Changing the Way the World Thinks about Strategy

Speed up your strategic planning – part two, smaller teams

In strategic planning, we want to bring in people whose input and commitment are vital to the creation and implementation of a great plan.  This requires three key perspectives in any organization:  market understanding, operations understanding and financial understanding.  In any organization with more than two or three people, you will want someone to adopt these perspectives in your strategic planning.  There are other roles that may be vital in certain industries, such as IT in finance or HR in construction, but the three mentioned are the minimum when you expand beyond just one or two people doing your planning.

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Speed up your strategic planning – part one: market segments

Why should you want to do strategic planning faster?  Simply put, the time spent planning is time taken away from other activities.  In addition, if you use a facilitator or consultant, a shorter engagement will cost you less.  Some companies skip planning entirely to save time – but that’s penny-wise and pound-foolish.  To responsibly scale […]

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Is it “just” an operational issue?

It’s not unusual, in strategic planning, to hear a team member say  an issue is “just an operational issue”.  In many cases, this may be correct – lots of operational issues don’t belong in your strategy discussions.  In other cases, how your operation works can be central to the success – or failure – of […]

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Does your culture help your bottom line?

Sometimes executives I work with overlook culture as an important strategic building block of success.  It may be that they see it as nonsense, and it may be they don’t see any return on the long and sometimes patient investment required to see results.  But culture literally affects everything an organization does, even if it’s […]

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What people get wrong in strategic planning – Information

Most people I encounter in business tell me they do strategic planning.  When they describe their process, however, I can quickly identify key issues they will have with their planning and how to address it with a few key questions (or thought processes). Let me share my 30 years experience and conversations I’ve had with […]

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Where are you on the Technology Curve?

Where are you on the Technology Curve?

New technologies follow a fairly well-understood “curve”.  We can think of these curves in terms of profitability, but this is oversimplifying things.  Much of the thinking about technology curves in the business world comes from the work of Nikolai Kondratiev in the 1920s. The Kondratiev Curve In his work, Kondratiev suggested that there are long-term […]

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Why don’t we complete our strategic objectives?

This is one of the toughest questions to answer for most people who do strategic planning. The average company that does strategic planning typically achieves only 30% of their objectives. Since your strategic objectives represent the highest priority initiatives in your organization, why would that number be so low? First, we must recognize that strategy […]

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Online Simplified Strategic Planning Series starts June 17!

Robert Bradford will be presenting Simplified Strategic Planning in a series of six online presentations starting on June 17.  You may participate live, and we will send video of each session to all subscribers.  Each session is two hours long and will cover the entirety of the Simplified Strategic Planning process.  Attendees will receive videos […]

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