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Excerpts from Opportunity and Challenge: The Corporate Anniversary
Corporate anniversaries—uncharted territory for many—can be challenging. Yet finding a way through the thicket of choices offers real opportunity for companies to pursue business strategies and shape the future of their enterprises. This white paper is intended to assist in anniversary planning and decision-making.
Corporate Anniversaries are about the Future
For anniversary milestones, each organization needs to find what is most meaningful at a given point in time. An invaluable anniversary plan aligns current high-priority business objectives while reinforcing the importance of heritage. Two critical success factors determine how well companies respond to this opportunity:
- Determining how to make the anniversary matter to those who matter most
- Interpreting the history and heritage of the organization to develop durable insights and illustrating stories, which help guide the way to the future
Plan Early for Your Anniversary
Perhaps the most important reason to begin early involves the question, “Who is doing the anniversary planning?” Companies today typically are complex mixtures of regional, national, and perhaps global locations; product divisions; original and acquired businesses; functional and operational employees; and customers, suppliers, and community and national leaders. Planning for an anniversary by engaging these diverse constituencies—either by asking for counsel or actively involving participants from each group—takes time.
How to Explore All Options
Planning for an anniversary is a balancing act. Recognizing this helps draw attention to all options and the need to align tactics with high priority outcomes. In other words, not only is there no right or wrong answer, but the purpose of exploring these balances is to ensure that all options are reviewed. In the end, companies decide to limit or expand their investments in their anniversaries based on many factors. The History Factory point of view is that there is great value in making those decisions after all the cards are on the table.
