Much is written about value. Even more is said about it. Value just might be the most overused word in business today.

At the organization level, we hear about customer value, shareholder value, and enterprise value. At the department level, Product Management wants its products to be perceived as good value not high cost. Sales wants to sell from value rather than feature/functions. And, Marketing is measured on the value of leads and brand equity.

Even support departments like Finance, IT and HR strive for value. Finance wants positive returns of value for capital deployed. IT must demonstrate value to its business unit customers. And, HR strives for a culture that recognizes the value of individuals.

If value is so important, why is there a dearth of proven ways to create and capture value in a given market space? A clear path to value would seem to be critical at a time when competitive differentiation is short-lived and the rate of change has accelerated.

My experience shows there is little content out there to help an enterprise know how to truly identify and realize top and/or bottom line value in their market. Which is enormously frustrating to client-side executives looking for clarity amidst the noise created by multitudes of companies touting their particular solution sets.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be shown the way to value rather than sold solutions? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a roadmap from a trusted advisor to guide your way to value — especially in a market that’s undergoing rapid change? You bet it would.

So what is there to do? Rise above the noise. Stop selling your stuff, and start making sense of the madness. Become a thought leader for your industry. Develop a value roadmap that shows the way to create and capture value in your market space. It works. I’ve helped architect a number of value roadmaps for companies in emerging or changing industries like PLM (product lifecycle management), Customer Experience Management, Digital Media, and Scientific R&D, among others.

What does a value roadmap look like? It’s a map that shows discrete routes to value along with specific advice on capabilities needed to capitalize on the journey. On the one hand you delineate the opportunities to create value. On the other you provide advice on the people, process, and technology needed to capture value. Simply put, a value roadmap shows where to go, how to go, and what’s needed to maximize value.

A road to value is organized by the following connected route and competencies:

More specifically, a value roadmap is comprised in the following ways:

–  Two measures of value. One is growth. The other is cost savings

–  Seven or eight discrete value opportunities. These are proven opportunities to create either top line growth or bottom line cost savings. One or two of the value opportunities might create both top and bottom line value

–  Two to four executing strategies for each value opportunity. These are the strategic imperatives that bring the value opportunities to life

–  Four to six business initiatives aligned to each strategy. These are the activities taking place deep inside an organization. Business initiatives are typically where most conversations start

–  Three sets of competencies in the form of people skills, process/workflow, and technology infrastructure needed to fully realize each value opportunity

Beyond the structure, it’s critical to know what a value roadmap is and isn’t.

A value roadmap is an overarching view of an industry for the benefit of everyone in that industry. As such, it is imperative to present a complete view of the capabilities and credentials needed.

A value roadmap is not a subset of just what your organization might be able to provide when it comes to knowledge transfer, process support or technology. The capabilities needed to fully leverage each value opportunity must be all encompassing.

Again, a value roadmap is an industry-leading effort. It is thought leadership at its best. And, unlike most thought leadership, a value roadmap is highly functional because it is actionable and real.

A value roadmap has clear and immediate benefits to any company operating in your market space. But, it also represents a significant opportunity for the company that publishes it and leverages it. Look for more on that in my next post, The Road to Value, part 2.

Note: If you like this post, you might want to check out another of my posts called Noise. It’s an example of how a value roadmap shifted an entire industry and helped position the company that brought it to market as that industry’s leader.

Thomas Butta

Some fifteen years ago, in the early days of starting up Fast Company magazine, co-founder Alan Webber, shared one of his rules of thumb with me: “a good question beats a good answer.” That pithy wisdom sunk in and took hold immediately. In the course of hundreds of reporting journeys and thousands of conversations with leaders, entrepreneurs, thinkers, and doers of all stripes, I’ve tuned into the questions people ask.

The first thing you notice when you have your ears pricked for questions is that most people (especially businesspeople) are more interested in presenting solutions, making assertions, and sharing their vision. This isn’t surprising. School programs us to focus on producing the right answer and the job description of the leader for the last century has basically been “the person with all the answers.”

That’s why it’s so refreshing (and instructive) to spend time with people who lead with questions rather than answers. Why? Why does inquiry beat certainty every time? Here are just three reasons:

1) Questions are a powerful antidote for hubris, which inevitably arises in a culture that celebrates mastery, values decisiveness, and reveres the top guy (or gal). Genuine questions (rather than that tired oratorical tool: rhetorical questions that contain their own answers) unleash humility, curiosity, even vulnerability. That turns out to be a powerful approach to leadership in a world of expanding complexity, immense challenges and intense change. No single individual can possibly have all of the answers. But an open and curious one can attract more perspectives, surface more possibilities, and enlist more help than one closed off by certitude.

As Vineet Nayar, CEO of the $3.5 billion global IT services firm, HCL Technologies, puts it: “the CEO should be the Chief Question Asker, not the final provider of answers.” He keeps a list of twenty questions and makes time to think about them on a regular (almost daily) basis. He’s asking for trouble when he wonders:

• Should people who create value be governed by people who control it?
• What things do I control that I should not control?
• Could we throw out the entire company rulebook?
• Would my children (or my employees’ children) want to work in a company like mine?
• What would happen if there was no CEO at my company (or at any company in the world)?

He professes not to have the answers, but one thing is certain: the more disruptive the questions, the greater the chance his organization will create the future–rather than be conquered by it.

2) The best questions are the bedrock of all change and creativity. Those classics–Why? Why not? What if?–invite possibility rather than doubt. They are fundamentally subversive, disruptive, and playful–and they switch people into the mode required to invent anything new. Even better, anyone can ask these questions (anyone who has ever spent time in the company of a three-year-old understands this). You don’t have to hold a position of authority to ask a powerful question–and the people with the most powerful questions stand to make the most impact.

That was certainly true for Jane Harper, who spent a nearly 30-year career at IBM asking the kinds of questions most people don’t want to touch. In 1999 she dared to ask: Why would really great people–the best technical and managerial talent in the world–want to come work at IBM? In an era when every young, gifted programmer, engineer, or entrepreneur’s first instinct was to write their own business plan or head to fast-growing startup, life as a foot soldier in Big Blue’s global army was a pretty hard sell. Harper understood that great people want to work on exciting, high-impact projects, with a small team, in a dynamic setting. So she created exactly that in a Cambridge, MA lab and launched a wholly original and powerfully effective internship program called Extreme Blue (which has since grown into a thriving platform for innovation and talent development).

3) Asking good questions trades control for contribution. A question asked and explored as a group (whether that group is a team, a company, or a community) generates more solidarity, engagement, and progress than a proclamation from on high. Spend any amount of time with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, whose organization is celebrated for exuding a powerful sense of purpose and passion from every corner, and you’ll hear him repeatedly refer to “the questions we ask ourselves.”

Questions create conversations–and those conversations are how thriving groups think up their future togetherand stay true to their core. One enduring and powerful question at the heart of Zappos is: how do we sustain this culture as we grow? How do we stay true to the core and inspire ever more creativity and energy to tackle the future? That question is actively explored across the organization and even results in a book–the annual Culture Book–which features the “true feelings, thoughts, and opinions of the employees,” who view themselves as vital custodians of that culture.

Of course, there is no one right question, but one of the most productive questions when it comes to engendering a deeply-felt sense of purpose and inspiring the kind of passion that fuels organizations to do extraordinary things is: What ideas are we fighting for? What do we stand for (and what are we against)? What is our utterly distinctive point of view on where we (our industry, our customers) could and should be headed? Why does what we do matter?

When an organization commits the best energy and imagination of its people to that question, you can hear it in the halls (and the marketplace). When LEGO CEO Jorgen Vig Knudstorp went in search of the iconic toymaker’s lost identity in 2004, he asked the question “what makes us totally unique?”–and designed a process to engage LEGO’s legions of fans and employees. The answer that came back wasn’t “the brick” or “fun” or “cool,” says Knudstorp, but “hard fun. . . deep involvement. . . like reading a god damned book!” More important than the answer itself, was how the question connected with LEGO’s community: “we were defined by the community and through that we found our way home again,” says Knudstorp.

The inevitable corollary to that question is: Are you really who you say you are? Unless you’re willing to hold a brutally honest and transparent conversation (both inside the organization and beyond) about where you’re living up to your ideas and ideals and where you’re falling down, those values will become meaningless words on the wall.

What’s your question? Share it here and join the Beyond Bureaucracy Challenge to share your stories, ideas, and practices about what it takes to make our organizations more inspiring, open and free.