What’s on Your 2010 V2MOM?

I recently read Marc Benioff’s Behind the Cloud, which the Wall St. Journal calls, “a triumphalist memoir and business self-help manual.”

The book spends a considerable amount of time discussing the V2MOM, which is Play #100:

“Use V2MOM to Focus Your Goals and Align Your Organization.”

Benioff has been talking about the V2MOM and the company has been relying up upon it as a management tool from the beginning. Check out this 2003 article:

“His zenlike approach to life even permeates the elaborate management process he uses to run Salesforce.com. It’s called V2MOM — standing for vision, values, methods, obstacles, and measurement. It’s about laying out a broad strategy, getting all the employees to agree on goals and methods, anticipating problems, evaluating tactics, and measuring results. Any new initiative is put to the V2MOM test.”

While some employees clearly don’t like V2MOM, I found it to be an extremely valuable way to align all levels of the organization and to build transparency into company priorities. Every employee has to have a V2MOM as Salesforce. Benioff has gone so far as to register the V2MOM domain!

So as 2010 rapidly approaches, what’s on your V2MOM for the year? Is your business aligned when it comes to the vision, values, methods, obstacles, and metrics? Sounds like a good exercise for your next management meeting, no?

You can read more about what Marc Benioff has to say about the V2MOM in this  Behind the Cloud excerpt as well as in this destinationCRM article.

All the best in 2010! May all of your clouds be connected…(sorry, a small plug for my vision of cloud integration seemed appropriate)