Alternatively, there is a way to get at your core values that’s fun and amazingly fast. It’s an approach first suggested by Jim Collins. Using the method I’m about to describe, companies can get a good first draft of their core values in 30-minutes and a finished document in a couple hours. Jim Collins refers to the process as the Mission to Mars.

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

Measures for Everyone Once the Moneyball stats and Critical Number are decided, every person or team should have one or two daily or weekly measures that align with these numbers. The key is alignment or

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.

Almost Matrix: This chart shows the relationships between organizational functions and the business units that form as the organization grows. These units begin to feel and act like separate businesses within the business. They can be organized around product lines, customer niches, geographical locations, or business units acting as wholly owned

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

priorities and choose the one on each side that needs the most attention at that moment. Be sure to specify whether the left-side driver is get, keep, or grow, and whether the right-side driver is better, faster, or cheaper. As an example, this quarter the top priority might be “increase by 25 percent (grow) the business we’re doing with our top

As part of that process, you might even ask your employees to audit the firm as to its alignment (or nonalignment) with a particular core value. Such an effort does far more than reinforce the core value—it can produce some very healthy and needed dialogue. That’s the sort of thing that keeps core values from being just a list on the wall.

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