The Six Driving Forces That
Affect Your Business Plan—
And How to Focus on the Best
One for Your Company’s
Needs
T
his chapter describes one of the most important elements of
your business plan. It is the element that provides alignment
between and among the functions of your business. Without this
element you cannot move toward coordinated goal accomplish-
ment.
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CHAPTER
6
Typically planning teams spend time discussing the current
state of their business situation. Equal time is spent discussing the
future. Almost no time is spent discussing how to get from one
state—as is—to the other state—to be. Goals will not do the job. To
get to the future requires more than letting the organization run
unchecked toward goals. The management team must drive the
organization. I’m not using the term
drive as in driving a reluctant
mule toward the barn. It means instead taking an active rather than
passive approach. It includes steering a course with all employees
speaking the same business language, aiming toward the same
goals, and moving with the same level of enthusiasm.
Employees reach a level of alignment throughout the organi-
zation when you clarify this element. Goal alignment of individu-
als with the organization’s needs has long been a target of manage-
ment theorists. Usually the wants and needs of the individual are
compared to the wants and needs of the organization. That takes

work perspective. He states, “In a nutshell, baseball requires situa-
tional teamwork; football, scripted teamwork; and basketball,
spontaneous teamwork.” That’s not what caught my attention. He
went on to describe how an organization rewards various types of
behaviors based on the way they are designed. Keidel’s work fired
my curiosity. I was always puzzled why his metaphors and models
didn’t catch the business world’s attention. His examples clearly
had a message to me, so I took the challenge to push the key con-
cepts further. I became intrigued by what specifically drives a busi-
ness, what transparent forces seem to be at work within any sys-
tem. Keidel found three while Treacy and Wiersema also name
three. I found others. My work leads me to believe that six, not
three, drivers actually exist. These seem to be found in all my
client systems. Over a ten-year period I tested and retested the con-
cept with a number of participants in management seminars and
with clients in my consulting practice. My conclusion is that your
story or plan will have a serious defect if you don’t understand the
business drivers. Furthermore, I believe that you must pick one
from the list to create a single focus for organizational alignment.
I labeled the six drivers as:
1. Players
2. Plans
3. Processes
4. Products
5. Properties
6. Payoffs
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T
HE

second.
3
His belief was that a company that takes care of its employ-
ees doesn’t have problems with customers. Putting employees first
means taking care of your people, eliminating the common gripes
and complaints that stand in the way of them doing a first-class job
for the customer. This model must have worked because
Rosenbluth Travel became a huge success.
Taking care of the employee first certainly has merit. We have
all experienced walking up to a counter to be served or pay for our
selections, only to be ignored. Doesn’t it drive you just a little bit
crazy when two salespeople, who are busy chatting about some
internal store problem, ignore you? I want to shout, “Hey, look at
me. Yes, me the guy with money in my hand. Me, the customer
who wants to be served. Remember me, I’m the guy who con-
tributes to your paycheck every Friday. I even put a little bonus
money in your pocket each year. I’ve probably contributed enough
Seven Steps to a Successful Business Plan
152
to your 401(k) for you to retire. You may as well retire, since you are
not serving me.” I may make that speech someday.
A second player-driven type organization is one that focuses on
customers. This organization does more than focus; it becomes very
customer-centric. In Treacy and Wiersema’s language they are
called a customer-intimate organization. This organization’s energy
is spent solving the customer’s problem. This core process of help-
ing the customer with everything from finding the right size shoes
to checking on the faucet installation is what creates the long-term
relationships between the business and the customer. Customer-
intimate organizations are clever. They know their market is the

of here.” A Toyota salesperson in Baton Rouge must have thought I
was kidding. When he returned he discovered I wasn’t.
Customer-intimate organizations give employees a lot of room
to make deals, work with the customer, and demonstrate value in
the relationship. In my car dealership story, the salesperson had
been told the rules up-front, yet he wasted my time and tried to
play games with my mind. Don’t do that to your customers, espe-
cially when they are sending signals that such amateurish behavior
will not be tolerated.
A number of outstanding companies choose to use the cus-
tomer-intimate model. Nordstrom, Cott Corporation, and Airborne
Express are three examples I reference because they are in business-
es with radically different goods and services. Don’t be caught off
base thinking that customer-intimate means assigning a personal
shopper to your customer. Customer-intimate means solving the
customer’s problems, no matter what type business problem is pre-
sented. Each of these companies believes that time spent up-front
with the customer in a one-on-one relationship pays great divi-
dends in the long term. People and businesses pay premium prices
to have their needs legitimized, their concerns heard, and their
unique business problems solved.
Doug Christie, a sales representative for Bayer’s agriculture
division in Crossfield, Alberta, understands the concept of being
close to the customer and customer intimacy. He is always on the
job with no order too small or situation too minor for his attention.
His clients know when they unexpectedly run short of vaccines or
they need technical information, Doug is instantly available. His
office has a twenty-four–hour phone contact number. Doug works
the phone constantly, staying in touch with his clients. I jokingly
said to him, “You must have that phone permanently attached to

Authoritarian management is the common approach. With a fixed
structure there is little latitude for individual decision making or
unilateral actions. In a plans-driven organization the name of the
game is to accomplish the goals. Employees are rewarded for high
compliance. Sticking to the plan is important. Because of this fixa-
tion with goal achievement, the customer tends to be placed in the
back row of priorities.
A utilities company is probably a good example of a plans-driv-
en organization. An electrical company must operate from a tight-
ly managed plan to generate and deliver a certain level of power to
its users. It must do usage calculations to determine the flow of its
outputs and plan accordingly. To adequately serve the public, it
must be thinking far ahead in terms of population growth, support
requirements, and total management of the consumption require-
ments.
Plans are central to any organization that by necessity has a
high compliance component. For example, a rigid plan would be
followed by a team during an annual outage changeover procedure.
Servicing nuclear rods is not the time to be creative. They would
not be rewarded for skipping standard operating procedures, taking
shortcuts, or making it up as they go along.
The Six Driving Forces That Affect Your Business Plan
155
Another example of a plans-driven organization is the military
unit preparing for war. The precursor to battle is thorough plan-
ning, but even this has limits. Every good commander knows that
plans are obsolete the moment the first shot is fired. War is truly the
role model for chaos. That’s why the U.S. military, contrary to pop-
ular stereotypes, trains its soldiers to take responsibility, take
charge, and take command. When the carefully planned attack

that solution too quickly, consider the cultural shift requirements
and implications. You may not be able to get people to move from
a product focus to an operational-excellence focus. I’ve watched
organizations try to make the shift. Resistance to the change takes
many shapes and forms. Employees will passionately charge that
The Six Driving Forces That Affect Your Business Plan
157
Figure 6-1. When business units have different focus from the corporate
focus, loss of direction, cohesiveness, and teamwork happens.
the organization no longer cares about the quality of its products.
They see the company as a money-hungry organization trying to
drive costs down. They equate steps like reengineering and down-
sizing with cost cutting only for the sake of being more profitable.
A corporation with diverse business units must have a plan
focus. The explanation is quite simple. What is the function of a
corporate headquarters? It is a control function. What should head-
quarters control? How about the plan? If I am the chief executive
officer with five diverse business units, I want them to follow our
plan. I don’t care how they do it. They may have five different
approaches (see Figure 6-2) and still be able to fill my corporate
requirements. What I want from each of my unit presidents is their
contribution to the bottom line of my corporate plan.
Seven Steps to a Successful Business Plan
158
Figure 6-2. A corporation with diverse business units must be plans-driv-
en. It is the only combination that allows diversity. The only thing that
matters in this case is whether the business unit met its plan require-
ments. That’s the bottom line.
T
HE

es required to stay ahead of production schedules, customer
demands, and short cycle times are too complex to be mastered by
one person or a handful of selected employees. An operationally
excellent company is the right testing ground for using teamwork
as a tool to promote the culture.
The Pony Express is a good historical example of operational
excellence. The design of this mail delivery system was based on
maximum efficiency for people and equipment for its day. The
images of riders staying in the saddle for hours with no break, fre-
quent horse changes, and frequent hand-offs to fresh riders at a full
gallop have become part of the lore. As with many good business
ideas the Pony Express’s days were short-lived because of the costs
and other factors. The process was so grueling and dangerous that
the company encouraged only young, single, male applicants.
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