Mapping Experiences, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 12. Activating Strategy Through Visual Alignment

There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.

—Peter Drucker, People and Performance

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Strategy activation
• Plans versus strategies
• Strategizing around the customer
• Visualizing strategy
• Collaborative methods for mapping strategy

Earlier in my career, I encountered a business perspective that shocked me. At a dinner following a multiday strategy workshop I’d facilitated, the director of sales explained his perspective on the workshop’s purpose: “We have to figure out how to get customers for all they’re worth.” He gestured as if wringing out a towel. “If the towel gets dry, you have to squeeze harder. A good leader knows how to do that, and a good strategy makes it easier.”

He was serious. I was horrified. “Our markets are not people ‘out there’ that we shake down for loose change. Customers are our most valuable assets,” I thought. Surely we should strive to learn from them so that we can provide better products and services?

The director’s perspective seemed shortsighted to me. He believed the sole purpose of our business was to get more sales. That may be fine in the short term, but ultimately, this narrow perspective leads to failure.

Companies frequently don’t realize that as a business grows, it must also widen its strategic field of vision. I call this misstep strategy myopia. It happens time and time again: organizations focus more on capturing value ...