Focus the entire organization around a common goal
Imagine you are in a room full of Coke machines. Each takes a dollar. You decide you’d like a drink. You pull a handful of quarters out of your pocket and throw one into a machine. Then you wander over to another machine and throw in a quarter. You keep drifting around the room, throwing quarters in at random. Getting thirsty? No Cokes to show for all those quarters?
This is obviously an inefficient way to spend your money. Yet, many companies drift into this pattern of investment as they grow. Product lines, sales channels, and go-to-market approaches diverge not only from each other, but from what really matters to customers—convenience, simplicity, and a ft for their businesses. Even seemingly clear objectives like revenue targets sometimes get derailed due to a lack of cross-functional alignment. If every organization and every program in your company isn’t explicitly focused on the same set of objectives and initiatives, you are wasting your quarters, and your millions, and foregoing the rewards of greater focus.
Citrix accomplished its rapid growth to the $1 billion revenue milestone and beyond by placing all its resources behind a single long-term objective. In 2003, the company was determining its three-year goals and looking for the right growth strategy. Citrix made the decision to establish $1 billion in annual revenue as the company target, and the X1 initiative was born. Mark Templeton, Citrix CEO, described how the executive team approached the planning task. “We took the future and subtracted the present, and then we needed to figure out what had to change in between.” What had to change was the way business was done throughout the company.
To translate the strategic plan into action, the Citrix executive team worked to define how to execute a project that involved everyone in the company. They debated issues that included “What is it like and what are the benefts for individuals to work for a $1 billion company?” and “What would it take within each department to accomplish the $1 billion goal?” The leadership team asked every organization to create a business plan of how to move to the three-year objective. X1 was broken out into smaller objectives that were meticulously measured and tracked.
Creating detailed goals and plans was only the beginning. Every employee had to believe that the objective was attainable, and that they were part of the effort to reach it. To ensure broad executive support and consistency of message, the executive team spent several months defining how to achieve the target. The execs then held countless formal and informal meetings and conversations, communicating that they were on board and explaining why they supported and believed in X1.
The Citrix example illustrates how critical it is to focus the entire organization around a common goal. Gain consensus among company leadership on both your objectives and methods to pursue them. Without that consensus, you will find orthogonal initiatives that compete with, rather than reinforce each other. If part of your objective is to become more significant to customers, every person in the organization must understand the context within which your products and services are evaluated, bought, and used, and how their actions ft within that context.3 A top-driven focus will ensure that departmental efforts are working in concert toward the same goals and that, at the end of the day, your company ends up with the most Cokes, and the most quarters.