process.

Before you can start thinking about the transformational initiatives that will take your enterprise from where it is to the place where it can command the highest premium, you’ve got to talk seriously with company leaders about where your company is right now. You need to get everybody’s perceptions of the company as it exists today out on the table.

This discussion will provide three immediate benefits.

• First, you’ll develop a baseline, a market position that will make all of you nod your heads and say, “Yes, that’s where we are.”
• Second, this is the first step toward determining what kind of initiatives your company needs to undertake to create a premium value.
• The third benefit is the most important-it helps to connect people across the entire company.

Enterprises rarely have company-wide discussions about what’s really happening on the ground. For example, your marketing people may seldom have any contact with the folks in engineering, and your sales force may rarely have any meaningful interaction with the people in corporate planning. This exercise gives everybody a chance to have the kind of enterprise- wide conversation that almost never happens. Just getting the key players to talk about the same issues will be beneficial.