Breaking the Survival Habit

A survival-driven company is like the heroin addict going after his fix on the verge of a cold turkey. Laser-focused, fearless, uncompromising. But, as soon as the syringe delivered its lode, the junky kicks back and loses motivation to do anything while the high lingers.

Since not all survival-driven acts are that dramatic, we tend not to notice our behavior, well after it became a habit. We feel too burnt-out to react to warning signs and wait until we have been enveloped in new flames. We ignore soft sales numbers, put off firing decisions, pin hopes on big but risky opportunities, or bury ourselves in busywork.

Firefighting is addictive as it makes us feel heroic and accomplished when a spectacular fire has been extinguished. How much more exciting than dealing with the mundane business of anticipating and preventing mishaps. Whoever notices all those catastrophes that never happened, or the inefficiencies saved by foresight? Creating havoc, and then rescuing the universe, instinctively feels much cooler.

Unfortunately, crises-driven businesses focus on maintaining, rather than constructing. They are all about preventing the building from burning down, not erecting further stories on top. Alas, breaking the survival habit is difficult without replacing it with another, similarly powerful way of life: the habit of strategic planning and execution.

Strategic planning is all about preempting crises by committing the enterprise to achieving aggressive objectives. When done well, the commitment to a vision and plan can become so powerful that any threat to it is perceived as an existential crisis, creating an emergency reaction. Missing the plan becomes unthinkable to the organization that generates a survival response, which harvests the same energy to grow and create profits, that had been expended in the service of breaking even. Think about a Fortune company missing an earnings target: the CEO gets fired, employees get laid off, or both.

One way to rewire a business from survival-orientation to proactive is to implement a management blueprint, such as the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS). EOS uses several tools to strengthen planning and execution, like:

1. Articulating a vision. By defining a Core Focus and a 10-Year Target, the organization clarifies what it stands for, the niche it needs to focus on, and the “one big thing” it wants to achieve in the long run. By committing to a big enough niche and articulating a long-term energizing goal, the brains of the employees can combine into a supercomputer and get to work on figuring out how to achieve that future desired state.

2. Strategic planning. Using a 3-Year Picture you paint a vivid canvass of what the organization will look like in three short years from now, to be on track with its 10-Year Target. By co-creating and agreeing on the specifics of the 3-Year Picture, the leadership can share the vision across the ranks of what needs to be achieved. The 3-Year Picture also becomes the engine behind a solid 1-Year Plan: what should be the revenue, profit and critical measurable that the business needs to hit to be on track with its 3-Year Picture at the end of the year.

3. Goal setting. EOS uses “Rocks”, or quarterly priorities, to focus organizational bandwidth on a handful of critical initiatives that would generate the required progress in the next three months. Company Rocks become the “themes of the quarter”, telegraphing to all what the business committed to focus on for the next 90 days. Company Rocks act as rallying cries to all employees, who then use them to articulate their own Individual Rocks that contribute to achieving the Company Rocks. Not all Individual Rocks will connect to Company Rocks, but sharing them will allow a wide and deep understanding of who is working on what, and will help clarification and consensus to emerge on what would have to be sacrificed to make time to achieving priorities.

4. Scorecarding. Checking critical measurables weekly allows leadership to keep an absolute pulse on the business at all times; as well as being accountable to executing those sales, operational and financial management actions that will ensure the business would be tracking its quarterly plans.

5. Peer accountability. Teams that commit to delivering on their plans will hold each other accountable to achieving Scorecard numbers. Weekly check-ins keep team members “honest” and help smoke out issues that prevent accomplishments. The team then solves and takes action on resolving issues, so that numbers get back on track.

Commitment and discipline are key for ingraining the habit of strategic planning and execution into your organization. EOS provides a framework for visioning, planning, execution, and building an open and honest culture, where people embrace thinking and executing big, confronting challenges and obstacles and taking action to resolve them as they arise.