How a Corporate Roadmap Creates Unity for a Company
by Rusty Rueff
To hear Rusty Rueff share more about his experiences with a single-page company Roadmap, take a listen to Podcast Episode 16 - Lightning Round. You can download this free template to follow/use in creating your own Roadmap: Corporate Roadmap Template
The first time I encountered a corporate single-page Roadmap was I believe in 1996 when I’d been transferred to Pizza Hut from Frito-Lay and David Novak had his CEO role expanded from just running Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) to also helming Pizza Hut. David, and his Chief HR Officer, Gregg Dedrick believed in transparency and alignment so much that they rolled out to the organization a single page Roadmap that captured the business vision, objectives, challenges, goals and values/principles.
What you will see attached is not much different than that first Roadmap I saw, except that the first one from David was handwritten. Yes, handwritten, by David himself. Three years later he was still handwriting them once a year, but now in the Annual Shareholder Report for Tricon Restaurants (later to change their name to Yum! Brands), the newly spun out public company spun out of PepsiCo.
A few years later in 1998 I found myself as the CHRO of Electronic Arts (EA). As a new HR Leader, I was fortunate to work for a values committed CEO and Chairman. The company, established in 1982 had operated from the foundation of the A.C.T.I.O.N Values (Achievement, Customer Satisfaction, Teamwork, Integrity, Ownership and Now!) and was secure in hiring, firing, promoting, rewarding and recognizing people against these values. What we didn’t have, yet, was a way of bringing together the vision and business plan in one place with the values so that every person in the company could see and understand where they fit in to the “bigger picture”.
The Roadmap serves as a great communication tool for all constituents of the company (customers, shareholders, analysts, recruits, etc.) So, after a lot of work by the team, we created and rolled out our Annual Roadmaps.
After my time at EA, I was asked to CEO a venture backed digital music commerce company. One of the first things I did was to work with my team to construct and roll-out our own Roadmap. And every year since, I have encouraged every founder and company I have worked with to adopt their own Roadmap creation process and annual output (not all have done it, but many have successfully).
One of the great bi-products of writing something down and distributing it is that once it’s “out there” immediate accountability is established. A public document becomes a litmus test, a filter and a scorecard against what we said we would do and what we did.
For Faith-Driven Entrepreneurs this can be an awesome tool for not only reinforcing the values and principles of the company, but also a process to instill full transparency as part of the normal course of doing business.
Here are a couple things to know about successfully building a single-page Roadmap:
The journey (process) of getting this done is just as important as the output. Broad input and buy-in is very critical. We want everyone to feel as though they own these.
Once the Vision and Values are set, they don’t change….only the stuff between changes annually, or on whatever time-frame you desire, but Vision and Values, they are consistent.
Feel free to download this template to follow/use in creating your own Roadmap:
You might also enjoy seeing some examples from my past experiences.
Once you have created your own Roadmap, please share them back with us so that others can benefit from your examples and experience.