This document provides strategic imperatives for running a successful business in Nigeria. It discusses the importance of having a clear mission, vision, values and strategy. Key points include having a balanced organization using the McKinsey 7S model. Critical success factors include targeting new clients, improving service delivery and financial performance. The document emphasizes managing for liquidity and financial strength. Keys to survival include carrying out regular SWOT analyses, understanding the environment, and having long-term strategic focus to compete successfully. Threats to failure include lack of capital, poor management, and not keeping proper records.

1. Strategic Imperatives of running
a successful business in Nigeria
S.S. Afemikhe Consulting
©

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Mission
PURPOSE
Why the company exists
VALUES
What the company believes in
STANDARDS AND BEHAVIOURS
The policies and behaviour
patterns that underpin the
distinctive competence and the
value system
STRATEGY
The competitive position and
distinctive competence
Includes four elements – Purpose, Strategy, Behaviour Standards and Values.
The Ashridge Mission Model
A strong mission, we believe, exists when the four elements of mission link tightly
together resonating and reinforcing each other.

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Vision
Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, authors of Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge,
identify vision as a central concept for their theory of leadership.
• To choose a direction, a leader must first have developed a mental image (Vision) of a
possible and desirable future state of the organization.
• This vision, may be as vague as a dream or as precise as a goal or mission statement.
• The Critical point is that a vision articulates a view of a realistic, credible, attractive
future for the organization, a condition that is better in some important ways than what
now exists.
Please note that vision and mission are not fully overlapping concepts.
• Vision refers to a future state “a condition that is better… than what now exists”,
• whereas mission more normally refers to the present. Marks and Spencer’s mission “to
raise the standards of the working man” was being achieved throughout the 1950s
and 1960s and is still being achieved today.
• This is a timeless explanation of the organization’s identity and ambition.
Vision, Mission, Leadership and Success

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When a vision is achieved, a new vision needs to be developed. But a mission can remain
the same and members of the organization can still draw strength from their common and
timeless cause.
 A vision is, therefore, more associated with a goal whereas a mission is more
associated with a way of behaving.
 Mission is the more powerful concept.
 Vision is valuable because goals are valuable. But it is the clarity of mission rather
than mission that is the strength of a great leader.
In times of change, a new mission will be difficult to distinguish from a vision because the
new mission will be a mental image of a desirable future state. Two concerns with vision as
a concept.
 a vision begins to lose its power when it is achieved. It is no longer a driving force for
action and the organization can begin to lose direction. This can happen to companies
that strive for market leadership. Once achieved, the ambition that drove the company
drains away, leaving it directionless.
 if a vision is so ambitious that it is unlikely to be achieved in the next five or ten years it
loses its power to motivate and stimulate. It becomes too ambitious and unrealistic.
Vision, Mission, Leadership and Success

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A corporate mission is much more than good intentions and fine ideas. It
represents the framework for the entire business, the values which drive the
company and the belief that the company has in itself and what is can achieve.
Colin Marshall, Deputy Chairman
And Chief Executive, British Airways
Mission is the cultural glue that enables an organisation to function as a
collective unity. This cultural glue consists of strong norms and values that
influence the way in which people behave, how they work together and how
they pursue the goals of the organisation. This form of mission can amount to
a business philosophy that helps employees to perceive and interpret events
in the same way and to speak a common language.
Key Points on Mission

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• Commercial and Cultural glue
A management team capable of defining a clear mission will have advantages
over a team that has defined only its strategy.
The mission team will have values as well as strategic concepts to guide it through
important decisions: the strategy team will have commercial logic only.
• Better recruitment and promotion decisions
Companies with clear missions are more choosy about the people they hire and
promote.
They use a border range of criteria than the traditional measures of education,
experience skill level and leadership qualities. This is because they have a clearer
ideal of what sort of company they want to be and what sort of people are likely
to do well in the culture. By defining the values that form the organisation
culture, managers with a clear mission are better able to judge who fit with the
culture and who will rub awkwardly.
The Benefits of Defining Mission

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Strategy is about shaping the future
Igor Ansoff Manager & Mathematician
(described as Father of Strategic
Management published Corporate Strategy
in 1965.
“How managers could plan for a more
successful future.”
Success is made when the organisation
moves towards a strategy that leans its
lesson and adopts to new opportunities
Strategy to survive business in Nigeria

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WARNING!
About 50% of SSMEs fold up within their first year
...only 20% survive beyond 5 years

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Why do Businesses Fail?
• Lack of access to Capital
• Inability to separate business and personal transaction
• Inability to determine if the business is profitable or not
• Absence of good business planning
• Weak management structure and lack of internal control
• Non compliance with corporate affairs and tax laws
• Refusal to seek advice from financial experts
• Not keeping proper books of accounts and records
• Poor management of stock and credit sales
• Inability to foresee business challenges and deal with them

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 Vision, Mission, Culture
 A balanced organisation
 Understanding the environment
 Long term repositioning
 Compete successfully
Superior Strategies for Survival

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A balanced organisation
Mc Kinsey’s 7s Model
• Strategy: future plans, what the company intends to achieve, how they intend to
achieve it as well as how we can improve on these plans.
• Structure: organisational structure, hierarchy and co-ordination with a view to
ascertain its effectiveness how it can be improved and how changes to these can
affect it positively or negatively.

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A balanced organisation (contd.)
Mc Kinsey’s 7s Model
• Systems: The different divisions or teams.
• Shared Value: Those values that support the very reason for the…. The beliefs,
the expectations the employees, culture.
• Style: An element of culture with their employees and clients are a good.
• Staff: The people in the organisation
• Skills: team Knowledge

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Critical Success Factors
CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS
Client People Financial
Operational
Excellence
Targeting
• New Clients
• Increased client
satisfaction
• Improved Client service
• Improved Service Delivery
• More aggressive marketing
campaign
Targeting
• Presentation skills training
• Marketing skills training
• On the job training
• Technology training
Targeting
• Delivering more than is
promised
• Improved client
turnaround
Targeting
• Revenue per existing client
• Revenue from NEW clients
• Revenue per service

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“Manage for Liquidity and for financial strength”
– Peter Drucker
 In turbulent times, liquidity is more important than earnings.
 A business can survive long period of low earnings or low
revenues if it has adequate cash flow and financial strength
 In the long run, productivity is the source of economic value.
Making resources productive is the specific job of management
Keys to Survival

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- Carry out SWOT analysis regularly
 Get everyone to think hard and imaginatively about the whole organisation and its external
context
 Consider the links between the four boxes. What strengths will allow you to take advantage
of opportunities
Environmental Sensing
- Practice wisdom of the crowd
Strengths Weaknesses
ThreatsOpportunities

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 How does your industry (or sector) work?
 What does success look like for your organisation?
 What would it take to do it ten times better?
 What is the most important issue you face?
 What would you do with no limitations?
 How many of those limitations are real?
Strategic SWOT Focus

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 See beyond the obvious to new possibilities for the big picture.
 Understand how to break down a situation into smaller pieces.
 Know how to play with individual parts and reorganise them.
 Be aware of the most important strategy tools and principles.
 Gain the ability to create vision and goals beyond the short-term.
 The people around you acknowledge you as a strategic thinker.
Strategic SWOT Focus

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 Does this problem let us start again and do it better?
 What can we do today that was impossible yesterday?
 Is our plan still working? How can we take advantage of events?
Remember the Paradigm question:
“What can you not do today that if you were able to do it will extensively
change your output”
Strategic SWOT Focus

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 You know what could threaten the survival of your business
 Everyone is looking for warning signs and discussing them openly.
 Potential delays to responding to threats are understood.
 Marketing and innovation are improved to keep the company adapting
 You know the basic steps of avoiding failure and getting sustained
growth.
Key Survival issues

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 What threats could cause the failure of the company?
 How will you recognise the warning signs of failure in your business?
 Are there replacement products and new competitors?
 Have you been putting off important decisions?
 What are customers saying about your products and services?
Key Survival issues

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 Are you growing too fast? Are getting sloppy with your expansion?
 Are your financial controls adequate?
 Is bureaucracy getting in the way of action?
 Which new competitors are more innovative? Or growing faster?
 How will social trends change demand for your products or services?
 What are your colleagues saying in employee surveys?
 Have you got the management skills necessary to be effective?
Key Survival issues

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All decisions are made about the future thus injecting uncertainty.
“Sweet are the uses of adversity which like the lead wears yet a silver jewel on its head –
William Shakespeare in As You Like it”
Uncertainty can only be reduced by committed decisions and actions. You can’t wait for
uncertainty to disappear but you can choose to create certainty of purpose and direction. You
can’t remove risk but you can think about how to create a culture and processes to adapt to
unexpected problems.
• How high are levels of uncertainty in your industry?
• What uncertainty surrounds a particular decision?
• What are the risks in making (or not making) certain decisions?
• How could things go wrong? What would you do next?
• Which risks are outside your direct control?
• Which risks are within your direct control?
• How can you deal with changes outside your control?
• How can you anticipate external changes?
Management task: Recognise the cost and benefits of Risks (Risk/Reward Matrix) Your strategy
will have uncertain outcomes but you can try to assess the rewards and how to gain them.
Taking risks in an uncertain environment

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Get competitive advantage
• Identify how you compare in cost, differentiation and focus.
• Find new ways of competing in these three generic areas.
• Consider how these sources of competitive advantage can be combined
• Seek to create virtuous circles or chains of advantage that create new
opportunities for you that are difficult for competitors to imitate
• Find ways of protecting your advantages.
A word about competition

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- Too little: Too late: Too few..
Strike a balance
- Create confidence
- Motivate
- Reward your winning team
Develop your winning team
Communicate to achieve Extraordinary
Performance
• Vision
• Mission
• Culture
Communicate endlessly

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Get lucky, Achieve success.
So what is Achievement
- Preparation
- Accident of time, place and birth
(opportunity)
- Practical intelligence.
Summarised into
[Preparation + Opportunity]
When a person is prepared and is given
an opportunity and he seizes it, the result
is success.

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Avoid the “Knowing and Doing
Gap
Just Do it: made popular by Nike
 Translate Knowledge into action
 Knowledge acquired by doing trumps that of learning
 Engage in thoughtful action ….taking action will generate
experience from which you can learn
 Break the barriers to internal and external knowledge
transfer
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Great victories are won when ordinary people
execute their assigned tasks.

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THANK YOU