Strategic Company Alignment with a V2MOM

  • Intro
    • Over the 21 year period ending when this blog post was originally published on 2013, Salesforce grew from a 4-person company to one with more than 50,000 employees
    • Benioff considers that one of the company’s biggest strengths has been maintaining alignment while growing
    • V2MOM stands for Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, Measures
      • Management process that Salesforce goes through every year
  • V2MOM focuses collective energy
    • V2MOM enables leaders to clarify what they’re doing and communicate it clearly to the entire company
    • Among many available leadership paradigms and frameworks, V2MOM stands out for its simplicity: it is easy to digest and implement
  • A living, breathing document
    • V2MOM encourages creativity, change, and empowerment
    • Different team members lead different methods, and they update the V2MOM as the year progresses
    • Once-a-year performance reviews are a stagnant management tool that doesn’t cut it in today’s fast-moving environment
    • Today, at Salesforce, every single department and every single employee drafts their own
      • Every V2MOM is published on the Salesforce’s corporate social network Chatter
      • Anyone can look up any V2MOM to see how each plans to contribute
      • An app allows every employee to track their progress on each item in their V2MOM
  • Create your own V2MOM
    • Vision (What do you want to achieve?)
      • If you’re not clear on where you want to go, you won’t get there
    • Values (What’s important to you?)
      • What’s important about this goal?
      • First, create a list of values, then rank order them in order of importance
    • Methods (How do you get it?)
      • Establish methods for implementing vision and values
      • Outline all the actions and steps that everyone needs to take to do the job
      • Rank these in order of priority
    • Obstacles (What is preventing you from being successful?)
      • What challenges, problems, and issues are standing between you and success?
      • Which obstacles are most critical to resolve, and how will you do so?
    • Measures (How do you know you have it?)
      • How will you know when you are successful?
      • Subjective yes-or-no judgment isn’t sufficient
      • Data and metrics are needed to determine what success looks like