We All Have A History

'We All Have A History' by Richard Shrapnel

We All Have A History.

We have all come from somewhere and have each experienced different things in our lives that have made us, for better and worse, who we are today. Each of us are great at some things and not particularly good at others. No one person is the same as the next.

We seem to recognise that we don’t necessarily know everything about ourselves, or what impact past events may have had on our lives. We often invest time and dollars in discovering some of these strengths and limitations.

But do we realise that our businesses are no different?

Our businesses all have a history. They have all come from somewhere and have experienced different things. Some good things and likely some bad things. And, if they have been around for a while, they will have also had many different leaders (like parents). And if you had ten different parents in your life, each of whom wanted to make their mark on you, well you could be a bit messed up.

I think of businesses as people, who have personalities and traits that have been formed and developed since they were first created. You can call it ‘culture’ if you prefer, but it reflects who they are and how they act.

And if we don’t understand and recognise what that history is and its impact, then our ability to be an effective leader is severely hampered.

Who Is Your Business?

Let me share with you a real life case example. There was a business that had a very autocratic CEO of many years tenure. It was to the extent where the senior management team wouldn’t walk down the corridor without asking permission. While I assume that is an exaggeration, it is a direct quote from one of the company’s team members. Roll forward to recent events and the said CEO has suffered a significant medical event, can no longer continue, and the board has appointed a new CEO. The new arrival’s opening address had a clear message: that they are going to transform the business to a dynamic innovative enterprise. It’s going to be an interesting exercise given the business, and everyone in it, has been taught to be the exact opposite for most of its life.

If we jump back to our human analogy – ‘I am who I am and I’m not sure how successful you are going to be in fundamentally changing that’ – I believe the same statement is often true for our businesses. No matter what level of change management intervention we may apply, there are some things that may not be able to be changed.

Again, to be an effective leader, you really need to intimately understand ‘who’ your business is and what impact past events may have had on it.

“Understanding and appreciating the history of a business is the starting point to building an effective strategy and is a critical part of developing that strategy. Don’t think of it as looking backwards or unearthing the past, rather think of it as understanding how your history has influenced who the business is today and therefore how it may step forward into the future.” – an extract from Strategy Play – Crafting Undefeatable Business Strategies.

Who your business is can be impacted by a diversity of events and unearthing them will not necessarily be as simple as conducting a survey.

As individuals, we all have unique world views, belief systems, values, cultural and family upbringings, and general life experiences that have made us who we are. Often we do not even recognise, or are willing to admit, what these elements are and how they may influence or impact who we are, how we act and react, and what we are capable of achieving.

When you think of delving into ‘who’ your business is, this is the complexity that you are potentially seeking to unearth and understand. I look at this issue from the perspective of a business strategist, in that I am seeking to understand how this ‘history’ may or will impact that business’s ability to compete effectively and deliver the competitive strategy that is being developed.

Keep in mind also that your business is moulded into who it is by the systems, processes, reward structures and other operating traits that have existed in your business over the years. If you want to delve into this a bit further then read one of my earlier posts on the subject, Crafting The Perfect Design For Your Business.

Discovery

Discovery starts with recognition and asking questions. It is a process that can be likened to peeling an onion. As you unearth each aspect and understand it, you will find another layer beneath. It, therefore, becomes important that these discoveries be saved into corporate memory so the learnings are not forgotten.

To provide a sampling of what this journey of discovery can be, allow me to set the following scene and provide a simple exercise that will crystallise it very quickly.

Imagine you have pulled your senior management team together for a two-hour workshop, and if you want to make it interesting, include your board members. There are three tasks that they need to undertake individually, one at a time and after each of which everyone will come back together to share their work. They are to:

  1. List the events that you believe to have been significant in the life of your business and describe the effect that you believe they have had on it – include the date, event and possible impact.
  2. Draw an image that reflects who your business is today. You may choose to draw a picture of a person or some other object which you feel reflects how you see your business (including the good and the not-so-good). Try to draw something that is rich in character traits using colour and, if easier, words. But it must be a drawing no matter how poor you feel your drawing skills are!
  3. If your business was a person, how would you describe them? List their most prominent and obvious traits, good and bad. You can look at the image that you have drawn and list out the traits it reflects.

I won’t try to fully unpack in this article the learnings that can be gleaned from this simple exercise but a few brief comments that will assist:

  1. Events: In answering this question, you are looking for events that have shaped the business that exists today. These may either be positive or negative but it is clear that their impact does influence how the business acts today and therefore may act in the future.
  2. Image: Drawing the image forces people to access another part of their brain. The response you receive will be quite different to if you or your team simply wrote down a few words. Images are also powerful as they subconsciously influence how we act. You should look carefully as to what the image says and doesn’t say.
  3. Describe: Look at the traits that are being attributed to your business and ask yourself: what do they say about the type of business you are?

Additionally, this exercise is very telling on how you function as a team, including the board members. How well do you really know your business and do you all see it in the same way?

The above exercise was extracted from my book Strategy Play – Crafting Undefeatable Business Strategies.

Assessing Impact

To assess the impact, you must compare who you are discovering your business is today against what it needs to be tomorrow.

Let’s assume that you have just reviewed and revised your competitive strategy, or what I term as your ‘competitive posture’, that is, how you intend to out-compete everyone else in your chosen marketplace.

In developing that competitive posture, you hopefully have asked yourself the following questions:

  • Who do we need to be as a business to deliver on this competitive posture?
  • How will we need to work?
  • What attributes will need to be strong?
  • What capabilities do we need to enhance?

The gap between who you are today and who you need to be tomorrow will reflect the challenge you will have in delivering your intended competitive strategy, and the areas in which you must focus your growth efforts.

As a leader, you must be continually seeking to understand more deeply ‘who’ the business that you are leading is, and how its capabilities may be grown and its core strengths lifted to the surface.

The quintessential role of your business strategy is to craft a business that is capable of delivering on any strategy. At this point, you are commencing the journey of becoming formless.

 


Active Knowledge Questions:

  1. Do you intimately understand who your business is and how to ensure it competes to its greatest capability?
  2. Do you have a growth plan to increase that capability?

 


 

Act Now:

How undefeatable is your business strategy? Consider Strategy Play – Crafting Undefeatable Business Strategies.

Need to lift the leadership performance in your business? Learn how in C88 – Leadership Performance Guide and Journal.

Want to become part of the Entrepreneurs+ community? Sign up for my eNewsletter, and join the conversation by sending me a question via Ask Richard.

 

 

All the best in the success of your business,

Richard Shrapnel