SOCCER - A Framework for Long Term Business Success
Introduction
Welcome to Season Two of the Seven Heads newsletter.
One of the thoughts when I decided to take a short break (which then became a long one) was that my writing lacked a framework for talking about company success or failure, both in the short to medium and over the long term. So, to start off Season 2 of the newsletter, I’ve put together a framework that draws together, what are for me, the key elements.
In this article, I’m just going to outline it briefly, and in future articles, break it down more into components and how they interact.
The SOCCER Framework
Before we start discussing it, let’s define what I mean by these terms.
Strategy and operations are fairly obvious as is their interdependence. For a startup, a great idea is rarely, if ever, good enough without good operational execution. However, over time, the ability of the company to change is equally important.
In the early stage companies have to be extremely flexible and ‘pivot’ where appropriate e.g. if customer take up is low, the company needs to find a better use case or target audience for the product. If not, it will run out of cash. However, as operations increase in size and complexity, organisational cultures become more established etc and making change becomes more difficult.
Over the longer term it is the endurance and resilience of the organisation that leads to sustained success and ability to adapt and survive when faced with external challenges. The University of Oxford can trace its origins back to 1096. It’s fair to say it has faced huge change, both societal and technological, in its history and yet it is still going strong. Yet we would not consider it to be a fast moving organisation. Clearly there are other factors that account for its continued success.
Bringing It Together
Strategy, operations, and change capabilities affect the viability and profitability of the organisation over the short term within the planning horizon, and there’s certainly a trend away from the traditional 3-5 years to a more ‘agile’ type of strategic planning.
Endurance and resilience extends beyond that horizon and into the area of ‘radical uncertainty’ and most organisations ignore this at their peril.It’s with this in mind that we can start to look at company success and failure.
Until Next Time
Pete