Author: Dana Baldwin

By M Dana Baldwin, Senior Consultant

What is focus?  Why is focusing on your business so important it should be a key element of your strategic planning?  Why is it a key to your ongoing success?  What happens when you lose focus?

To illustrate what focus is, let’s use the example of a camera. In order to take a good picture with your camera, digital or film, your subject needs to be in focus. By focus, we mean that the subject needs to be in sharp definition, clearly visible, and properly illuminated.  In business and many other activities, the same care to bring things into sharp definition needs to be incorporated into our daily lives and, especially, into our strategic planning for the future course and direction of your organization.

By having good focus, you should be concentrating on the key elements required for your success as an organization. You should bring all the elements of the organization into the process of developing appropriate strategies to maximize the performance and longevity of those core parts of your business first, as this will most often determine whether your organization will succeed or fail.

Why the core parts of your business? The core business segments are the foundation upon which your organization depends in order to be successful going forward. This definitely does not limit your company to doing only those core segments which are at the center of your ongoing operations, but it does mean that you should be heavily focused on making the core segments as profitable and sustainable as possible, so you will have a secure, healthy base on which to build.

What can happen when your company loses focus? There are multiple possible paths which may be followed when you lose focus. One is that your organization starts putting time, people and money into projects which do not rely on, nor build on, your key strengths.  By diversifying in an unplanned way, your loss of focus may mean that your core business could be neglected, thus harming the key segments which are the center of your ongoing business. This can lead to a downward spiral, losing market share, earning lower profits and eroding your customer base in the key center parts of your business. Another path can occur when you stray from your core businesses without a good strategy to diversify. This can lead to investing time, people and money into markets in which you have no significant competitive advantage, and at the same time, taking resources from key elements of your successful business segments, thus sapping their ability to make sufficient profits to sustain the whole organization. This, too, can lead to a downward spiral in the ability of your business to be profitable, to grow and to survive.

If you think you may have some of the challenges outlined above, one good approach is to improve your strategic planning efforts. You can start this by attending one of our highly acclaimed seminars Simplified Strategic Planning, or by contacting us at: to discuss your situation.

M. Dana Baldwin is a Senior Consultant with Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc. He can be reached by email at: .

By M. Dana Baldwin, Senior Consultant

Reprinted from Course and Direction June 2008

Marketing, done well, is a vital cog in many companies’ strategies. Marketing performs many functions which are some of the keys to success over time. Good marketing helps pave the way for good sales. Effective marketing can be one of the leading factors in successful innovations and product or service enhancements.

Marketing can also be one of the first expenditures cut when times get tough. But the real question is: Is that the right strategy for your company? Let’s look at the benefits of keeping and even improving your marketing efforts versus the long term effects of lowering or even eliminating your marketing investments for a period of time.

The word investments is used deliberately, because there can be many long term benefits to properly funding and staffing an effective marketing department. First let’s define how we see marketing. Marketing has a long lead time view, not the short term approach of sales. Sales is concerned with this week’s or this month’s or this quarter’s orders. Marketing is concerned with building the company’s reputation in the market place. Marketing is usually tasked with building up the image and increasing the value and the recognition of the company and the brand, over time.

Marketing can be tasked with identifying and defining new products or services that fit the strategic competencies of the company. Marketing can also be charged with developing new markets for existing products or services. These new markets can be new territories, new channels or outlets, new industries which can use existing products or services, or even new applications for these same existing products or services.

All of the items listed above are consistent with, and integral to, the usual definition of marketing, marketing departments or staffs and the normal marketing function we have all seen as a part of many companies for years.

In the past, many considered marketing a necessary evil, or at least slightly superfluous to the actual running of the company. Today, however, marketing is often being challenged to go further, to contribute more directly to the company’s actual results. Well run marketing departments are more directly involved in the operation and in setting the direction of the company than ever before.

Marketing can contribute directly to the course and direction of the company, as a part of the strategic planning team. Marketing can assess where markets, customers and competitors may be heading in the future. Their input can have a major influence on strategies selected by the strategic planning team.

Marketing should be a part of any innovation efforts a company may have. The guidance of effective marketing should help the company minimize unproductive efforts in deciding what new products or services to pursue, and to help focus the limited resources, time, people and money, toward those innovations which will likely bring sales and profits to the company.

The analysis of the worth of an effective marketing group within a company should be based on all the factors above, culminating in an assessment of how profitable the company is based on how much marketing has contributed to the success of the company.

M. Dana Baldwin is a Senior Consultant with Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc. He can be reached by email at: baldwin@cssp.com

© Copyright 2014 by Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc., Ann Arbor, MI — Reprint permission granted with full attribution.

By M. Dana Baldwin, Senior Consultant

Does your company think that developing a strategic plan, printing it and distributing it to the appropriate population within your company actually completes the whole process? Or is it dedicated to actually carrying out the decisions the planning team made during the strategic planning process?

Many companies go through a reasonably diligent process to arrive at a potentially effective strategic plan. They involve key people who are in positions to know what is really happening in the company and in the market place. They make strong efforts to analyze what is really going on with their customer-markets and with their competitors. Assumptions about where each part of the company will be headed are made, with care taken to be as realistic as possible.

Strengths and weaknesses are analyzed, so the company may build on the strengths, and address any critical weaknesses which could affect the viability of the company in the future. Sustainable competitive advantages, which we call strategic competencies, are determined, and efforts scheduled to enhance these advantages to make the company even stronger in its chosen markets.

Strategic issues — those issues which can strategically affect the course and direction of the company — are chosen, prioritized and discussed in depth. After a quick reality check to avoid discoverable unintended consequences from the decisions just made, the team attacks its strategies.

In strategies, the team selects the appropriate course and direction for its core businesses, lists new opportunities to pursue and selects strategies to improve the strategic competencies, enhance corporate capabilities and develop the key personnel in the company. Targets for growth rates are selected at this time.

Here is where the problem of follow-through can arise. All too often, when a company has selected its strategies, they think they are finished with strategic planning. But, without effective follow-through and monitoring, only a small portion of the actions will actually be accomplished.

The planning team needs to establish Objectives: Specific, time-related and measurable projects which will not happen unless an action plan is established and followed. An action plan is simply a written road map of how to accomplish an objective, broken into controllable steps, with people assigned the responsibility of carrying out each step, time to do so, and a month by month schedule formally agreed upon.

As effective as the action plan process is, it is only one step in the follow up process. Regular monthly monitoring is required to make sure that each action plan is kept on schedule, and so each action plan can be \”tweaked\” to meet the ever-changing conditions on the real world. Failure to add monitoring to the strategic planning process will result in lack of progress and loss of confidence in the strategic planning process within the company, as well as possible lower sales and profits, potentially reduced viability of the company and loss of morale by those who have assumed ownership of the plan. Without effective monitoring, most companies will complete only about 20-30% of their action plans. With monitoring, the completion rate most often soars to well over 80% completion essentially on time, with good progress on the remaining Objectives.

Which way does your company complete its strategic planning?

Interested in more ways to improve your strategic planning process?  Download a complimentary copy of our Strategic Planning Tune-up book by clicking on Tune-up.

M. Dana Baldwin is a Senior Consultant with Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc. He can be reached by email at: baldwin@cssp.com

© Copyright 2014 by Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc., Ann Arbor, MI — Reprint permission granted with full attribution.

By M. Dana Baldwin, Senior Consultant

Why don’t some organizations do strategic planning?  Great question, because a surprising number of companies do not actually put together a written plan of where they want to go.  Why don’t they plan?  There are a variety of reasons, and we will explore some of them.

Some feel planning is superfluous.  Their perception is that the world changes too fast for planning to be effective, so they simply fly by the seat of their pants and try to do the best they can with what they have.  The plain truth is that if they would do a decent job of developing strategies for their future course and direction, they would have a base from which to work when the world changes course.  By having a sound starting point and knowing where they intended to take the company, any changes could be more easily discerned and they would have a sound basis for analysis to determine what, if anything, they would need to modify in their strategic plan to accommodate the new reality.

Others feel strategic planning is for big business only.  This misconception arises from one of two sources: first, the feeling that they are too small to be able to influence their future, and, second, they often think they know enough about their business and their market place that planning isn’t needed.  I would submit both of these thoughts are misguided.  No business is too small to do some formal planning of where the business should be headed, because without a plan, it is too easily pushed around by both competitors and customers.  Focus on what should be done can be lost by the constant barrage of input from outsiders (customers and competitors) with the result that, unless one is extremely careful and resolute, the course and direction of the company can be taken off the sweet spot into areas where the company is less strong and more vulnerable.

Some think strategic planning is too time-consuming.  Anything worth doing is worth doing well, and planning the future of your organization is worth the investment of time and money to do it well.  How many days last year did you devote to planning your family vacation?  Some, of course, will say very few, as they went to a cottage or a familiar resort that really didn’t involve much need for planning.  But for those who took a trip, either driving or flying, stayed at a series of hotels or resorts, went to a national park or a theme park, there often can be quite a few days spent planning the whole trip.  Isn’t planning where your business should go be at least as important as planning a vacation?  Yet many feel it takes too much time. A well-structured, methodical approach like our Simplified Strategic Planning gives great, actionable results and only requires about 5.6% of your time the first year and only about 3% per year after that. The quality of the plan and the execution of the objectives should pay you back many times the modest cost of doing the actual planning.  If you are not doing a good job of strategic planning or if you don’t currently actually do strategic planning, go to our website: www.cssp.com to see what you can gain by implementing an effective planning process.  If you want to explore strategic planning further, please consider attending our acclaimed seminar: Simplified Strategic Planning where you will learn the benefits and the processes of implementing a good strategic plan for your business. For more information, click here.

Interested in more ways to improve your strategic planning process?  Download a complimentary copy of our Strategic Planning Tune-up book by clicking on Tune-up.

M. Dana Baldwin is a Senior Consultant with Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc. He can be reached by email at: baldwin@cssp.com

© Copyright 2014 by Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc., Ann Arbor, MI — Reprint permission granted with full attribution.

by M. Dana Baldwin, Senior Consultant

How many times have you decided you needed to add to your staff, decided on the technical qualifications the job required and started looking for the person to fill those requirements?  How many times have you hired someone who met all the technical requirements, but who did not really end up fitting in to the current team and their existing culture?  What were the consequences of these hires on the atmosphere and levels of cooperation within the department or the company as a whole?  How did that decision to bring that particular person on board affect those who were already there?  What could be the long term impacts of making good or poor hiring decisions on the success of the company?

Best guess: Some hires were successful.  They fit into the culture of the company, had attitudes which made them acceptable to the existing staff and generally had a positive overall impact on the company or department.  On the other hand, what was the impact of those hires who were not successful as outlined above?  What were the effects on productivity, morale and the general atmosphere in the department or whole company?

An unsuccessful hire can be defined as one in which the impact of the new person does something negative to the working environment, productivity, team work and/or atmosphere within a company.  Often this can lead to an overall culture change inside a company with long lasting impacts on multiple groups of people within the company itself.

A logical conclusion may be reached that indicates that technical capabilities are not sufficient reason alone to hire someone, if that person could have a negative effect on the rest of the company, or even within a department.  For example, one of our clients has taken a very different approach.  Within the job definition is included a factor for attitude.

Attitude can be a significant contributor to the success or failure of a new hire.  Does the applicant approach the hiring process with a positive, “can do” attitude, or is the applicant merely looking for a job?  Does the applicant walk briskly into the room, or amble slowly with little apparent purpose?  Does the applicant look the interviewer in the eye, or stare at the table or off to one side?  In general, is the overall attitude a positive one, or a neutral or negative one?

If the job is principally a manual labor job, the emphasis on attitude can be a large part of the overall decision about hiring a particular individual.  This one highly successful client has the approach of: “Hire for attitude, teach the skills” for most of their factory positions.  Obviously, if the job requires certain highly technical skills, those have to be the first filters, but within the group that possesses those skills, attitude is often the deciding factor.

For office and staff positions, much the same approach is recommended.  Be as specific as possible about the job related requirements that the new hire will have to be considered for the position.  While the skills set out in the job description should be a necessary qualifier for those who are candidates for the position, attitude should influence the decision of whether to hire or not.

The impact of personal relationships within a company, depending on the size of the company or department, and the consequences of an unsuccessful hire are too important to be left to technical qualifications alone.  One bad hire can seriously impact morale, effectiveness and even the culture within a department or company to the point that good people stop being productive and effective.  Some may even go so far as to start looking for positions outside the company to get away from the disturbance that an unfortunate hire can generate.

The possibility that hiring this type of person may lead to additional hires with the same general attitude could lead to a cancer within the company.  This “cancer” can spread, sapping strengths and lowering productivity while eroding internal culture and atmosphere to the point where good people leave.  A poor decision in hiring can start a sequence of events that, if unchanged, could hurt the company severely over time.

Much of the company’s long term success hinges on the attitudes of those who are brought on board, how well they fit into the existing culture and how well they work with the existing staff.  A good fit, coupled with a positive attitude, can help ensure the long term effectiveness of the staff and, as a result, may increase the likelihood for long term prosperity of the company.

If you want to learn how to keep your employees engaged and motivated once you hire them, please listen to our webinar.  Click here.

M. Dana Baldwin is a Consultant with Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc. He can be reached by email at: baldwin@cssp.com

© Copyright 2014 by Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc., Ann Arbor, MI — Reprint permission granted with full attribution.

M Dana Baldwin, Senior Consultant

When your organization does strategic planning, what strategies do you consider for each of your market segments?  It is likely that you may select different bases for competing in different segments, because your competitive atmosphere is different in each segment, and what you bring to the market is different in each segment.

The two approaches to strategies we are going to examine are: differentiation (specialty) and low cost strategies (commodity).  In a low cost strategy, the true winner is the company with the actual lowest cost in the market place.  For example, if two companies make essentially identical products that sell at the same price in the market place, the one with the lower costs has the advantage of a higher level of profit per sale.  By having this advantage, the low cost company is able to do a number of things to maintain or increase its market share.  It can invest more in marketing.  It can pay for better positions in retail stores relative to its higher cost competitor.  It can lower price, thus squeezing its competitor’s margins and profits.  It can invest more in research and development, allowing it to improve the performance of its product.  The bottom line here is that the higher cost competitor is allowed to stay in the market at the sole discretion of the lower cost competitor, because, if it so choses, the lower cost competitor could drop its price to the point where the higher cost competitor would have to sell at a loss in order to remain in the market.  Eventually, the higher cost competitor could be driven out of that business.  You need to understand what percentage of the market is buying solely on price.  This often happens with mature products.

In the low cost strategy, a company must have a thorough understanding of costs and how to continually reduce them.  The company must be willing to standardize its offerings in order to manage costs, which implies that exceptions requested by prospective customers must be limited or excluded in order to keep costs down.

The other approach we are examining is differentiation.  Differentiation involves being perceived by the market place as having a relatively higher value to the customer or user than the offerings of its competitors, and often at the same or even higher pricing levels.  These are different customers – not buying just on price.

In a differentiation strategy, the company must totally understand its customers’ needs and preferences.  It must be driven to innovate to continually address those wants and needs.  And, it must build its brand to maintain its position and visibility.

Years ago, Sony sold the Walkman radios and disc players at a higher price than any of its competitors, yet dominated the market place.  The reasons for this seemed to be that they provided the highest quality, most consistent performance and the best sound delivery in the market place.  The interesting thing here is that, due to both volume and to good design and engineering of the products, Sony also was, for a very long time, the low cost producer as well.  This gave Sony the distinct advantage of having sufficient resources available to effectively out-market its competitors, as well as having the resources to do more product development and refinement to keep Sony at the forefront.

The Sony example is actually a combination of low cost and differentiation strategies, which, done well, can be extremely effective in the market place.  To do this requires a high level of commitment to both approaches, but the benefits can be outstanding.  For years, Sony was by far the leader in personal musical devices, with the highest volume and profitability.  Eventually its position was overcome by advances in other technologies like the smart phone and MP3 players, and, most likely, Sony’s eventual loss of concentration on what got them to the top.

Interested in more ways to improve your strategic planning process?  Download our Strategic Planning Tune-up book by clicking on Tune-up.

M. Dana Baldwin is a Consultant with Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc. He can be reached by email at: baldwin@cssp.com

© Copyright 2014 by Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc., Ann Arbor, MI — Reprint permission granted with full attribution.

By M. Dana Baldwin

The basics of Strategic Planning can be misunderstood by those who need to determine what they are and how they apply to the overall development of your strategic plans. On one hand, some teams will overlook the importance of carefully defining the market segments so they can obtain the best analysis of how they and their customers do business. On the other extreme, some teams make the analysis somewhat more complicated than is necessary.

As your team approaches strategic planning, it is very important to recognize that the basics must be done thoroughly and well in order to provide a solid foundation for good decision making later in the process. The first set of worksheets in the Simplified Strategic Planning manual is ”Market Segment Analysis”. A worksheet is to be completed for each of your market segments. The starting point for this is the definition of those market segments.

Let’s begin with the overall picture. What are we selling, to whom are we selling it and where are we selling it? ”It” can be either a product or a service, or a group of products or services that have the same or similar characteristics or behaviors in the marketplace. What are the characteristics of this item or group of items that define its behavior well enough to distinguish it (them) enough from other groups of items/services?

You should be looking for common behaviors in the market place: Types of products/services sold, the characteristics of customers who purchase these items, common geographies where sold, channels through which they are sold, etc., are the usual bases for analysis. The process can be a simple as listing products or services down one side of a page or flip chart, then listing the types of customers to whom they are sold across the top and putting an X in each row and column where each is actually sold.

Most often, this will result in more combinations than we really wish to analyze, or than we can effectively work with. We should combine or group like items with like buying behaviors so we have a workable number of market segments to analyze. Reasoning is that when we get beyond the eighth or ninth market segment, we are spending time on a relatively small percentage of our overall business, and unless there is a significant reason to include such a small segment by itself, it should either be omitted or combined with a similar segment for analysis. On occasion, there may be a need for different combinations of product, market, geography and channel because of differing buying characteristics, and effective leadership is required to establish when this should be included in the overall planning process.

By consolidating the products/services and the customers to whom they are sold into groupings with similar behaviors in the market place and analyzing these groups as market segments, we begin to establish the discipline and rigor necessary for effective analysis. Care in defining each of your market segments helps establish the necessary foundation for our ongoing process of defining, analyzing and integrating the results into the overall program which comprises Simplified Strategic Planning.

Interested in more ways to improve your strategic planning process?  Download our Strategic Planning Tune-up book by clicking on Tune-up.

To learn about Gaining Market Share, click here.

M. Dana Baldwin is a Consultant with Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc. He can be reached by email at: baldwin@cssp.com

© Copyright 2014 by Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc., Ann Arbor, MI — Reprint permission granted with full attribution.

By M. Dana Baldwin

What are the characteristics of a good leader?  While there are many fine attributes that a leader should have and exhibit, what leadership comes down to is the ability to interact and lead people to accomplish tasks which lead to the success of the organization and of the individual.

In a recent article, Jack Welch and Suze Orman listed six attributes, phrasing them in the negative (Don’t be…).  When I reflected on the list, I realized that the approach, while thought provoking, left something to be desired, at least in my humble opinion.

My thoughts after my cogitation turned to the positive: What would be the characteristics of a successful leader?  In no particular order, I came up with the following:

Commitment to values:  A successful leader should have high ethics.  Yes, people with lower levels of ethics can succeed for a while, but after a while, the good people will see through any façade and likely end up leaving for places with higher ethical standards.  This attribute includes both personal and professional integrity, mixed with true humanity.  A leader should care enough about the people with whom he or she works that those people feel the support and enthusiasm of the leader in each of them as a person as well as an employee.  In my opinion, this could well include the willingness to have fun while working.

Ability to learn and adapt: Everyone ought to be open to new ideas, concepts, approaches and processes.  This is especially true of the leader.  The leader sets the tone for the organization, and if the leader is close-minded and not willing to listen and learn/adapt, the organization likely will suffer.  Look at the automobile industry.  The Big Three for many years didn’t listen to what I call “the car guys.”  Especially in the 1970s, they made cars up and down the line that looked the same and were produced solely for the lowest cost, not what the market wanted.  As a result, the imports became transplants and provided what customers wanted.

Leaders need to be decisive, to be willing to make decisions when they should be made.  Inherent in this, however, should be the willingness to allow subordinates to make decisions when appropriate, instead of reserving the right to make all decisions.  This allows subordinates to grow and mature, giving them confidence and experience.  When the foreseeable consequences of a wrong decision are small enough, a leader might consider allowing a bad decision by a subordinate to go at least part way to completion in order to show what should have been considered in making the decision originally.  The ability to allow subordinates to make mistakes and to learn from them is a necessary part of growing and maturing.

Be real:  People can spot a phony person a mile away, if not at first, later when the consequences of the phoniness can be seen.  Leaders need to be genuine people.  They need to live what they preach, and show, by example, that they are actually the kind of person they are portraying in real life.

Good leadership can overcome a lot of ills within a company, and bad leadership, sooner or later, will take the energy, vitality and life out of a company.  One important aspect of good leadership is to assure the continuing stream of competent, able, true leaders in an organization.  If you want to improve your leadership abilities, please contact me at baldwin@cssp.com so we may discuss how coaching and teaching might improve those abilities and your company’s results.  Often this is accomplished within the framework of Simplified Strategic Planning.  A significant component of strategic planning often is succession planning.  For more information on this subject, please listen to my recent webinar: Succession Planning.

M. Dana Baldwin is a Senior Consultant with Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc. and can be reached at baldwin@cssp.com.

© Copyright 2013 by Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc., Ann Arbor, MI — Reprint permission granted with full attribution.