Company Aspirations – A Case Study

November 12, 2009

I recently wrote about developing the company’s Aspirations as one of the CEO Imperatives. Last week, we facilitated an Extraordinary Execution workshop for Exinda. The aim of the workshop was to develop the company aspirations, and to translate them into the strategic themes for 2010… and the associated goals for the next quarter.

The Exinda senior management team, with an imperative push from the CEO Michael Sharma, came to the workshop with a pain point: the need for clarity on the ultimate target they are aiming for, and a sharply focused road map on how to get there. Clarity and focus… The key for creating competitive advantage.

They spent two days holed up in a conference room discussing, debating and getting to a common vision of what they aspire to achieve at Exinda. One very powerful shift in the senior management team’s thinking about the company happened on the first day. In trying to define the mission of the company (the ultimate goal), the team kept navigating to a product/technology centric mission… “We want to be the most … provider of WAN Optimization solutions in the … market.” “We want to be the … Unified Performance Management company…”

A classic symptom of early stage technology companies… All about building technology and being defined through the technology…

When we asked the team to dig deep into their own personal reasons why they are part of Exinda and why they like to show up to work every day (and be on conference calls to the wee hours of the morning)… We started to see a clear shift in their thinking… Ultimately, something clicked, and this is what they ended up as the mission:
Our MissionTo build a company that our employees, customers and partners all consider to be great!
This means:

  • Creating innovative products that customers and partners can’t live without.
  •  Creating enthusiastic long-term customers.
  • Building great people and teams who exhibit Exinda values

Then we came to the Vision (an image of the company in the future that brings it closer to achieving the mission). The ah-ha moment was about focus… True focus… Which means having the discipline and faith to hone in on a very specific focal point, and put all the effort into NAILING it. In the case of Exinda, it was all about being market segment focused; taking each segment one at a time; and truly nailing it before moving to the next.

Our Vision

Within 3 years, Exinda will have a 60% market share in 2-4 specific product market segments by:

  • Systematically targeting each segment
  • Tailoring our product to have a significant competitive advantage in that segment, and
  • Tailoring our go to market strategy, methodologies, and organization to win that segment

Then we moved on the Values (set of inherent beliefs and characteristics that are shared by the organization)… I will let the values they came up speak for themselves:

Our Values

  • Teamwork : Trust, healthy conflict, commit, be accountable, results (TCCAR)
  • Humility: Respect everyone, not beyond advisement; Be humble
  • Focus: Laser sharp, disciplined, no distractions
  • Intelligent: Do what makes sense, be smart, resourceful. Keen sense of curiosity with a hunger to learn
  • Passion : Love what you are doing and show it
  • Hard Work: Break a sweat; dedicated and committed to excellence
  • Sense of Urgency: do it now, do it right…next…
  • Integrity: Be ethical; do the right thing
  • Meritocracy: Reward and grow people based on results

The second day of the workshop, we focused on strategies and goals. Like any of our other portfolio companies, the team started with a long list of strategic themes and goals. We were not getting very far in pulling back to a smaller set… Until Michael stood up, pointed to the Aspirations… All of a sudden, 15 or so strategies boiled down to three… and 50 or so goals for the next quarter boiled down to less than 10.

The senior team walked out with a clear set of common aspirations, clarity of thinking, a focal point they can all hone in on. All the more ammunition for creating competitive advantage… And an inspiration to management teams across the portfolio… 

The Chief Executive Officer

Firas was previously a venture capitalist at Openview. He has returned to his operational roots and now works as The Chief Executive Officer of Everteam and is also the Founder of <a href="http://nsquaredadvisory.com/">nsquared advisory</a>. Previously, he helped launch a VC fund, start and grow a successful software company and also served time as an obscenely expensive consultant, where he helped multi-billion-dollar companies get their operations back on track.