Build a strategic plan
In building a strategic plan that would best meet the needs of customers, Alvin looked where a lot of business leaders have looked — to Jim Collins’ often-referenced business bible, “Good to Great.’
But the part Alvin references has nothing to do with buses or getting people to board them.
“In ‘Good to Great,’ they did research on companies that had superb performance over a 15-year period,” he says. “They analyzed these companies and determined certain common attributes of companies with high levels of performance. One of the common attributes was something called a unifying concept. It’s a simple concept that defines the company.”
To have a unifying concept as defined by Collins’ book, your company needs to be able to answer three questions: What are you deeply passionate about, what do you think you can do better than anybody else in the world, and what drives your economic engine?
“Companies that can focus on answering those questions would derive a unifying concept that everyone in the company can understand and embrace,” Alvin says. “That unifying concept serves as the heart of your strategic plan.”
Strategic plans are formed, in part, from the softer skills of drawing information from customer relationships, fueling passion for the work you do and maintaining an environment of continuous improvement throughout your company. But strategic plans are also rooted in hard data. You can’t really know if you’re meeting customer needs if you don’t have the numbers to back it up.
Above all, you should never trust your gut, even if you have years of experience to draw upon.
“You have to prove to yourself that the direction you are moving in makes sense, and you can’t do that without quantitative analysis,” Alvin says. “You are unable to ensure that you’re moving into a direction that you need to move in. There is an art and a science to running a business and leading a business, and measuring is part of the science of it. You have to have both the art, which is about culture and creating an environment where people can flourish, and science. The science is how you make sure that you’re moving in the right direction.”
Alvin facilitates a dual focus on both short-term and long-term goals at HAP. He wants his staff’s measurable projects to extend three years into the future, with longer-term projection for 2014 and beyond, when health care reform will start to take root.
“You have to do an analysis of the marketplace to project out what the marketplace is looking for now and what it will be looking for in the longer term,” he says. “We have a definition of our assessment of the environment as it will become reality in 2014, and our strategies therefore are based on longer-term assessments of the environment and developing unifying strategies that will serve the customer over that period of time.”