Original article from the Flevy business blog can be found here: http://flevy.com/blog/a-strategic-framework-for-lasting-excellence/ In my teens and twenties I was an avid hill-walker (hiker) and occasional mountaineer (ice axe, rope and crampons). Nowadays time, dodgy knees and lack of fitness limit my adventures, but my fascination with mountains and mountaineering history is undiminished. 18 months ago I was lucky enough to make my first trip to Nepal to see the awesome 8,000 metre Himalayan giants and I’m looking forward to returning, both to trek and in my capacity as a Trustee of a charity that supports schools in remote mountain areas there. For me mountaineering analogies aptly describe the challenges of business. If you were on the organising committee or a team member setting out to climb Everest or, even more difficult and dangerous, the world’s No 2 peak, K2, would you: • Select an expedition leader you didn’t trust, or one who was an egotistical bully who insisted on making all the decisions themselves without consultation? • Select team members who couldn’t get on with each other? This is a frequent cause of mountaineering failures and sometimes tragedies. • Fail to pick the strongest available team for the expedition due to petty politics and prejudices? This happened for example in the British expeditions to Everest in 1922 and 1924, with ultimately disastrous consequences. • Fail to train and get fit? • Take along team members who were manifestly unfit, for whatever reasons? • Fail to consider and plan for reasonably predictable eventualities that could jeopardise the expedition or, more importantly, lives? • Go at a time of year when the weather was guaranteed to be bad, or stay too long into the monsoon season to try to complete the climb? • Fail to acclimatise once you were there? Altitude sickness, often caused by moving too fast and staying at high altitude too long, is a major issue.

1. A Strategic Framework for Lasting
Excellence
Contributed by Mark Ashton on November 17, 2014 in Management & Leadership , Strategy, Marketing, & Sales
In my teens and twenties I was
an avid hill-walker (hiker) and
occasional mountaineer (ice
axe, rope and
crampons). Nowadays time,
dodgy knees and lack of fitness
limit my adventures, but my
fascination with mountains
and mountaineering history is
undiminished. 18 months ago

2. I was lucky enough to make my first trip to Nepal to see the awesome 8,000 metre
Himalayan giants and I’m looking forward to returning, both to trek and in my capacity as a
Trustee of a charity that supports schools in remote mountain areas there.
For me mountaineering analogies aptly describe the challenges of business. If you were on
the organising committee or a team member setting out to climb Everest or, even more
difficult and dangerous, the world’s No 2 peak, K2, would you:
 Select an expedition leader you didn’t trust, or one who was an egotistical bully who
insisted on making all the decisions themselves without consultation?
 Select team members who couldn’t get on with each other? This is a frequent cause
of mountaineering failures and sometimes tragedies.
 Fail to pick the strongest available team for the expedition due to petty politics and
prejudices? This happened for example in the British expeditions to Everest in 1922
and 1924, with ultimately disastrous consequences.
 Fail to train and get fit?
 Take along team members who were manifestly unfit, for whatever reasons?
 Fail to consider and plan for reasonably predictable eventualities that could
jeopardise the expedition or, more importantly, lives?

3.  Go at a time of year when the weather was guaranteed to be bad, or stay too long into
the monsoon season to try to complete the climb?
 Fail to acclimatise once you were there? Altitude sickness, often caused by moving
too fast and staying at high altitude too long, is a major issue.
 Take people with you who lacked serious experience of mountaineering? Summiting
Mount Everest has become a tourist industry in the last 15 years and sadly has
caused far too many fatalities of guides and sherpas as well as some of their clients.
 Not bother to work out a safe route up the mountain before you set off or understand
the topography of the mountain intimately, including safe evacuation routes in the
event of bad weather, avalanche or other unexpected dangers?
 Not work out how you were going to get everyone safely off the mountain after you’d
got to the summit? Most accidents occur on the way down.
 Not bother with a map and compass?
 Not take enough emergency provisions?
 Use experimental, unproven equipment?
 Change the expedition leader 2 or 3 times during the expedition? This can happen
on mountaineering expeditions, normally out of necessity due to injury or illness
rather than because the team or organising committee back home decide the leader
isn’t up to the job, though that is not without precedent!

4.  Change the route up the mountain every time the expedition leader changed?
 Ignore existing knowledge and experience, and try to climb the mountain by the
most direct and dangerous, unclimbed route?
 Once on the mountain persist with a route of ascent that was clearly unsafe and
impossible?
 Press on when weather was bad, there were insufficient supplies, and not enough
hours of daylight to complete the climb to the summit, driven on by your ego? This is
how the world’s then greatest climber George Mallory (a husband and father of three
young children) and his inexperienced 22 year old climbing partner Andrew
(‘Sandy’) Irvine died attempting the first ascent of Everest in 1924.
You get the picture. All these points reflect real situations.
The history of mountaineering is littered with cautionary tales, most of them involving
human weaknesses – classically misjudgment, lack of planning, poor leadership, internal
rivalries and politics, ego, under-preparation or foolhardiness.
Many companies are guilty of the business equivalents of such ‘own goals.’ Is it any wonder
that only the Top 1% (almost literally) get it right?

5.  A 2007 McKinsey study found that only 0.8% of companies analysed consistently
outperformed their competitors on both revenue and profit growth for at least 10
years.
 Jim Collins’ ground breaking study ‘Good to Great’ (2001) looked at the reasons why
only 11 companies out of 1,435 (curiously also just under 0.8%) listed on the
NASDAQ between 1965 and 1995 achieved cumulative stock returns for at least 15
years of at least 3 times the market after previously achieving cumulative stock
returns for at least 15 years at or below the market.
So here’s a robust, experiential strategic framework for lasting organisational excellence:
 Firstly recognise and accept that no matter what technology is prevalent at any point
in time business is about people, and the principles of sound business are
timeless. So learn from others, including our predecessors. Avoid getting caught up
in the ridiculous cycles of hype that sweep business every so often, like the dotcom
bubble 15 years ago, in which the current generation scorns past generations and
insists we’re now in a brave new world in which we can defy gravity and do what we
want. This is a counsel of stupidity repeated millions of times in human history with
generally dire consequences!

6.  Discover, or rediscover and plug back into your company’s values. You can only
discover them, not dream them up and impose them on others. They are not your
personal values, or the C-team’s values; they are the company’s values, owned by its
employees as a whole.
 Select good leaders – selfless, humble, yet fiercely determined, often grossly
underestimated people who enable and inspire teams of people to perform way
beyond what they previously considered themselves capable of, and who build
mechanisms that allow the company to prosper after they have gone.
 Cultivate good leaders at all levels in the company and, unless there are compelling
reasons not to, promote from within. The appointment of leaders from outside the
business is generally negatively correlated with improved long-term organisational
results. Alignment with the company’s culture and values, and consistency in
applying long-term strategy independent of individual leaders, is crucial.
 Pursue business strategies that your company has the skills, knowhow and passion to
be outstanding at, based on hard evidence, not hubris.
 Understand, adopt and stick religiously to Toyota’s Five Principles of Lean
Thinking. Lean is badly misunderstood and is invariably misapplied in the West. It
is NOT a tool for reducing cost and increasing efficiency, which is a dangerous,
internally-focused mentality. It IS a tool for inspiring employees to create customer-

7. focused businesses (an outside-in perspective) and to progressively reduce or
eliminate ‘waste’ (the Japanese word is ‘muda’), defined as anything that does not
add value from the customer’s perspective, in the form of unnecessary transport,
inventory, motion, waiting, over-processing, over-production or defects.
 Implement business and operational metrics that are customer-focused and
customer-driven. They must start with the end-to-end (E2E) customer value chains
(CVCs) and provide clear, timely data on key performance indicators in the eyes of
key customers. If you do this well it will not only become obvious what operational
performance improvements are required, but it will also force you to interact with
customers far more and thus insure your relationships with them and dramatically
improve your understanding of their needs.
 Avoid top-down managerialism and bureaucracy at all costs. Cultivate assiduously
and sustain a culture of self-discipline and entrepreneurism so that your best people
never become disillusioned and feel the need to leave, and your business has a buzz
that magnetically attracts great people.
 Use your company’s entrepreneurial culture to test assumptions and new ideas by
exposing them rapidly to customers in dialogue and in prototype products and
services. This is the so-called ‘fail fast’ or Lean Startup approach and it will save you
huge amounts of time, cost and angst, as well as building significant competitive

8. advantage. Its power arises partly because it runs counter to human nature, which
tends to believe it has the full answer when it only has a partially complete jigsaw
and is afraid to expose anything to possible ridicule or rejection. So have the courage
to go against the flow and you will reap the rewards!
Mountaineering is one of humanity’s most epic endeavours. The best mountaineers are the
ones who achieve repeated successes and stay alive, not the heroic or ignominious failures
or the tragic, often unnecessary fatalities. Getting it right is not rocket science, but neither is
it easy. Well-informed, intelligent, quiet, undemonstrative tenacity is the key, as it is with
business.

9. About Mark Ashton
Mark Ashton is a UK business leader, developer, entrepreneur and consultant whose passion is starting,
growing or restoring great businesses that outstrip customers' expectations. His leadership mettle and
die-in-a-ditch, selfless business principles were first forged in the early-1990s in the US, where in 4 years
he led 250% growth of a 2 year old textile machinery sales and service company against a backdrop of
industry decline and fierce, entrenched competition. Since then he has led and advised on start-ups,
turnarounds, and growth, strategy, improved business metrics and customer-driven Lean (continuous
improvement) projects in SMEs, mid-sized and large corporates, in widely differing industries. He brings
strategic insight, courage, honesty, common sense and motivational skills to help businesses survive,
avoid pitfalls and grow sustainably. Over the next 5 years he and his close-knit team of C-level experts
intend to build a hands-on, long-term investor company that will apply tried and tested, winning principles
of enduring Top 1% businesses to create exceptional shareholder value. You can connect with Mark on
LinkedIn here .

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