Strategic Planning – Executing the “Box Top” Strategy

When I was a young boy growing up on our farm, we lived next door to my grandparents. On rainy days, my grandma would send one of us to the closet to pick out a jigsaw puzzle. The jigsaw puzzles were stacked up one on top of the other in that closet but in the very back was a brown grocery sack rolled up from the top. One day, the curiosity got the best of me and I grabbed the sack down off the shelf and peered in. Guess what was in it…a jigsaw puzzle. I asked my grandma if we could put that one together that day instead of one of the others we had put together so many other times. I’ll never forget her response. She said, “son, we can’t put that one together. There’s no box top. It will take forever and we’ll have no idea where we are going.” Wow. How many business strategies are like that jigsaw puzzle in the old grocery sack? We spend hours upon hours building the best strategy possible for our businesses and then send the pieces of the strategy to each department responsible for it’s execution. What we seldom do is send the box top. How do your leaders, marketers, sales people etc.. know where they are going and how their role fits into the “big picture” if we don’t send them the box top? Take the time to paint your box top carefully and then make as many copies of it as necessary to ensure every single person in your business can see it in their sleep!