<^> - - [] [] The international emoticon for: Don't bother coming into work today, aliens are attacking the city.
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Did this make any sense?
One upon a time, circa early 2011, there was a company that sold its goods online. It employed about 100 people and was not making a profit. To turn things around, its CEO got the 100 people together to talk to them about the company's strategy for the coming years. It took one and a half hours (at a cost of about £5,000 in wages).
Tell me, do you think that this counts as strategy? Was the £5,000 well spent? Will the CEO stay in place once the company is taken over by someone who knows what they're doing?
Editor says: Certainly a Value For Money Analysis was omitted for the presentation meeting. So now we get to what was presented to the employees... And i've changed the names, but the essence is there.
Alientrees.Com Spacestation 2011
What is the Spacestation 2011?
It is the business document that relays our strategy for the next 3 years
It is simple, easy to understand for everybody in the company
It explains what we will ALL be focusing on over the next 3 years
Finance
Exceed Sales plan
- Aim to beat all the sales and KPI targets we set our selves
- Drive the business into profitability
- Do everything in our power to exceed the sales plan
Deliver target gross margin
- One key way to profitability is through gross margin
- The better the margin the more we have to play with
Control overheads
- Spend money wisely
- If we see a saving then we must act on it
Simpler, smarter, cheaper
- We must always look for ways of doing things simpler, taking out costs and complexity
- We must look at what we should stop doing, do more of, do less of (editor says this is confusing)
- Ask ourselves if it does not add value, why are we doing it?
People
Drive ownership and accountability
- We are all responsible for our own careers
- We must not sit back and wait for things to happen, we must be proactive
- We must not blame others, but accept responsibility ourselves and influence
Open and empowered culture
- We can make changes, we do not need others to do it for us
- We are empowered to do what is good for the business
Recruit and retain the best
- We have great people, we need to make sure we keep them
- Each individual can take advantage of what Alientrees has to offer
Develop our people
- Developing skills and behaviors starts with the individual, the company is there to help
- We offer training, coaching and development, make the most of it
Social responsibility
- We will treat people with integrity
- We will make sure we contribute to the community with our time and thought
- AlienLife principles is an important part of what we do
Operations
Cross selling opportunities
- We must make processes simple and efficient to cross sell
- We must embrace all cross selling opportunities
Turning technology invisible
- Technology must be an enabler
Provide business information
- We need to provide the business with robust, easy to read and analyse data
- We need to make business decisions around informed data
Outstanding product quality and design
- Product development is at the forefront of what we do
- We aim to provide our customers with the best
Customer
Outstanding customer service
- We must aim to give the best customer service to all of our customers
- Customer service must be at the centre of what we all do
- We must stick to our USP’s for customers
Customer experience
- We must be the best for customer experience
- Everything we do must make the customer experience better
- We must use new and innovative ways to make the customer experience better
Expansion into new markets (indeed that means planets)
- We must strive ahead with offering new products for customers
- We must move into new markets in order to grow as a business and retain customers
Drive own brand to 50% of sales
- The way to profitability is through own brand
- Own brand is what makes us different from our competitors
- Own brand gives us independence
Build the Alientree brand
- We are a lifestyle brand
- We must stick to our lifestyle brand values
- We must at all times adhere to our brand guidelines to enforce and build the brand
Cross selling into customers
- We have very loyal customers, but they buy too infrequently
- We must aim to give our customers the opportunity to buy other products
- Everything we do, must be about offering and selling additional desirable products
I must say as a rescue mission the above wasn't very employee friendly. It was a bit garbled. The Virtual Gherkin Understands what he was trying to say. But He didnt think - employees. Target Audience. Errr Theyre quite in limbo and want answers and not unpack a load of management speak.
Jules_Clarke 
