John Stroup was not taking over a company in trouble when he was named president and CEO at Belden Inc. in late 2005. The electronic cable designer and manufacturer provides cables for a variety of industries and was doing a good job, with revenue hitting the $1 billion mark in 2005, up more than $350 million from the year before.
But Stroup saw a flaw that he believed needed to be addressed.
“The thing that has been my greatest challenge at Belden and continues to be my greatest challenge is really creating consistent alignment within the organization and being able to execute on what we believe to be important on a daily basis,” Stroup says.
What separates the average companies from the great ones is often the discipline and focus they give to the things they do best. Each fall, Stroup noticed that employees just don’t seem to have the same focus on company priorities that they had in January and February.
“Other things creep in that people want to work on,” Stroup says. “People are well-intended and it’s not like these ideas are bad ideas. But in any organization, and most notably a company, it’s not so important to determine what you’re going to work on. Often it’s more important to figure out what you’re not going to work on, because you just don’t have endless resources.”
Stroup wanted to find a way to keep his 7,500 employees focused on the things that mattered most to the success of Belden.
The answer was to start using hoshin planning, which is a systematic planning methodology that was developed in Japan.
“It allows a company to literally on one piece of paper be able to identify the key breakthrough priorities that are important to us,” Stroup says.
All he needed to do now was determine which key priorities would make it onto that paper, develop a plan to achieve those goals and do it in a way that Belden’s employees would support.