Optimizing Your Strategy by Evaluating Your Results

There’s another element though to creating strategy, and many people overlook this.  Even big companies quite often fail to do this.  It’s that you have to evaluate your results.  Big companies look at the results, but they rarely attribute failure to achieve those results to a flaw in their strategy.  Usually they blame their employees for not implementing it.  But, at the end of the day, it’s the lack of implementation that they blame.  That certainly is a valid reason for a lot of people, and I’ve just talked about that.  But there’s another side of this you need to think about.  If your strategy is flawed, you can implement it all you want, and still not get the results that you’re striving for.

That part is overlooked by many people.  Not just big companies.

In this training I’m going to teach you how to not only create that strategy.  But, also how to implement it.  You have to make sure that you have the right foundation, and practical structure, but you also have to have a plan in place so you’ll be able to do it.  You will have to revise both of these constantly in order to reach your goals.

I’m reminded of an instance when I was quite young.  I couldn’t have been more than 4 or 5 years old.  My father and I were out in a big field, I mean a really big one, it was probably a mile to the nearest farmhouse at least.  You know, when you’re only 4 or 5 years old you’re thinking that it could take you a whole day just to walk there.  And then another day to walk back.

Anyway, my father was flying his airplane, it was probably one of those early radio controlled designs.  And there was another guy about 100 yards or so away who also had an airplane.  And this guy was doing his best to fly his plane, but he just couldn’t really get it to work.  I think at some point it came in for a pretty rough landing.  They guy went over to his plane, he took the motor and all the other mechanical bits out of it, and then he proceeded to kick the rest of the plane to pieces.  Now I have to tell you, as a 4 or 5-year-old I thought that was really cool.  I took great pleasure in bringing some of the pieces home with me.  My dad later told me that there was nothing wrong with the plane.  It was the engine and the mechanical stuff that guy had kept that was the problem.  You know, the same thing is true here.  You need to evaluate both halves.  The plan and the implementation if you want to accomplish what you set out to do.

It’s absolutely fatal to assume that you know what’s broken.