Changing the Way the World Thinks about Strategy

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Speed up your strategic planning – part three: eliminate some exercises

This article is the third in a series about simplifying strategic planning to make the process faster. The key idea is to focus only on the parts of the process that provide real value. While strategy itself is critical, not every part of the process is equally useful. Here are three quick ways to streamline […]

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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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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, part 2 – buy-in

As organizations grow, buy-in gets more and more difficult, and this can be an issue in even the smallest businesses.  In our experience, a cultural alignment of employees with the mission of the organization and its strategic plan are critical to success.

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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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