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 […]
Continue readingBy Robert W. Bradford, President & CEO Reprinted from Course and Direction April 2007 “Time is money”. We’ve all heard that, right? But does your company operate that way? Many times, I’ve seen companies succeed wildly simply because they do things faster than their competitors – usually, a LOT faster. This works simply because all […]
Continue readingBy 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 […]
Continue readingBy Denise Harrison, Executive Vice President & COO Reprinted from Course and Direction March 2007 Is strategic planning dead? Many so-called experts criticize the time spent on evaluating the core businesses and current competition as myopic. They point out that companies often miss emerging markets (mainframe to mini-computer to PC) or are blind-sided by new […]
Continue readingBy Robert W. Bradford, President & CEO In over 1,600 strategic planning meetings, I have noticed that people have a tendency to approach their planning process from many different angles. One of the most interesting sets of angles revolves around the very common idea that we can hit our targets more accurately using the sequence […]
Continue readingBy Thomas E. Ambler, Senior Consultant Reprinted from Course & Direction May 2007 Since the millennium Eastman Kodak Co. has been under attack by a Killer App known as Digital Imaging. In the last several years it has suffered the loss of much of its historical core business (as much as 20% per year) and […]
Continue readingBy 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 […]
Continue readingReview by Denise Harrison, Executive Vice President & COO Playing to Win is A.G. Lafley’s book on how he determined strategy when he was at the helm of P&G from 2000 to 2009 – and interestingly enough, he is back at the helm of P&G. While there is little new ground covered in this book, […]
Continue readingBy Robert W. Bradford Note: The following article was first published in 2008 but seems timely today. It shouldn’t be a surprise to you that going green can be an extremely useful strategy in today’s markets. Without question, our strategic planning clients who have pursued environmental friendliness as a part of their strategies are reaping […]
Continue readingBy 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 […]
Continue readingBy Denise Harrison, Executive Vice President and COO Note: The following article was first published in 2007 but is still relevant today. What? How could a low cost company in India have trouble with low cost competition from China? Welcome to global competition. Over the last year several articles in Course and Direction addressed dealing […]
Continue readingThis is my fifth post on bad strategic objectives. In my first post, I discussed a test to tell whether an objective you set for your organization is truly strategic. By now, I’ve also highlighted four common types of non-strategic objectives, the incremental objective , the accounting objective, the lead brick objective and the world […]
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