Let’s start by helping us understand the building blocks of your business strategy. Whom are you relying on? What are they going to do? How are you going to get noticed and appreciated? And why should anyone give you money to build your organization? Success is often determined by an ability to focus on a small number of critical success factors. Organizations, like people, should focus on these factors when performing the work that results in the production and delivery of goods and services.

Amazingly, though, some organizations don’t even bother to identify their critical success factors. Others do so, but they fail to measure their own rates of success in performing these tasks. And yet others neglect to obtain continuous feedback from customers and investors, information that they need to continually refocus on the most important elements of their business model. These organizations, of course, are bound to fail. Other organizations, such as those that identify, measure, and continually revise their critical success factors, are bound to succeed. So how does an organization begin to define these building blocks of the business model? First, it must construct its process chain; then it must identify the four elements of the chain.

There are huge firms and tiny firms, global firms and local firms, for-profit firms and nonprofit firms. And yet they all share one feature in common: They all must focus on the same number of elements in their process chains—namely, four elements. At the most fundamental level, all successful organizations produce value by mastering a simple sequence of events. They find good people . . . who do good work . . . thus pleasing their consumers . . . resulting in the receipt of funds from purchasers and investors. Only the specifics of each element of this chain may vary from organization to organization; the sequence, though, is a universal one. Some people think of this process chain as a simple common-sense description of business operations. But when they proceed to define each element, they realize that their task can become rather complicated.

Good people—that is, employees who are well educated and highly motivated to learn and grow along with the organization—form the foundation of any successful business. But how do we identify the most important people in our firm? And might our choice evolve as the firm changes over time?