What is the Primary Driver and a few Secondary Drivers of your organization?  What does your organization fall back on when times or decisions are tough?  What fundamentally shapes your decisions and actions for union bargaining, competitive threats, financial reverses, expansion, contraction, regulation, potential new laws, customer dissatisfaction?  What should the Drivers be, if you had the final word?

A few examples of Drivers:

• Bottom Line or short term profit maximization
• C.E.O. or a top official’s goals, motives, personality, whims
• Competition
• Customer (student, client, citizen, patient, etc.) needs, wants, expectations
• Department Dominance, e.g., engineering, finance, operations, marketing
• Employee needs, wants, expectations
• Financial Security of the organization, long term
• Image or perceptions of the most important stakeholders, e.g., shareowners, customers, employees, contributors, voters, suppliers, unions, etc.
• Innovation, new products and services
• Market Share, local, regional, national, worldwide
• Politics, Patronage and Polls
• Price of your stock shares
• Process Prominence, e.g., budget
• Quality
• Technology Infrastructure
• Top Line — revenues or sales — growth
• Values Based Mission and Vision

Once your Board or your top management team selects the Primary Driver and a few Secondary Drivers, then all goals, strategies, objectives and tactics and any necessary mid-course corrections should be aligned with those Drivers.

Can any organization be successful when they say they want equally all sixteen listed above or even eight or ten?  Some Driver must be Primary and a few Secondary - or the result will be poor communications at best and chaos at worst.

A key problem is that few organizations will take the time and trouble to identify the Primary Driver and a few Secondary Drivers — and then use those as the foundation, the touchstone against which to test all difficult decisions.

For any business, not-for-profit organization or governmental unit what could be better than noble, ethical Values Based Mission and Vision as the Primary Driver?