When you’re knee-deep in the logistical details of managing a project team, it can be easy to lose sight of the big picture: your organization’s vision.
We use established and proven strategies at Cheetah Learning to help us achieve our vision in each course we offer. For example, the vision for our new program is pretty simple: With the right training and systems, most people can efficiently and cost-effectively grow their own food year-round.
Our mission though is much more specific — it is to create inexpensive, easy to set up, operate and maintain systems that enable people to grow micro-greens year-round and provide training for ways to use, share and/or sell the micro-greens in their communities. Strategies are how we achieve our vision through our mission.
We map-established our strategies using a process learned in Harvard Business School’s Owner President Managed (OPM) program. This strategy map shows the connections among our internal processes, our customers, and our core organizational growth strategy.
By mapping the connections between our established strategies, we integrate our daily work to realize our vision.
For all of our courses, the four core elements of our strategy build to top-level growth. Here they are in hierarchical order:
1. Build off our stable "PIE" foundation
People, Infrastructure, Enterprise. For the Cheetah Micro-Greens course, we expanded our core capabilities from the foundation of what we had established to enable our students to expand their capabilities, too.
2. Deliver "best friend service"
To inspire ourselves and others to be our best, the systems we create make it possible for people to become the best versions themselves. We are like that best friend who brings out the best of you.
This goes from our head, to our hearts, to our hands through the internal processes of how we deliver value to our students — we call it "best friend service." Our internal processes include product development, operations, business development, and the technology we rely on to do our work.
3. Generate great results, fast
As part of our programs, we create inexpensive systems that are easy to use and generate great results — fast — for our students.
With the new Cheetah Micro-Greens course, our students get a complete turn-key system so they don’t just learn the theory on how to grow their own food year-round; they get the system and quickly develop real capabilities they can use day-in and day-out to grow their own food.
4. Expand mastery
We grow the business with research-based methodologies combined with accelerated learning. This develops new capabilities to the mastery level.
We develop our curricula so we and our students quickly master our new capabilities. For example, in the micro-greens course, within one month, the students are already harvesting micro-greens they have grown themselves in their climatically controlled indoor grow tents.
By putting these elements together in a cohesive strategy map, we can trace the connection from our day-to-day work to achieve our vision through our mission.
You can adapt this strategy map to your organization to show the connection among your core strategies. This allows you to step back and see the big picture when you’re feeling buried in mundane logistics.
