge management (market research, technological and competitive intelligence), accounting and finance, information system, supplier relationships, legal, tax, and regulatory affairs. Finally, analyze management processes: strategy determination, quality organization, management control, communication, and human resources management.
4] Value equation: This involves analyzing the economic and financial data of your company. Such a performance analysis goes beyond balance sheets and income statements, but social accounts provide an initial indication of your financial leeway. If your company has multiple activities, it is useful to return, for each of them, to an average order multiplied by the number of invoices and see how direct costs are decomposed and evolve. This section can be complemented by impact measurement indicators.
5] Shared values, management, and governance: A company is primarily a human community led by leaders who derive their legitimacy from their ability to define objectives and provide their teams with the means to achieve them. How are decisions made within your company? What is your role as a leader? What are the main delegations? What is your vision? What are the main values of your company? What are the rituals and events that embody them?
Key challenges for your company and for yourselves
When such a diagnosis is carefully conducted, it leads to the identification of major issues for your company. These may relate to your market, your offering, your organization, cost structure, governance, or other priority issues.
This analysis should also highlight your major challenges as a leader. It could be an opportunity to describe both what you particularly excel at and what you enjoy doing. This work will allow you to specify priority projects in the short and medium term.
Knowing where you come from, where you stand, and where you can and want to go: like politics, management is the art of the possible… and imagination and ambition are the fuel and engine of entrepreneurs. However, the strategic questioning that leads to the formulation of a development plan committing the company to a horizon of several years will require additional analyses and choices.
Again, this process can be illuminated by mechanisms where third parties serve as catalysts for a strategic reflection essentially aimed at holding up a mirror to your life choices.
