From Confusion to Clarity

In 7 words or less

Ken Aber and Ian Chamandy form the powerhouse behind The Blueprint. This is not a product or service, but a dynamic and innovative process that allows businesses and individuals to enact great vision by “stripping away layers of varnish until the real wood is revealed”. Spend just 30-minutes in their company, and you instantly want them to help you create a new blueprint for your business. They’re irresistible.

They are fun, they are dynamic, they are highly intelligent. Being seasoned in business, and highly successful in their own right, they are also extremely good at what they do, with an amazing track record behind them.

Implemented right, The Blueprint is one way to get to profitability sooner.

Ian Chamandy is a proud strategist, quick to cut through the chaff to get to the wheat. Equally adept at business planning, Ken Aber is the type to listen and observe, then, in concert with his partner, lead businesses to find their cores, their corporate DNA: in other words, a brilliant tactician with a strategic mindset. What a dream team!

By the end of The Blueprint business planning process, an entire organization (or an individual) can succinctly answer the “Why should I chose you?” question in seven words or less. Two or three words are even better.

It’s not as simple as creating a catchy ‘tag-line’, although that is one salient part of the process. It’s more about getting to the core dialogue of a business and creating a plan, a business architecture, so that everyone involved in a business changes their perception of a company’s core proposition in mere minutes, and starts living the company story in every moment. This is a radical change that penetrates deep into the heart of corporate culture – in the best of possible ways.

Getting on for seven years ago, Ken and Ian started having a conversation about business planning – in the upper level of Balzac, purveyor of excellent coffee in Toronto’s Distillery District. They realized they had a shared passion for strategic planning, and shared frustration about the conventional planning process. They intuitively knew there was a better way to go about this – a way in which people would be so inspired by the plan that they are similarly inspired to implement it, and live and breathe it every moment of their working lives.

Business planning is broken

To better understand how the business planning process was broken – and if you’ve ever spent two or three days with fellow executives in an off-site strategic planning meeting, bored out of your mind, and convinced that you could spend your time better, you would understand the ‘broken’  description – this pair stripped it down to its simplest terms.

Who are you?

Where are you going?

How are you going to get there?

“This is effective for organizations, charities, individuals or even people like politicians”, said Chamandy. “We have a conversation that revolves around why I should choose, you, donate to you, work for your organization, or vote for you. Even why I should hire you. It’s the single most important question in business. You may have the greatest product, service, people or business, but if you cannot answer the ‘Why should I choose you?’ question, you are going to fail.”

Clarity and brevity are all that really matter

How Blueprint works is to hold between four and six half-day sessions with a leadership team (or individual) to guide them through the Blueprint process. Well described on their website, the four components are Core Proposition (what defines you at the ‘DNA’ level), Business Architecture, Core Dialogue (which allows everyone in the company to articulate answers to questions in ways that are meaningful to them) and the Company Story.

According to Aber, all of this is arrived at following “three or four hours of Ian and I, in a collaborative process of course, asking questions and saying “bull” to most of the long-winded answers, until we have stripped away all the layers of varnish. We believe that business leaders have all the answers, and that The Blueprint is the process for extracting it, getting to clarity quickly and creating succinct core propositions, core dialogues and company stories.”

Ask any of their clients, and they will tell you that it works. And it works extraordinarily effectively. If only they’d been around 20 years ago when I was a senior executive in a software company: we could never quite put our finger on our core differentiator. The Blueprint would have been perfect.

Blueprint: core propositions that work

United Van Lines – a higher standard of care

Interiors Inc. – opening sooner

Famous People Players – we inspire people to achieve more

A cancer charity – more birthdays

Corporate Karma: How business can move forward by giving back

Connecting corporations with social responsibility

Peggie Pelosi stumbled into her life purpose after turning 50. Having spent her entire – successful – career working because she needed to make a living, she found her true calling in her third age.

Peggie shows corporate leaders how to develop strong, sustainable connections between their company and relevant causes. In the process, she transforms entire corporate cultures to create truly inspirational places to work. Peggie explained to Tempo Toronto how this came to be.

“I was hired by a public company in 2000 to turn it around. Sales had been flat for a few years, and I had the role of inspiring the sales force to grow the business. I hadn’t heard of Corporate Social Responsibility at that time, but I already had an intrinsic sense that corporations needed to give back. Sure, the company had written cheques to charities, but they didn’t remember anything about the causes they were supporting.”

Her action was to find a charity that would meet a need for engagement, and to roll out an optional program in which employees could participate. It was a children’s hunger fund.

“The company made pharmaceutical grade nutritional supplements, and there is a huge need in the world for proper nourishment. So, we ‘adopted’ orphanages,” said Peggie. “I took the CEO, board members and employees to San Salvador to get them engaged with the children. Once we had formed this partnership with orphanages, the whole company became enthused. We raised $120,000 in the first year.”

Fast forwarding three years, sales more than doubled, and share value went up by more than 3000 per cent (yes, three thousand). Why?

Peggie knew. “The company looked exactly the same from the outside. But through an internal lens you saw the complete culture shift that hat happened. The company became an inspiring place to work, and we attracted and retained the best people. That has a huge impact on the bottom line.”

This was Peggie’s “aha” moment. She realized that most people weren’t satisfied with going to work just to make a living. She know that there was a missed opportunity for businesses, and for her to help businesses figure out how to do this – how to develop a strategy to breathe giving back into their culture. Orenda Connections www.orendaconnections.com was born. She published her book, Corporate Karma: How businesses can move forward by giving back, in 2006.

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“It’s compelling for me to create these opportunities for people to come to work for more than just earning enough to pay the bills,” said Peggie. “We’re all hardwired to give. People like to reach deep and want to help, but when the messaging fades and there’s no feedback, or if you just write a cheque without getting involved, it’s easy to go back to day to day living. When you give businesses the opportunity to truly connect and make a difference, it trips a wire. It’s transformational.”

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Peggie took her five sons with her to visit an orphanage in Uganda, and spent three weeks in Gaba, a small fishing village. While they all helped to build an orphanage home, she watched her children’s lives transform before her eyes. On their return to Toronto, her two youngest graduated from business school and set to work helping Peggie spread her message.

Now, Orenda Connections works with businesses to show how to create partnerships between companies and their corporate social responsibility. The recent Roots and Shoots program, a co-development between Roots Canada and Jane Goodall, instigated by Peggie, is one example. Roots, already a philanthropic organization about 2000 strong, has a history of giving away a lot but had never engaged its employees. Under Peggie’s guidance, the recently launched “Roots Cares” engages each employee and reaches out to youth in their local communities to get them involved in community environmental activity, which is naturally close to Jane Goodall’s heart.

October 27 sees her Toronto conference “In Good Company” at the Berkeley Church, on Queen Street East, bringing together non-profits and corporate executives to dialogue about the importance of best practices around corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Back to Peggie, who had observed many people seemingly knowing exactly what they were here to do, but hadn’t yet visualized her own life purpose. It took her a half century to get there, but she now knows that Orenda Connections allows her to combine all the skills she has and apply them in a way that has real meaning both for her and for the people with whom she works.

“It gives me purpose. The return on the emotional investment is enormous.”

Tina Rogers