Focus Drives Results

tl;dr

• Most planning tools have too much information in them

• Without a clear plan, a company drifts

• Strategic plans are about priorities not detail

• StrategyRx puts together a few simple best practices to give you a better method

I've sat through enough strategic planning sessions to know they're mostly theater.

Two days locked in a conference room. Endless PowerPoints. SWOT analyses that tell you nothing. Mission statements that could apply to any company.

Then you walk out with a 47-page document that sits on a shelf until next year's planning retreat.

Another trick is to call something a one-page plan and then fit a bunch of stuff in there by messing with the margins and using both sides of the page.

It’s like the reverse 7th grade essay tactic.

What it leads to is unclear direction that allows companies to drift.

Strategy is about ruthless prioritization. If you don’t prioritize, you don’t have a strategy.

There's a better way.

The Salesforce Secret

Marc Benioff built a $250 billion company using a one-page planning tool he scribbled on the back of an American Express envelope in 1999.

It's called V2MOM. Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, Measures.

That's it. Five sections. One page. Every employee at Salesforce can quote it from memory.

While other companies are drowning in strategic documents, Salesforce keeps everyone aligned with something that fits on your phone screen.

Why One Page Works

Here's what I learned building OwnerRx: If your strategy doesn't fit on one page, it's not a strategy. It's a wishlist.

One page or 350 words forces ruthless prioritization. You can't hide weak thinking behind bullet points and appendices. Every word has to earn its place.

Most strategic plans fail because they try to do everything. V2MOM forces you to pick what actually matters.

My V2MOM Evolution

I tried this for OwnerRx and immediately saw why it works. But I did a couple of tweaks borrowing from some other great strategic minds.

The first tweak was on obstacles.

I’m a big fan of Richard Rumelt's concept of "The Crux."

The Crux is the single most consequential, solvable challenge you face. The one thing that, if solved, unlocks everything else.

It’s tempting to solve easy problems so that we can feel like we made progress without too much effort. A Crux forces you to focus on the biggest challenge.

So I changed the O in V2MOM to a C.

The second tweak was on the metrics. I’ve become a big supporter of using a North Star metric.

That’s the one metric that, if you move it, you know you’ll succeed. That is your primary and all other metrics flow from it.

Notice the language of those two tweaks. The Crux is the one obstacle that you have to overcome and the North Star is the measure that indicates you’ve overcome it.

The North Star keeps you from chasing vanity metrics. For example, who cares if your website views are up or down if it doesn’t keep customers from cancelling?

Both concepts also force more prioritization. Owners and their teams waste too much time on shiny objects or initiatives that don’t produce results.

Focusing on just one obstacle and one measure helps you overcome that.

The Five Questions That Matter

I’ve built out a light weight version of the tool I’m going to include in the OwnerRx app. It’s on the website if you want to play with it. There’s no database or authentication so you can enter data and download it but it resets when you leave the page.

The strategy focuses on answering 5 key questions:

Vision: Where are we going? One sentence. Present tense. Paint the picture of success as if it already exists.

Values: What principles guide our decisions? 3-5 things we hire, fire, and reward people for.

Methods: How will we get there? The major initiatives we need to undertake in the next 6-18 months that move the needle. Not everything you could do. Just what you have to do to move The Crux and the North Star to achieve the vision.

The Crux: What’s the one challenge we must overcome? See above.

North Star and Metrics: How will we know whether we are succeeding or failing? See above

Timeframe: the world is changing fast. Five year plans are a joke. I believe you should do what I’m calling StrategyRx once a year.

That doesn’t mean you need a new vision and values each year but you should make sure it’s all still relevant.

The Cascade Effect

Here's where it gets powerful: Everyone writes a StrategyRx.

The CEO creates the company StrategyRx. Don’t outsource this. Yes, ask your people for input but this is yours. If the team had a vision, they’d run their own companies.

Now each department writes theirs to support it. Every team cascades down from there.

Suddenly everyone from the intern to the executive team is rowing in the same direction. No more "I didn't know that was a priority."

Implementation

Most strategic plans get written in January and are forgotten by March.

I’m embedding StrategyRx into the meeting rhythm of the company. It stays alive because you:

1. Break down the methods into quarterly initiatives.

2. Review progress on the initiatives in your weekly leadership meeting.

3. Deep dive on initiatives and the North Star at your monthly.

Are you making progress?

Are these still the most important things to work on?

If not, why not? Did we select the wrong methods or did we get distracted by fire drills?

Why is that happening?

If you aren’t executing your strategy, what are you doing? If you are executing it, what are you learning?

The real meat of leadership is the answers to those questions.

The OwnerRx Example

Vision: OwnerRx will help 10,000 small-business owners pinpoint the work that lights them up and align their companies to their Zones of Genius.

Values:

• Fast Turns – Insight is only useful when it becomes action—today, not next quarter.

• Owner-First – Every feature must make it easier for owners to work in their Zone of Genius.

• Play the Infinite Game – We are here to play the game, not for short-term wins.

Methods:

• Ship the Core: Release the beta coaching dashboard + command center.

• Power-Up Playbooks: Publish a library of 3- to 5-day blueprints that keep an owner improving all year.

• High-Value Tools (5):

  • Daily Owner Prioritizer

  • Leadership-meeting recorder & scorecard

  • Zone of Genius tracker

  • Direct report tracker

  • Sales evaluator

• Build the Community: Create a community of owners dedicated to aligning their business to their Zone of Genius.

Crux: Momentum—500 weekly-active power users within 12 months.

North Star Metric: Weekly-active power users—owners who complete at least three in-app actions every week.

Everything we build fuels this flywheel. Anything else is noise—cut it.

Your Move

Can you boil your business down to the same simple model?

I think you can.

Benioff runs a $250 billion business off of his.