Our friends at ChangeThis just published our manifesto, Talking Strategy: Three Straightforward Ways to Make Your Strategy Stick. Chip and I believe that most organizations do a lousy job communicating their strategies internally.  Most execs seem to believe that formulating a strategy is 90% of the battle.  If you’re a sole proprietor, that’s true. In a larger organization, though, the test of a strategy is how effectively it guides the specific actions of specific people. And that is fundamentally a communications challenge.
Once you realize that, the action plan becomes clear. You’ve got to translate the strategy into concrete terms that your folks can understand (not “maximize shareholder value”).  You’ve got to make sure the strategy is specific enough to be useful to your employees (i.e., it helps them make decisions better). And perhaps most importantly, you’ve got to establish a language that makes it easier for the front-line people to talk back to the boardroom people in terms that both understand. If you do these things, you can avoid the 3 nasty barriers that impede strong strategic communication.
To learn about the full nastiness of those 3 barriers–and to see whether your own organization suffers from them–go check out the manifesto. And tell us what you think of it.Â
Thanks for the PDF which supplements my copy of “Made To Stick.” I appreciate, incidentally, the landscape layout. Once I’ve properly sized my Acrobat Reader window on my laptop, I don’t need to scroll to read the entire page. This kind of “trivial stuff” can contribute to turning “ho-hum” into pure pleasure — a concept which Apple, for instance, has built into its genes. (Microsoft, it seems, wil never “get it.”)
I love the Manifesto PDF. Outstanding content and a great layout. I will recommend it and pass it to people. Thanks for introducing yourself to me this way. My friend Tim Stevens is reading your book. Two little comments: you mention college professors and ministers as the typical one-way communicators. I am a college professor of preaching and am trying to combat those realities in the pulpit and classroom. It is good to hear your description of the problem in the business context.
One other tiny comment: I will summarize it this way. “Streamline your commenting process.” You are probably not getting many comments on your blog because it is a pain to comment. Here are the seven steps I navigated to leave a comment. 1) Get your comment rejected because you are not logged in correctly. Try it again. Nope. 2) Figure out how to login. 3) Figure out that your normal WordPress login will not work. No, you need to get a new WordPress login just for this blog. 4) “Register for this blog” by giving my email address to be sent a password. 5) Go to my email and find my new random password. 6) Go back in and log in to your blog. 7) Then put my name, email and comment. Whew.
It takes a hearty commenter to make comments on this blog. I’ve never seen anything like it.
All the best.