Will You Deliver Outstanding Results in 2023? Here's a Difference Maker.

Develop Clear Strategic Options with the Future Press Release

The Digital Leader Newsletter — Strategies and Techniques for Change Agents, Strategists, and Innovators.

"Winning should be at the heart of every strategy." — A.G. Lafley & Roger L. Martin.

Is 2023 going to be an excellent year for your business and team? For your career? A year of growth, improved customer satisfaction, and innovation? OR... a year of just hanging on? In this current business environment, it’s completely understandable to have a plan to “just hang on.” It’s okay.

BUT… if you don’t have the luxury of “just hanging on”; if you are inspired to “do more with less”; if you have to define and lead growth, innovation, and improved business results while simultaneously cutting expenses and perhaps headcount, then you need to develop strategic options.

This week, The Digital Leader Newsletter has a difference maker for developing strategy and delivering outstanding results in 2023.

The Problem with Strategy? — There is no actual “strategy.”

Most “strategy” functions are actually “planning” functions orchestrating essential topics such as

• Financial plans, headcount plans, and budgeting;

• Account, product, service, or capability program definitions;

• Organizational goals & OKRs.

There might be occasional conversations of competitive threats or “horizon two innovation.” But everything boils down to “a plan for next year.”

This is the typical strategy and planning function in most businesses and teams. While these are important topics and approaches, one thing is missing ==> strategy selected from strategic options and choices made from these options. We don’t ask questions leading us to strategic options. Questions like

• How will we create value and serve customers in new and more efficient manners?

• What are the different scenarios for doing this?

• Which scenarios and options do we say “YES” to, and which ones do we deliberately say “NO” to?

THIS is strategy.

Most businesses do not develop strategic options as part of their annual strategy, planning, and goal-setting. The default assumption is that we continue to do more of what we currently do.

If you need a growth & innovation strategy, a digital transformation strategy, or a turn-around plan, you first need clear strategic options. Here’s a difference maker in building your strategic options —>start with outcomes.

Start With Outcomes

The difference maker in strategic choice is creating a crystal clear definition of potential future scenarios & capabilities.

Typically only a vague sketch of the idea or future point is developed. Critical considerations such as innovating the value proposition, changing the channel or distribution options, and considering the broad customer experience instead of the narrow part of the customer experience your product or service impacts today.

What if you could imagine the future and better visualize and understand how your strategic option might work before committing to the strategy? It’s an exercise in strategic thinking and clarity called the future press release.

To complement your existing strategy and annual planning processes, add this “think big” exercise. Spend some time outlining “non-linear” or non-obvious potentials. Describe all of your options using a future press release, and then debate them as a team. This relatively lightweight addition to your strategy and planning process gets people thinking beyond the obvious, and the creativity and non-obvious ideas & risks are uncovered. This adds STRATEGY back to “strategy and planning.”

THEN, you can create plans and goals attached to these strategic options. You now have “strategy and planning.”

IMAGINE THE FUTURE

Amazon’s “working backward” process requires teams to create a future press release before starting a new product, undergoing any transformation, entering a new market, or as part of Amazon’s annual strategy and planning process called OP1.

The process of creating a simple but specific product or service announcement creates a clear strategic option. This acts as a forcing function to examine critical features, adoption, and the likely options path to success. Committing to a press release, speculative though it may be, also helps leadership clearly express to important stakeholders the roadmap to success.

Join Our Workshop

Are you interested in learning this difference maker, modeled from the “working backwards” approach at Amazon? Join me for a live workshop on The Amazon Way on January 20th! In this workshop, you'll learn how to get develop a strategy option portfolio by leveraging the principles and strategies from Amazon’s leadership and the working backwards approach. Don't miss this opportunity to learn from the best and take your business to the next level!

THE RULES FOR THE FUTURE PRESS RELEASE

The future press release creates energy, captures ideas, and forces choices. It defines clear and lofty goals, requirements, and objectives and builds a broad understanding from the start of a program or enterprise change. Writing future press releases always take iterations, and I often write different versions highlighting options and subtle differences between choices.

Here are the “rules” for the future press release to help in your use:

Rule 1. The goal must be stated at a future point where success has been achieved and realized. Press releases discussing the launch are good, but a better one is sometime after the launch, where true success can be discussed.

Rule 2. Start with the customer. Use the press release to explain why the product is essential to customers (or other key stakeholders). How did the customers’ experience improve? Why do the customers care? What delights customers about this new service? Then discuss other reasons it was important and critical goals. These customer examples and value propositions must communicate the differentiated customer experience or super-power. What’s the critical differentiating capability we are giving a customer? Why will customers choose this solution?

Rule 3. Set an audacious and clear goal. Articulate precise, measurable results you’ve achieved, including financial, operating, and market share results.

Rule 4. Outline the principles used that led to success. This is the trickiest and most crucial aspect of the future press release. Identify the hard things accomplished, the critical decisions, and the design principles that resulted in success. Discuss the issues that need to be addressed to achieve success. Getting the “tricky” issues on the table early on helps everyone understand the fundamental nature of the change needed. Don’t worry about how to solve these issues yet. You’ve still got time to figure that out.

THE FORCING FUNCTION

Here is an example of a future press release. Notice how the lead paragraph clearly states the objective. In this case, “Consumer Reports gave Acme Co. its ‘Most Admired Home Appliance Brand’ award.” Once the aspirational goal and time limit are set, the future press release clarifies why the award was presented and illustrates how Acme Co. started by asking a different set of questions and being willing to build and collaborate within an ecosystem of partners, including traditional competitors. It concludes with a series of specific milestones that the organization can use as a road map from here to there.

Back to 2023 and Your Digital Transformation

Companies and teams must stop suffering from poor returns on their digital transformation strategies. To do so, the critical “first steps” are to define a “what if” portfolio of scenarios giving crisp definition to what “transformation” might really be. The future press release technique is one way of articulating these “what if” scenarios.

I hope you have a peaceful holiday season!

Onward.

John

About The Digital Leader Newsletter

This is a newsletter for change agents, strategists, and innovators.  The Digital Leader Newsletter is a weekly coaching session focusing on customer-centricity, innovation, and strategy. We deliver practical theory, examples, tools, and techniques to help you build better strategies, better plans, and better solutions — but most of all, to think and communicate better.

John Rossman is a keynote speaker and advisor on leadership and innovation.

Learn more at https://johnrossman.com