French CEO Hubert Joly, who turned around Best Buy, notes in his book The Heart of Business (I named it #1 in 2021) that you don’t have a strategy unless you’ve named it!

out of the ground) or refineries (over 1,000 popped up overnight), but oak barrels for capturing the oil, and very specifically, the iron rings that hold the oak slats together. So, one of his first acquisitions was a key firm that made the all-important iron rings. Later, when it became clear that transportation costs were the biggest threat to pr

Now that you’ve put a stake in the ground by determining your measurable brand promise, what are you going to do to lock it up, to hold that position? How will you build a mote around your business making it difficult for competitors to compete? You start by looking for the bottlenecks or chokepoints in your industry—there’s always one or two—and f

Bear in mind: your brand promise shouldn’t be easily accomplished. It ought to cause some stress in your organization to achieve.

NOTE: For more on the importance of having and communicating a measurable brand promise, in order to drive valuation, please read the 2024 HBR article “The Right Way to Build Your Brand.”

Start by taking four minutes to watch Clay Christensen’s “Job of a Milkshake” video. Christensen popularized the key strategy question “what is the job to be done by your product or service?”

alive and make them personal. It’s also useful to display last year’s results on the graph along with a projected or budgeted target line.

Highly Visible Make your measurements visible. Like the huge scoreboards at sporting events, your company-wide measurements—preferably in some graphical form—should be on large charts or television screens placed where the individual, team, or company can see the results. And I strongly suggest that every office employee have some kind of whiteboar

what Jack Stack, author of the Great Game of Business, calls “line of sight.” Can every employee see how what they’re doing impacts the entire firm? One organization chose improving their customer service rating as a Critical Number to focus on for one quarter. Based on this, every employee or team figured out something they could do better to impr