The North Star or a passing plane?

Entrepreneurs are excitable and risk-takers. That’s part of what makes them entrepreneurs. Those who want to play it safe remain employees.

This also means that they are prone to going after the next shiny thing at the risk of never staying the course long enough to get results.

While bigger organisations can afford trying out all kinds of crazy ideas, knowing full well that many will fail SME’s can’t. They don’t have enough management and financial resources for this so they must focus.

At the start of a STRATAGILITY® process, participants are challenged to identify and verbalise the organisation’s Dream Goal – how will it look when all is perfect. Later in the process they need to list opportunities to exploit that will get the organisation one step closer to its Dream Goal.

Throughout this process, they must consider if the opportunities do indeed follow the North Star (the Dream Goal) or a passing aircraft. Obviously, following the latter will lead them astray.

When thinking about the Dream Goal it is imperative to think of it in terms that will not become obsolete when technology or markets change. The classic article “Marketing Myopia” (Theodore Levitt · 1960 – Harvard Business review) mentions the railways and large film studios in the US that lost their market leadership positions because they defined themselves in terms that became irrelevant when circumstances changed (railways instead of transportation, movies instead of entertainment). Later examples include Kodak and Nokia.

So, while it is important to follow a North Star rather than a passing plane, the organisational North Star, like the one in the sky needs to be eternal.