© 2009 * Dan Heath and Chip Heath * madetostick.com * fastcompany.com/madetostick

5 TIPS FOR CREATING A STICKY STRATEGIC VISION
1. Articulate your organization’s “core idea.” A core
idea is your “secret sauce”—it informs every aspect of
your business. If it doesn’t help employees make
decisions, it ain’t a core idea. For instance, Southwest
Airlines says they’re “THE low-fare airline.” Herb
Kelleher gave an example of a marketing exec who
approached him with some customer survey data. She
suggested that Southwest should add a chicken Caesar
salad to some of their longer flights. Kelleher asked
her, “Will adding a chicken Caesar salad help to make
us THE low-fare airline in those markets? Because if it
won’t, we aren’t serving any damn chicken salad.”
Notice how the core idea helps employees make
tradeoffs between 2 competing values: customer
satisfaction and economy. For Southwest, economy
wins. For Singapore Air, customer satisfaction wins.
2. Don’t zoom out, choose. Let’s say you run a
restaurant in Centerville that
serves outstanding thin-crust
pizza. Your mission: To serve
the tastiest pizza in town. But
then the chef reminds you that
he makes great ravioli—he’s
frustrated that your mission
doesn’t reflect it. So you zoom out: To serve the best
Italian cuisine in town. But what about your great
service? Your birthday parties? Your family-friendly
decor? You keep expanding the mission to include all
these pieces, until you end up with an unholy
statement like this: To create cuisine-related solutions
for regionally proximate families. Fight this urge! Don’t
zoom out! A great vision is specific, and that means
making a hard choice. Chip and I once worked with a
mental health chain that had 11 core values. Ouch. 11
core values equals 0 core values. Executives want to
compromise, so they add in everyone’s pet values. Are
you willing to make the hard choices among priorities?
3. Make the vision concrete. JFK’s speech is the Holy
Grail: We will put a man on the moon and return him
safely within the decade. What a concrete vision! Was
there anyone in American who misunderstood? The
nonprofit City Year says: One day, the most common
question asked of a 17 year-old in this country will be:
“Where are you going to do your year of national
service?” Boeing was incredibly concrete (and specific)
with its goal for the 727 passenger plane: “The 727
must seat 131 passengers, fly nonstop from Miami to
New York City, and land on runway 4-22 at LaGuardia
[one of the shortest runways at the time].” Concrete
goals like these help to ensure alignment. They ensure
everyone shares a common picture of the destination.
4. Show why employees should care about it.
“ExxonMobil Corporation is committed to being the
world’s premier petroleum and petrochemical
company.” Bleh. No one wakes up in the morning
excited about that mission. But contrast that with
J&J’s Credo: “We believe our first responsibility is to
the doctors, nurses, and patients, to mothers and
fathers and all others who use our products and
services.” It’s easy to see how
someone would feel proud to
support that mission! And
Sony, in the early 1950s, said
they wanted to become the
company most known for
changing the worldwide image
of Japanese products as being of poor quality. J&J and
Sony’s missions add clarity and motivation.
5. Consider the virtues of single focus. Change can
happen quickly when leaders orient the company
toward a single, bright-line goal. Gordon Bethune,
taking over a troubled Continental Airlines, made his
team focus on on-time arrivals. Paul O’Neill, taking
charge of Alcoa’s aluminum empire, made his top
priority: No worker accidents. (His team thought he
was nuts, but he knew that to prevent accidents,
they’d have to understand their operations so well
that operational efficiencies would unfold naturally.)
In the 1980s, a new director of New York City’s
troubled subway system declared: No graffiti. He knew
that eliminating graffiti would provide a quick and
important victory and would, in turn, lead to other
achievements. Can you be strategically single-minded?