Exercising leadership: Plan your firm’s retreat using a baker’s dozen of planning ideas

Management guru Tom Peters (http://www.tompeters.com/) shares his ideas on what thought leaders need to know about strategy. Here is his baker’s dozen of answers to get your creative juices flowing just in time to plan your firm’s retreat:

1. Do you have awesome talent everywhere? Do you push that talent to pursue “audacious quests”? “This should be every boss’s mantra, every employee’s aim,” claims Peters, “or else we are settling for demotivation and mediocrity, and no strategy – no matter how clever or wise – will save us.”
   
   
2. Is your talent pool loaded with wonderfully peculiar people whom others would call “problems”? Or said another way, bring on the misfits. Peters cites all the misfits and troublemakers who rose to be great leaders – Napoleon, Churchill, de Gaulle, Alexander the Great, Bill Gates.”
   
   
3. Is your board as “cool” as your prospects? Your leadership group should bear at least some resemblance to the markets you serve.
   
   
4. Is creating a culture that cherishes above all things innovation and entrepreneurship your primary aim? Stress innovation and battle imitation, Peters advises. “We are assaulted by a siege of ‘me too’ – at exactly the wrong time, at a time of profound and rapid change coming from every point of the compass.”
   
   Peters compares the Four Seasons with Motel 6, Neiman Marcus with Wal-Mart, and contends their success lies in what they have in common. “The thing that all of those companies have in common is that they have nothing in common,” noted Peters.
   
   
5. Are your OODA loops shorter than the next guy’s? OODA stands for the Observe-Orient-Decide-Act cycle. The firm and its leaders with the fastest OODA loops unbalance the opposition and increase sales, profitability, and backlogs. Leaders, says Peters, must behave less like bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists.
   
   
6. Is your motto “reward excellent failures, punish mediocre success”? “Any activity, no matter how apparently humble, can be turned into a work of magnificent art,” argues Peters. New ideas and innovation must be rewarded if your firm is to continue to grow – and do so intelligently. The time devoted to a mediocre success is a tragic waste in Peters’s opinion.
   
   
7. “We do not merely want to be the best of the best, we want to be the only ones who do what we do.” Uniqueness outweighs standard quality of services any day on any but the most routine building and construction types. Avoid trying to keep up with competitors, cautions Peters. “Aiming to beat the competition has the opposite effect to the one intended. It keeps firms focused on the competition.”
   
   
8. Subscribe to the best sources – Peters advocates extensive outsourcing. There are still not a lot of CPA firms that have embraced outsourcing, but at least looking into the possibilities is important to ensure that no new opportunities are available now that might be right for your firm. The philosophy certainly applies to firms whose clients may come to them seeking services or expertise that your firm does not have.
   
   
9. Do you embrace the new technologies with childlike enthusiasm and a revolutionary’s zeal? What Peters means is to embrace information technology to such a degree that it will enhance productivity for your firm, saving time and money.
   
   
10. Do you “serve” and “satisfy” every client? Or do you go berserk attempting to provide every client with an awesome experience that does nothing less than transform the way he or she sees the world? Relationships are important – but there is only so much that one firm can do for a single client.
    
    
11. The two biggest underserved markets are women and “boomer-geezers.” Though this verity is geared more to product vendors than professional services providers, it bears keeping in mind that your client buying pool is very likely becoming more diversified like the U.S. market in general. This shift should be a consideration not only in internal initiatives you take to diversify, but also in how your marketing addresses the needs of diverse groups.
    
    
12. Are you and the other leaders in your firm accessible? Do they wear their passion on their sleeves? Does integrity ooze out of every pore of the firm? Is “we care” your firm’s implicit motto? All these are marks of character – of leaders and of the firm. Time was, recalls Peters, when “the old boss’s mantra was more like ‘Show up. Shut up. Or starve.’ But now, it’s fair to say, morality aside, ‘we care’ is not optional.”
    
    
13. Don’t try to compete with Wal-Mart on price and China on cost. “Clients want the best or the least expensive, there is no in-between,” says Peters, quoting advice from business leader John Di Julius. The only way to do this is to become the only firm that does what you do.

From the April 2008 issue of Partner’s Report for CPA Firm Owners.
Copyright © 2008 IOMA, Inc. The Institute of Management and Administration.

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