I plan to publish a series of notes, emails and meeting notes I made for the past 1 year to give you an inside view of this turnaround I am involved with. I am starting with a mail I sent to leaders who joined 2 months back to build a sales channel for our products. This was my first mail after formally welcoming them aboard.
Gentlemen,
I am attaching the first cut of the Annual Operating Plan for 2005 for the network channel XXX. Here are some points & thoughts from me on this document and our way forward:
- Plans are useless; planning is priceless. One belief I strongly hold is that no plan survives the first contact with reality. Having said that, the question would be “why plan”? I think that by planning, we will be forced to consider all kinds of scenarios (both optimistic and realistic) and that in turn prepares us to be balanced when we encounter the surprises that real world throws at us. In this context, please note that the value of a plan increases linearly (or even geometrically) based on the quality and intensity of input.
- The quality of input will depend on our candidness and openness to challenge our assumptions, and our ability to sit down and tear the plan apart so we can arrive at a common vision for XXX. Please do not hesitate to challenge, reject or modify the assumptions I have made in this document. The more we tear down and build up this plan, the more we will be successful once we start implementing it. On a personal note, I was lucky to have bosses and teams where experience, rank or hierarchy or age had no impact on rewards; the only thing that mattered was the value that each person brought to the table and the courage with which he/she held her opinions and beliefs. Once you add passion for the job into this mix, I believe we have a winner in our hands.
- I saw today morning that there were some questions or doubts in your mind about our ability to go for x00, 000 €. If this is the case, please talk to me and let us explore how we can get there and what we need to do to reach this goal. If at the end of our discussions, all of us agree that x00,000€ is too ambitious but the fundamentals are good, we can still go ahead on a different resource budget. The key is both of you OWN this goal. From my experience, I learnt that to move from accepting a challenge to owning a challenge is long, difficult and painful. The sooner we start on this road, the more effective we will be when we begin executing. whatever goals we set for ourselves. From my experience, the mindset shift between
I would like to make a few points on the core values that I am trying to build into OurCompany warp & weft.
- Deliver what we promise. I believe that any company that is serious and hopeful about its future has to internalize this value. The bottom-line is we are people who agree to work with each other based on mutual trust and respect. The only glue that holds these relationships together is the promises we make to each other and our partners and our customers. I am sure that both of you agree that it would be very difficult to trust and work with a person who keeps breaking promises or does not deliver the results that are promised. Without this value, OurCompany cannot hope to be successful and neither can anyone be inside OurCompany.
- Do more with less. OurCompany is a small company with big ambitions. In order to realize these ambitions, we have to be extremely miserly and particular about where we deploy our meager resources. All our sales, marketing and recruitment efforts until now have been based on leverage and trying to maximize the bang we can get for every buck we spend. If you and the rest of OurCompany cannot internalize this value, we will not have cash or resources to go after valuable opportunities.
- Embrace reality. As leaders of the network and potential leaders of OurCompany, your biggest job will be to define reality for your team members and teach them not to be afraid of it. In all my work experience, especially in sales, I saw many people who were reluctant to ask tough questions about their leads, their opportunities and their team members because they were afraid of what they will find out. Our inability to confront, embrace and manage reality will ultimately lead us to fail and surprise our teams and ourselves. I think failure is not bad; but failure that nobody saw coming is terrible.
- Dream with integrity. I love this value. While the above three values impose restrictions and boundaries, this is the value that builds passion and hope into our company and ourselves. We all dream; we all hope for the best results; it is only when we dream with integrity that we can clearly see what is possible and what is good. It means that our dreams are rooted in reality; it means our dreams do not become wild fantasies; it means our dreams do not force us to do something we will not be comfortable with; it means our dreams will become a source of power for us when things are not going as we expect; it means our dreams will enable us to align our personal goals and values with what OurCompany needs and demands.
You might find it odd that I chose a fact-based Operating Plan discussion to push these soft ideological values and thoughts. As I said initially, plans are useless; planning is priceless. But the kind of high quality, high intensity planning process that I am looking forward to will happen only if we are relaxed about our opinions; confident in our abilities and secure in our self-respect. I believe both of you are way ahead of me in terms of experience, ability and insights into the dynamics of this particular channel. My request to you is please reflect on this mail, and appreciate what it means to accept, own and internalize these values and this work ethic. The only critical issues will be the realism of our planning and the intensity with which we execute our plan. I am supremely confident that you are the right leaders and this is the right time and the right opportunity.
-Srini
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