SwampFox

Mapping Strategic Positives And Negatives To Achieve Better Outcomes

Leading a small business, nonprofit organization, industry association, or large corporation is becoming increasingly complex for owners, executive directors, and CEOs. Home runs, strikeouts, and land mines abound.

If strategy is not well communicated from the outset, your execution and ROI/ROE are prone to inefficiency, scope creep, even failure. Proactive solutions must be calibrated in advance for internal and external dissemination quickly.

A distilled diagram of cascading opportunities and pitfalls serves as a map (or dashboard) to best view goals and problems as a group. This process also assigns clear priority into containable lanes according to severity.

BOTTOM LINE: Poorly led, operationally flawed organizations are declining and crashing. Expertly led, well-executed organizations are prospering and soaring. It’s called turnaround management, whereby positive patterns and outcomes are duplicated and negative patterns and outcomes are eliminated, relentlessly.

The linear and hemispherical model included (please e-mail us, SwampFox is unable to post this graphic) is fast, easy, and communicable (SEE GRAPH). This circular spoke n’ hub graph also allows custom POSITIVE + NEGATIVE polarities to intersect for better collaboration and policy alignment according to financial severity.

The value of this model is its simplicity and efficacy. Each dash represents an escalating positive or negative for accurately targeting organizational gains and confronting losses. Some POSITIVE + NEGATIVE issues may extend “off the chart” as articulated by the quick case study/link below. This graph (D?) is also expandable infinitely.

In my 20-year experience, poorly performing organizations, business models, and administrations are still sweeping three fundamental atrophies under the rug:

A) LACK OF EXECUTABLE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE – Poor organizational strategy,

B) LACK OF HONEST, GRANULAR ANALYSIS – Poor data and metric auditing, and

C) LACK OF IMPROVED POLICY ADHERENCE – Poor behavior.

What is both exciting and uncomfortable is facing the positives AND the negatives lurking within your organization fairly, squarely, and simultaneously. This process requires fresh brains, transparency, and policies.

Here are 5 core POSITIVE + NEGATIVE polarities that any struggling organization can employ to build consensus:

1) STRATEGY IMPLEMENTATION (X): Leadership either has proactive strategies in place that are prospering your organization –– or your business model is shackled by tired, outdated strategies yielding unfavorable outcomes.

2) INNOVATION IMPLEMENTATION (Y): Leadership either has your team proactively researching and implementing sustainable innovation –– or your organization is reacting to diminishing ingenuity.

Here’s where this graphing process becomes more interesting –– customized intersections:

3) PRESENTATION IMPROVEMENT (A): Leadership either engages stellar public relations, marketing, attire, events, media, websites, and related technologies that result in innovative organizational presentations –– or your C-suite tolerates lackluster, half-hearted presentations.

4) FISCAL IMPROVEMENT (B): Leadership, especially your CFO and supply chain managers, are either proactively ratcheting granular fiscal best practices –– or they allow pinholes to exist in the hull of your ship.

5) BEHAVIOR IMPROVEMENT (C): Leadership and your entire staff either exude patterns of polished behavior that add fiscal value to your workplace, community, and industry brands –– or they are misbehaving liberally.

Millions of small businesses, nonprofits, industry associations, and large companies produce wonderful products and services publicly, yet still operate poorly and negatively in private.

Quick Case Study:

Wild American shrimpers throughout the southeast and Gulf Coast are the nicest, hardest working, salt-of-the-earth people. Their local catch every afternoon is a delicacy akin to hours-old Caribbean lobster, fresh California abalone, or draft Guinness in Ireland.

However, these commercial fishermen face the Herculean task of coming face-to-face with generations of organizational (family business) negatives once back on dry land.

Competition from modern man-made shrimp farms is high because these importers run tighter operations, employ well-educated professionals on their front lines, and maintain granular data down to each prawn.

Our firm helped one local shrimper turn around and innovate their recipe value as a pro bono community project by utilizing the POSITIVES + NEGATIVES mapping framework above: http://www.moultrienews.com/news/-15CHRISSHRIMP-

Local shrimpers hardly run their businesses via modern, generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). They barter “off the books” and give away half their catch to “country cousins” after a few drinks on the dock. Wives spend cash like wildfire living Vegas lifestyles, yet do zero work. Inebriated sons crash and sink the family vessel –– without any commercial boat insurance.

The fiscal implications are obvious. Imported shrimp farms are prospering wildly because they have improved many organizational positives and eliminated many negatives. Local shrimpers, even though they have a superior product, refuse to transform their business practices ("Well, that's just the way we've always done things 'round here"). Hence many are going the way of the dodo bird.

TAKEAWAYS: It can be uncomfortable for both organizational leaders and family business owners to confront the granular truths inside their companies, especially struggling southeastern business models in the $1MM to $15MM space.

The best organizations achieve better outcomes than their competitors (in less time) because they have excellent accounting, legal, innovation, and strategy counsel in place to map out and manage their escalating positives and negatives, simultaneously.

What will a POSITIVES + NEGATIVES analysis honestly reveal about your organization going forward?

Baron C. Hanson is the principal and lead consultant of RedBaron Consulting, based in Charleston, S.C., and Washington D.C. Follow the firm on Twitter at @redbaronUSA.