Page 83 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Developing a Strategy 73

intends, why specific goals are targets, and how the team will achieve
them. Keep your key messages short, powerful, and easy to understand;
they should clearly connect strategy to the vision and mission. Repeat them
constantly, in every interaction you have with your stakeholders, and make
clear what the strategy will mean for each of them. (The discussion and
experimentation you’ve had along the way will mean that the key tenets
will not be surprising, but they will still need to be constantly reinforced.)
Mulcahy engaged the people at Xerox constantly during the compa-
ny’s strategic transformation. As she met with stakeholders worldwide,
she always explained how their particular work could help the company’s
strategic efforts. By staying away from conceptual executive speak and ad-
dressing the implications for change in a targeted, practical way, she was
able to make the strategic transformation personally meaningful.
At PBS, Kerger continues to allocate significant time to promoting PBS
KIDS to the system and a wide range of stakeholders—speaking candidly
and personally about the importance of the strategy and its fit with her
vision and the broader educational mission of PBS. She is methodical in
reaching out to different leaders across the organization, her board, station
managers, and other community leaders in the PBS network. She also now
regularly references PBS KIDS 24/7 in her outreach to current and future
donors across the system.

Keep learning, keep adapting
The notion that strategies must be continuously renewed is not new, but
the pressure on organizations to do that is harsher than ever before. The
rise of lean and learn-by-doing approaches to strategy reflect a new gen-
eration of organizations finding ways to adapt to a more volatile and com-
petitive climate. To help with the shift, they are using new technologies to
collect and analyze large amounts of customer and market data, includ-
ing, in real time, enabling faster tailoring of product or service offerings as
change unfolds.
Similarly, at PBS, the national office monitors viewership progress of
the new children’s channel and continues to collect feedback through au-
dience data analysis and ongoing discussions with local station leaders. It