News & Insights
“You have no right to go before a public without an adequate technique. You have to have speech, and it's a cultivated speech.” Martha Graham, pioneer of modern dance
|
“You have no right to go before a public without an adequate technique. You have to have speech, and it's a cultivated speech.” Martha Graham, pioneer of modern dance
|
Dear Business Leader, Thank you for all that you do. Please remember to celebrate the victory in continuing to face our lives with actionable optimism, despite the uncertainty in so many of our institutions. It’s been a joy to watch so many undaunted colleagues building their expertise, serving their customers, and developing their team. I’m as amazed as I am grateful for your stories about delivering on professional values in spite of what crises have come. Frankly, it’s the strength of your work that leaves me feeling as though the “emergency” isn’t so much of one. I think we all realize that if a “crisis” is pervasive enough, it’s just a problem—and problems are solved by taking action. We’ve learned to prefer next steps, and that’s what I want to discuss. I believe next steps towards offensive value come from effective use of information. Just as you wouldn’t back down from challenges in innovation or customer service, I encourage you to tackle information design—the journey from meeting people where they are to delivering outcomes in harmony—with the same aplomb. Information design applies to every aspect of business. This ties nicely to the fact that value never stands still: any offer can be degraded either by competition or by many varieties of supply shocks. Resilient value, then, is built on proactively effective communication between team members, stakeholders, partners, and customers. To stay ahead of commoditization, economic trends, and supply chain volatility alike, we must message to people in a way that mobilizes them to cooperate. The necessary message begins with ourselves. Developing your team can train you in the clarity, compassion, and context that knits together a strong offer. Build the body of knowledge that upholds your professional values, and its courage will radiate authentically throughout your organization. Authenticity is simply alignment between values, beliefs, goals, actions, and learning. And more than ever, it’s the key to organizational efficacy. A strategically authentic organization designs the execution of its principles for systemic returns. You, likewise, can achieve resilient engagement across internal and external audiences—as long as you intentionally commit to authentic action. We all must comprehensively solve for the needs of the community around our value. So we also realize that communicating in resiliency and authenticity is the only way to share clear insights with that community. Now seeing the strain of this crisis on our community, we further understand that high-trust relationships are key to creating deep value. That’s why I want to help you enforce standards for privileging the strategically authentic, transparent, and rigorous conversations which build the community of competence that we need to continue moving forward. The beginnings of that community are what I’ve enjoyed most over the past year. It’s a gift to keep faith that setbacks are survivable, and to share solidarity in prudent processes. I will continue showing my gratitude by delivering the most authentically integrated value I can. Let’s keep doing our best together. Sincerely, Alexander David McMath
Principal | McMath Solutions LLC
0 Comments
"The cobbler's child has no shoes." It's a shame how common it is to neglect the application of our expertise within our own business. Conversely, when we prioritize implementation for internal customers, we unlock value in both efficiency and innovation.
We understand that it's simply not credible or tenable not to practice what we preach. Putting aside the natural marketing disconnect, we know that clear thinking comes from the practice of clarity. We also know that addressing our own needs is valuable to the refinement of our offer and delivery facing clients. We need the repetitions, and frankly the stakes, to practice defining problems--along with their causes and solutions. Just as we message to clients to meet them where we are, internal implementation is a key task within our own management to avoid indecision based on scope insensitivity. Wherever we go and whomever we serve, to include ourselves, we have to face stakeholders with designed expertise. Our core competencies must be readily actionable, easily communicated, and internally consistent. We are what we can prove by doing, but we won’t get to prove what we don’t understand deeply. We earn opportunities when we communicate valuable understanding informed by experience. Implementation is matching insight to action. It’s the only way to provide solutions beyond the obvious. Don't neglect a valuable resource for informing your approach. Our Operations & Program Management practice deals with the challenge that not all businesses are easily understood, even from within. We believe that information design is what aligns motivation and incentives so that key activities align the outcomes of delivery, capture, and customer goals. We're ready to help you develop and deliver your expertise to build value from the center of your organization outwards towards all stakeholders. To tell us more about your goals, and discover how McMath Solutions can help you Make your Market, contact us today to schedule a strategy call. Decisions are made by people, and beneficial decisions happen when people receive information messaged to mobilize them. It's true of internal customers and stakeholders as much as external ones—or more, because organizational culture and politics may prevent an open conversation about each person's true decision-making context. To solve this problem, we designed the Change Management Canvas: a single-page tool to map stakeholders and optimize the flow of information between them for consistency and alignment of objectives. ![]()
We use this tool for client and internal projects to ensure clear fidelity to intent regarding the strategy of a given initiative. By developing a common operating picture for all the producers, consumers, and users of organizational information, we're empowered to move from a kernel of key values through the perspective of each stakeholder to ultimately weave a tapestry of incentives and concerns for everyone within the scope of desired changes.
We're proud to share this robust resource with you. We approach the Knowledge Management & Strategic Communications practice as the optimization of organizational behavior through information architecture. We design for business outcomes by solving for the best use of information by individuals, helping you unify and refine your efforts in order to grow your capabilities and tackle bigger challenges. To tell us more about your goals and discover how McMath Solutions can help you Make your Market, contact us today to schedule a strategy call. A value chain is the process of creating a good or service from start to finish. You likely use this concept in your business to discover your strengths and capitalize on them.
But as markets become more competitive, and innovative solutions become not only valuable but necessary for survival, you need more depth in your thinking around the relationships between your organization and its stakeholders. Enter the value constellation. The visual metaphor is apt for a deeper way to think about operations and incentives because it evokes dense connections in more than a single, linear dimension. Thinking in terms of value constellations obligates us to consider more possibilities for each vendor's knowledge base, risks, costs, and forms of capital. A value constellation allows for complex interactions between resources and experts that gives you the ability to offer better solutions by combining the strengths of more than one vendor. By creating access to new knowledge bases, you expand the ability of your business to serve more customers in tandem with partners. A more diverse customer base means a greater likelihood of finding new clients and that is always a good thing, especially for a growing small business. Most business owners don’t want to take on the risk or cost of trying to own every resource. An innovative teaming strategy creates value for your business by allowing a variety of vendors to contribute through a constellation of operations that gives you the ability to call upon expertise outside of your niche. Innovation prevents our value from being obviated. It's therefore critical to understand how to knit together capabilities from extended networks of partners, and communicate the value of that cooperative solution between them—and furthermore, to your customers. At McMath Solutions, we approach the information architecture of strategic partnerships as a critical part of our Our Offer Development & Capture practice. We can help you present your expertise as value facing partners and customers in order to grow your capabilities and tackle bigger challenges. To tell us more about your goals, and discover how McMath Solutions can help you Make your Market, contact us today to schedule a strategy call. Market positioning is about credibility. How will we guard ours?
Comparison of a brand directly to others misses the point. The better self-assessment is to ensure that stakeholders' experience of credible positioning is continuously improving, lest it regress compared to customer or competitor knowledge alike. Credibility comes from experience—and yet too often, we face a double bind: experience is required to qualify for the very experience we need to gain. And it's too often easy for stakeholders to view the experience we do have as insufficiently similar to their needs. Ambitions wither and die for want of those initial opportunities. We all hope to transform experience into expertise that is repeatable, adaptable, and defensible. We attain that expertise when we capture, deliver, and learn from opportunities. In fact, the journey to expertise is completely necessary: otherwise, our expertise becomes obviated and our value proposition is disrupted. This means that even established businesses must continue to deepen their value and expand the universe of clients they can serve. So marketing never ends, and neither does it become easy. We are always iterating on our ability to "tell it to sell it." A growing business is always capturing some form of opportunity for the first time. That's why it's paramount to align the purpose, values, and presentation of existing insights with the needs, decision processes, and dreams of future partners. We are what we can prove by doing. We prove what we earn the opportunity to do. We earn our opportunities when we communicate clear, valuable purpose to the people we want to serve. It's paramount to practice this clarity at all times. Our Offer Development & Capture practice is built to serve your needs in presenting expertise as value. We help you guide your customers through the conversation from technical solutions to realized value. To tell us more about your goals, and discover how McMath Solutions can help you Make your Market, contact us today to schedule a strategy call. Part 3 of a series. Find previous installments here and here.
We've previously discussed the benefits of aligning your mission, vision, and core values; along with the process of maintaining alignment across stakeholders. To conclude the series, let's explore the results we achieve through consistently held informational values—the what we get and how it serves our why. A business is founded to help people according to its' leaders core values. But it will only succeed if those values are enacted in a way that moves customers to exchange the value they perceive for revenue that allows the business to sustain operations. Most of us know the key management requirement behind sustainable revenue is sustainable processes. We additionally hold that the information is the master process design discipline. Marketing is information design. Talent acquisition is information design. Training and onboarding is information design. Delivery and customer service standards are information design. Likewise accounting, although the information is more (or less) straightforward than the previous items. Every aspect of a business requires stakeholders to understand, process, retain, and act on information. Why leave any valuable flow of information unmonitored, or less than optimized? There are two insights to consider. The first is that tacit knowledge is always growing. If it isn't recorded, it will be lost each time stakeholders enter or exit. Its recreation, with no guarantee of fidelity to previous iterations, is frankly a waste and a risk. The second is that processes are only properly interconnected through managed design. The functions of a business are meant to serve a common goal; they naturally have insights to offer each other and mesh points to control. As long as functions are fulfilled by people, those people's communications need to be guided by known values and shared purpose. In turn, the business as a whole faces its customers, partners, vendors, and stakeholders. Only by aligning internal actors and activities to values can an organization consistently face external audiences with effective, continuously improving messaging. Ultimately, consistency and dedication to a regular design process is what builds towards the most desirable outcome: a shared narrative to drive emotions and frames the further explanation of "why this actually works”. Informational alignment, or messaging consistency, is the means by which we actually gain purview to opportunities. And when actually deliver effective work, our informational process is ready to corroborate and refine the story for an even stronger future. To learn more about the Knowledge Management & Strategic Communications practice, and how other McMath Solutions...solutions can help you Make your Market, contact us today to schedule a strategy call. Part 2 of a series. Find the first installment here.
Last time, we discussed the benefits of aligning your mission, vision, and core values. Now, we'd like to discuss the process of maintaining that aligned information across internal and external audiences. Aligned messaging empowers aligned activities and outcomes. Effective information strengthens every aspect of a business, from training, to quality control, to marketing and sales. The unified creation, understanding, and refinement of information products, then, is critical. For us, message development is a systems design discipline: an intentional practice that ensures the true reflection of your approach is never lost in the moment of solving a problem. Even though we handle information every day, it proves difficult to build a process that integrates its many forms. To that point: please be clear that processes and technology are not the same thing. A process may require capital investment, but the strategy behind it can't be dependent on the tools it uses. Information isn't created (or understood) by tools and tactics, but rather by people. Choose a unifying direction for the needed effect of messaging, and both the greater process and its tools will avail themselves. In some cases, the key design guidance and configuration management is as simple as a set of outlines and tables created in a word processor. Simple tools are particularly important as we consider the permutations of perception between audiences. We quickly find that the messaging process must strike a balance between repeatable actions and situational flexibility. Efforts to make your values uniformly actionable and persuasive will highlight the interplay between these two requirements. Ask your team to curate information and streamline its processing to protect the spirit of your mission, vision, and core values. Curation begets consistency. Consistency begets better choices. Correct choices compound. Investment in compelling communication realizes tremendous returns as you make your organizational identity impossible to misunderstand. In the end, the only alternative is to risk a breakdown in trust—as well as quality, and ultimately value—between leadership, team members, stakeholders, and clients (or any combination of the above). That's why we champion standards and principles in messaging: they equip your team to uphold core truths and strategic unity at every level of work. To learn more about the Knowledge Management & Strategic Communications practice, and how other McMath Solutions...solutions can help you Make your Market, contact us today to schedule a strategy call. This is the first of a new series where we’ll discuss the importance of maintaining messaging consistency. The most important asset to your business is its message—the reason why it exists. This message should saturate all aspects of your business and ultimately stand as its cornerstone.
The first assignment then for any new business will be to determine what that message is. We find this by asking the following questions: What is your mission? What is your vision? What are your core values? Your mission is an extension of you. Clearly define your mission by looking at the problems you solve and how you differ from others in your field. That difference will be critical to remember. As an example, we here at McMath solutions began with this mission in mind: “We strive for clear, consistent, actionable implementation of our clients’ first principles facing all their stakeholders.” Our mission lets you know who we are and why we exist. With the mission defined, your vision statement will speak to not only what your company currently achieves but look toward the future. Consistency to mission is key. If your vision and mission are not consistent you run the risk of dividing your team. For McMath Solutions, our mission led to our vision: “Messages Make Markets.” This vision is our mission looking toward the future. We believe that when we work toward actionable implementation and help you with your messages we can make and open up markets that were previously closed to both your business and us. Once the mission and vision are defined and in alignment with one another, your core values need to be defined as well. What are the values that your business strives to achieve? Or more to the point, what values will your company need to achieve your mission and vision? These values should reflect your mission and vision and bring understanding to your team on what’s expected of them. Our core values, which we call truths, “Aggressive efficacy, clarity at the crux, and allegiance,” grew out of the mission and vision. If we believe that messages make markets and that we strive for clear, consistent, actionable implementation, then we must press for our team to ensure aggressive efficacy, to remember that clarity pushes toward best outcomes, and to strive for allegiance in all aspects of business. In order for your business to fulfill its mission, consistency to message is crucial. Everything the business does has to be aligned to the mission or the business risks losing efficacy. Now that we’ve discussed guiding values, stay tuned for next week as we discuss further areas where consistency will be critical to your business. To learn more about the Knowledge Management & Strategic Communications practice, and how other McMath Solutions...solutions can help you Make your Market, contact us today to schedule a strategy call. Process development and a comprehensive implementation plan work in tandem to create a business’s strategic success. As your company grows, systems must be built in order to handle expansion. As your company thrives, the more necessary it is to build a systemic framework of processes that sustains the success.
Every business is someone’s dream of how to solve a problem, being made into reality. Optimal systems lead to the solutions. However, systems require intentionality towards solving the correct problems via integrated methods. It will take effort to solve problems with a process, but this will lead to sustainable growth. Your value to your clients rises because you are better able to handle their problems. Every problem solved with a process is one less problem you will have to face in the future. Depending on the process, you have instead built an avenue for profit or efficiency. Once these systems have been created, it is the leader’s job to monitor their efficiency periodically. A system of processes for one stage of growth may not fit the needs of a later stage. A business must always be willing to revamp processes as time goes on. In doing so, a system that leads to success is created. A culture of continuous process improvement ensures tradition never stifles growth. Tradition is pivotal to a business’s culture. Left unchecked, tradition can also be its downfall. Make your culture value growth and sustainability more than the status quo. Your business is too important to allow it’s traditions to override its effectiveness. Systems and processes are necessary to the continued success in a company’s long-term strategy. Ensure your business sees that success by being willing to evaluate your systems and processes when necessary. When leaders take the time to reconsider the systems they’ve implemented, the company learns a new standard of optimization. They grow in understanding the company culture and build alongside leadership sustainable practices for growth. To learn more about the Operations and Program Management practice, and how other McMath Solutions...solutions can help you Make your Market, contact us today to schedule a strategy call. The beginning of a project requires answers to familiar questions: Whom is it for? What do they need? How much will it cost? Who will work on it?
Those questions are necessary but not sufficient. Consider also: What do we know? Or conversely: What am I missing? What are the gaps in my knowledge? An organization’s ability to answer these questions should grow over time. Single answers guide the parameters of a project, but in the aggregate they either fulfill or sunder the mission of a company. When we invest in processing our teams’ bodies of knowledge, we set ourselves up for growth. Intentional planning is what mines value from knowledge reserves to create consistent and available information as a substrate for growth. Consistency strengthens both internal onboarding and client-facing communication processes. It builds efficiency, scalability, buy-in, and understanding. Growing pains are inevitable. Every next step causes friction. That’s why knowledge management is pivotal: We can’t sell if offers aren’t aligned. We can’t scale if there are no standards. An emphasis on consistency unifies effort, and in fact empowers innovation from a shared context. We’ve lived this for ourselves. We had to curate each team member’s knowledge into client-facing value. We understand that it’s critical for each member of the team to know what we offer, to whom, how, and why. Fluency is a prerequisite for the synergy and innovation we desire—that’s why knowledge management is a key investment at both strategic and tactical levels. To learn more about the Knowledge Management & Strategic Communications practice, and how other McMath Solutions...solutions can help you Make your Market, contact us today to schedule a strategy call. |
As a businessperson, you’ve taken the obligation to stand before someone who has their own goals and needs, and to assure them that you can help bridge the gap between present and future. You desire to bring something real to bear both on the gap itself and on the customer’s understanding of it—nothing hidden behind cliché or sophistry. We know you take the promise to maximize customers’ time and money as seriously as we do. That’s why we treat thought leadership as another means to earn the trust your dreams will place in us.
|
Make Your Market Today!
|