Any business book or business expert will tell you that to thrive and survive in a competitive market your organization must have a strategy. To refine it even more, you must have a ‘clear and concise’ strategy. This must be something everyone in the organization can understand and align to as the basis for what they do every day. But clear and concise is not so easy.
This is at the core of LIFT, where we focus on People Powered Growth. Dr. Jeff Kaplan has spent over 20 years studying successful companies from around the world. After a while, he started to see patterns – some good, some bad. The one thing that stood out was that organizations needed a formula for how to align and accelerate your strategy to reach your goals faster, which is how he developed the ICE principle. The acronym stands for:
- Innovate – How can we think differently today than we did yesterday? How do you challenge yourself and the organization to grow and stretch? How do you reach beyond the status quo and continually improve? In reality, innovation is not just new solution or a redesigned package. As Clay Jones, former CEO of Rockwell-Collins, states, “Innovation is making it so the company is free to think differently”. Innovation doesn’t have to be radical; it has to be an openness to new ways of thinking.
- Collaborate – How can we work differently today than we did yesterday? Most companies that have been around for a decade or more eventually fall into silos. Neat, comfortable areas where we often become – without saying it aloud – a closed system whose goal is to hang on to the way we’ve always done things. Collaboration challenges that by helping break down the silos and facilitating teams and individuals to join forces. New ways of working help us reach the strategy faster and senior executives are often surprised how much latent potential is unlocked with some of the brightest ideas and new, streamlined processes from all ranks of the organization.
- Engage – How do we act differently today than we did yesterday? How do we include more people, internally and externally to achieve our goals? How do we engage with more customers, more markets, and more areas of business that we’ve ever connected with before? It is about building meaningful conversations and relationships where everyone succeeds.
AT LIFT, we have found that the companies who deploy an ICE strategy for success, consciously and unconsciously, rise higher in their industry and climb higher in the Fortune 500 list. Are you willing to accelerate your vision, your core strategies, and continue to thrive in the new business world of today? That is the calling of willing2win.org. We are sharing our experiences and highlighting your successes every week. Are you Willing to Win? Join the conversation and take the challenge to look at your strategies in a fresh new way? Email us at info@liftinnovate.com and together we can Leverage ICE to transform work!