Our colleague Cindy Barnes from FutureCurve makes another punchy plead to focus on BUILDING a value proposition WITH all company stakeholders, so that all corporate actors can ALIGN their actions and stay authentic and synergetic !
In the article published on the FutureCurve blog, she points out the current many discussions around « being authentic both in business and in life in general« , meaning « being congruent between what you say, what you do, what you think, what you feel and what you mean« . Of course she acknowledges this is important !
She also presents how to get it, and we are totally in line ! Some excerpts :
« In talking about value we must focus on stakeholder value and not only customer value … customers are hugely important but if you don’t also consider employee value and supplier value and other key stakeholders then your value will not be authentically congruent.
Engagement here is key … means two-way collaboration, a sharing of the power for mutual benefit
You can’t write a value proposition, full stop. You design a company-wide or portfolio-wide authentic value proposition based on input from all stakeholders. Only then do you design the engagement strategies and plans for multi-level engagement with all stakeholders and only then do you create sales stories and marketing messages. »
Nothing to erase !?
Then the tricky part is to help the company stakeholders (clients, suppliers, employees, shareholders, society, environment …) express what they value ! They so often only say what (the solution) they want or desire, and not what they (really) need …
The Value(s) approach we are building across the Valeur(s) & Management network is based on 2 simple but powerful questions and a principle :
- What for (the solution required) ? leading to define the utility, aim, purpose, goal, need … instead of a solution
- What is enough (to answer these needs) ? leading to constructive ex=changes with actual and potential suppliers
- Work WITH the stakeholders (just like Cindy said …)
Many of our readers know it works not only on business model and value proposition : in purchasing, product & services design, organisations optimization, business model … for so many years ! It looks like we found another set of likeminded people at FutureCurve. Maybe they also can take profit of the synergies with the years of experience accumulated by Value(s) methods specialists ?