Discovery. That’s usually the No. 1 goal of an exploration. If you intend to explore, it’s not a success unless you reach the objective, by using the strategy you crafted.
Pedro Menéndez de Avilés landed in Florida in 1565 on an exploration with 800 colonists to found St. Augustine. He claimed the land for Spain and the settlement is the longest continually inhabited one in America (it was under the Spanish flag until 1821).
St. Augustine celebrates its 450th anniversary this fall and is the subject of this month’s Uniquely Florida feature story.
You have to admire what Menéndez and other leaders of the new community accomplished. They had a clear goal of reaching Florida from Spain and starting a settlement. Of course, they were motivated by a search for gold and resources, but they still had to develop strategies to achieve success.
Clarity in your strategies to meet goals is essential to a successful outcome. It’s not an easy task, and it’s considerably more involved than setting a goal. You have to have vision and an understanding of your strengths in order to formulate effective strategies.
A CEO I interviewed echoed that statement.
“If you’re a manufacturing firm, a financial services firm or what have you, there are certain strategies to select that you think are going to help you reach those goals,” he says.
“You can’t have a generic approach and say, ‘Well, we’ll throw a bunch of stuff against the wall and we’ll see what sticks.’ You have to design your way through it with specific questions.”
The first question is, “What are we good at?” It’s sort of old-fashioned business advice. But it forces you to think in a narrow manner.
“It’s extremely important that you not try to do everything, that you become very focused and specialized in terms of where your expertise is,” the CEO says. “That’s not market niche; that’s about capacity, your ability to deliver and so on.”
The focus may be exceptional customer service, innovative products, an outstanding employee culture or flexibility in adapting to changing demands. Define your strength in the simplest manner.
The next question is, “Where can we get the highest return?”
To answer this question, you have to look at the numbers for the figures that stand out, but you also have to be willing to pass judgment on what is not really giving you the results you need.
The final question is, “Where can we add value?”
“It’s being clear about where you are going to add value,” he says. “Develop ways to measure progress to help you set your own direction on how much value you want to add. That’s another question — being realistic about that. If you are developing a new drug, what’s that drug going to solve in terms of the physical or other challenge that the person is facing?”
The more clarity you can insert in your strategy, the better the chance of success. That’s how the New World was founded.
