Page 67 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Developing a Strategy 57

Step 2. Set strategic goals
After such preliminaries, talk to your team about what success for the strat-
egy making overall might look like—how to imagine what a great result
would be. To get more concrete, think next about some specific goals and
how the strategy will help move your organization toward whatever kind
of future vision might be in place (see the box “Check in on your vision”).
Because lean-style strategy making involves iterative learning and
evolution of thinking, different strategic choices will likely emerge through
your process, but whatever the path forward, the final measures of success
(what you’re ultimately aiming to achieve) will likely stay pretty constant.
Choose measures that clearly signify value and impact consistent with
your team’s vision and the broader vision of your company. The goals you
choose should resonate with your key stakeholders, too.
In the PBS KIDS case, Kerger and the strategy team agreed early on
that the programming for the potential new channel would have to reach
a particular audience size, measured by a threshold of member affiliates
that would agree to carry the service; and they placed special emphasis on
reaching more lower-income households. They also understood that the
channel and its programming would have to be in line with the PBS mis-
sion of educational improvement of the nation and the network’s corpo-
rate strategy of building and distributing quality content, ensuring strong
member stations, and promoting innovation.
Different businesses and different strategies will have different mea-
sures of success. A business unit with a vision of, say, reaching a new level
of market growth might set strategic goals that are top-line financial tar-
gets for specific customer segments or achieving a percentage of revenue
derived from new products. For a civic or governmental organization com-
mitted to, say, eliminating poverty, strategic goals might be providing a
level of food and shelter security for a specific community or increasing its
level of employment. For David Winn, who became CEO of the failing
American Express Bank in France, the organizational vision was to revi-
talize the institution with the consumer financial expertise of the global
corporation; he set strategic goals to make the bank profitable again and