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Alternative Selection Warning Flag 1 – Too Many Initiatives

StrategyDriven Alternative Selection Warning FlagContemporary business leaders embrace the mantra of continually doing more with less. Each and every day, managers and employees are challenged to produce ever-increasing quantities of goods and services at higher and higher quality levels. All other things remaining equal, there are limits to what any individual or workgroup can do. Beyond these limits, output declines and quality suffers.


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About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

Alternative Selection Best Practice 6 – Select What Not To Do And Stick With It

StrategyDriven Alternative Selection Article | Select What Not To DoNo organization can do it all. Resource limitations drive leaders to choose from those activities that will maximize the benefit derived from the assets the organization does possess. What is not commonly done, however, is the discontinuation of some ongoing activities not deliberately selected for funding. Consequently, these activities draw precious resources away from the more value-adding activities thereby diminishing the organization’s overall effectiveness.


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Alternative Selection Best Practice 5 – Establishing Priorities

All organizations face resource constraints inhibiting the accomplishment of all proposed work. Some organizations resist prioritizing initiatives commonly resulting in the completion of lower value activities ahead of those with a higher return on investment. Such an approach diminishes the value returned to stakeholders and represents an abdication of management’s responsibilities.


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Alternative Selection – Total Value of Ownership

More and more prevalent in business case evaluations today is the concept of the total cost of ownership whereby organizations evaluate the collective expense associated with a given initiative or asset over its entire life. Comparing initiatives on this basis alone however, fails to consider the offsetting benefits the organization would realize over the investment’s lifetime as calculated during return on investment (ROI) estimations. In order to effectively compare competing proposals, organization leaders should evaluate the total value of ownership of each investment alternative.


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Guardrails: Keep Your Projects Out of the Weeds

StrategyDriven Strategic Planning ArticleThink about if there were no guardrails on the freeway. It would be all too easy to run off the road and find yourself hurt and way off the fast track to your end destination.

Business is a fast and zigzagging road – a road that needs guardrails to keep businesses and projects on track. On your road to success (whether it be to increase profits, become an industry leader, capture more market share, etc.), you need to establish your own guardrails so you do not drive your company or project into the weeds.

Establish Guardrails

I worked in several large companies during my corporate career, and I can’t tell you the number of pet projects that became my pet peeves. I saw literally millions and millions of dollars flow into projects that had no real metrics and timeline in place. In other words, these projects had no guardrails.

You can ensure that your projects don’t waste time or money by simply putting the correct boundaries in place. You must think, “this is what we’re trying to drive to and if we don’t get to it at this point, we’re going to go back to the drawing board to go after the next idea.”

Proper Boundaries

To establish proper boundaries, you must do the following:

  1. Identify the major steps (or zig zags) that will take you to your goal. Example: Zig #1: Drive to profitability – have product bring in $20K in revenue.
  2. Define when you have completed your zig zag. Example: We will have sold 15K units of product.
  3. Set a deadline to assess your team’s progress. Example:We will have sold 15K units of product and bring in $20K in revenue by April 2012, or we will go back to the drawing board.

Zigzagging to Success

Establishing guardrails is just one element of the entire Zig Zag Principle. I encourage you to be strategic and deliberate about the way you approach your business. It may seem counterintuitive, but zigzagging to your goal (rather than charging straight for it), with the correct guardrails in place, will lead you and your business to success.


About the Author

Rich Christiansen describes himself as ‘a perfectly good business executive, turned entrepreneur.’ Before becoming an entrepreneur, he was a skilled executive and market innovator in the corporate world. He was General Manager at both Mitsubishi Electric and About.com. After 20 years in the technology industry, he discovered that his true passion and talent is in launching start-up companies.

Rich has founded or co-founded 32 businesses. These ventures were bootstrapped with just $5,000 to $10,000 of starting capital. Eleven of those businesses were miserable failures, but eleven have became wildly successful multi-million dollar businesses. Rich has identified The Zig Zag Principle as his secret formula for optimizing success while minimizing failure. It is also his methodology for setting goals and living a happy, healthy life. To read Rich Christiansen’s full biography, click here.