Reading an article about Darwin this weekend, I couldn’t help but think that evolution and business strategy have a lot of interesting parrallels. One that struck me relates to a couple of fascinating stories – the first about the horrible rise of the deer population on a resort-covered island in the Carolinas after hunting was banned. Of course, the deer had a huge population explosion, and then began to eat everything – including some very expensive landscaping. It was not unusual to see the corpses of starved deer, and groups of 3-4 could be seen bravely eating geraniums out of window boxes.
The 19th century English political economist Thomas Malthus commented that populations can experience what is now known as a “Malthusian Catastrophe” of runaway growth when there is an increase in food available. Since resources are rarely infinite, such explosive growth often leads to this kind of problem. The same can be seen in business – when money is easy to come by in a given industry – or using a given practice – the population of companies exploiting that resource explodes. Two excellent recent examples are the dot com boom and bust of the 1990s and the more recent real estate boom and bust.
How can we use an understanding of these pressures to succeed during a recession? We should be aware that everyone – individual consumers, employees, companies – is looking to graze in the window boxes where there is still money to be had. In the late ice ages, isolated wooly mammoth populations evolved to be smaller, more efficient, and able to survive on less food when faced with similar catastrophe. Human beings, on the other hand, under the same pressure, developed the use of tools and language to enable their populations to feed on a wider range of foods.
Will your business be a mammoth during this recession and become smaller to survive? Or will you develop capabilities that broaden your markets? Ordinarily, I’d strongly recommend a tight focus, but I can see that for some businesses, learning to feed on different resources may be an appropriate strategic option. I’d be very interested in hearing what is working for people in either circumstance.
One of the real upsides of a recession is the cleansing effect it has…I notice a high correlation between poor strategy and disastrous performance in recessions. That isn’t to say that good strategy makes you completely immune to a downturn, but you will weather the storm much better with a good gameplan in place.
In particular, the problem I mentioned earlier about “stealing from customers” tends to precipitate interesting behaviors during tough times. This is partially because EVERYONE wants your business when their markets get soft – so the commodity players amp up their products and service, while the specialty players trim their prices. The people who made money by cheating their customers…well, they don’t have anywhere to go. That’s why we are starting to see the end of certain stupid practices in the airline industry, the hotel industry, and other places where it has become fashionable to take money from customers without delivering value. The only places you don’t see such practices challenged is where there is some kind of monopoly power – such as your local cable, phone or power company.
I’m curious…is anyone seeing this trend, too? Are there any counter-examples, where a company is removing value from their product/service and becoming more successful?
Thinking about the current recession, I couldn’t help but think back to recessions I’ve gone through in the past – and how clients succeeded (or didn’t) during those difficult times.
Several important concepts come to mind, especially about the importance of maintaining strategic discipline, but the first I’d like to point out is that your challenges will probably be driven by your strategy. Put another way – you will probably have challenges, but different strategies will lead to different problems during a recession.
If you are pursuing a specialty strategy, you are probably already seeing increased price pressure and declining volume. If you are pursuing a commodity strategy, you may be experiencing the same thing. The difference lies in how you are experiencing these pressures. With a good specialty strategy, you can give up margin and still have room for profit. With a good commodity strategy, you can give up volume and still keep your operation humming. If you have made the mistake of pursuing a “hybrid” strategy – a bit of specialty, and a bit of commodity – you are in for a world of hurt, because you probably don’t have enough margin cushion and you probably don’t have volume cushion, either.
Assuming you have been following the advice in Simplified Strategic Planning, you have a clear specialty or commodity strategy, though – and this means your adaptation to a recessionary environment should be simpler and more effective. If you are using the specialty strategy, you need to find a way to adapt your operation to a temporary decline in volume. If you are using the commodity strategy, you can maintain volume if you can manage past a temporary decline in your already thin margins. Obviously, this highlights yet another reason we tend to prefer specialty strategy – scaling a specialty company for lower volumes is much simpler than adapting a commodity company to even thinner margins.
Banks failing, real estate loans made to people who do not and did not have the means to repay them, institutions using derivatives without fully understanding the risk – what happened? Were executives trying to meet their goals? Did these goals enable them to qualify for significant bonuses? Did this achievement of short-term goals lead to long-term instability?
Many of the financial institutions currently in distress did not pay heed to the warnings of a real estate bubble. Instead many institutions developed plans to keep the top line growing in spite of the increasingly risky nature of the borrowers and the overvaluation of the underlying collateral. Could this have been prevented?
Well, hindsight is 20-20, but the lessons here are important and should be a part of your strategic planning process:
Evaluate external forces – (is there a bubble?) Are your goals consistent with the external environment?
Are top line growth goals in line with long-term stability and perhaps survival?
Are you not investing in key projects in order to make the top line?
What will the consequences be if you do not invest? Will it impact your long-term growth?
Will your phone system go down if you do not invest?
Will you have a safety issue if you do not continue with training?
Will you have inadequate staff for the upturn if you do not replace key positions now?
Are you taking on customers who are a time sink in order to make your top line?
As your team weathers these turbulent times be sure you set realistic goals that not only allow you to survive the downturn, but also position your team for the upturn when it finally arrives.
Even for the most raw and rapidly conceived start-up company, the entrepreneur and initial management team have some strategy in place – some reason to believe that they should begin conducting business. For more established businesses, strategy has been in place from the beginning regardless of whether it was the result of careful consideration and study of the marketplace or whether it has been improvised over time in a series of convulsions reacting to customers, competitors and internal capabilities.The important point moving forward is that a company at any stage in its evolution will benefit from serious, deliberate evaluation of its company’s basic strategic building blocks (markets, customers, competitors, competencies, opportunities, threats and all the rest!). Once the business analysis has been performed and the company strategy is formalized, then structure should be chosen to support the strategy in the most effective way possible. The implication here is that a management team formalizing their strategic plan for the first time may realize that they need to make significant changes to their structure. In many cases, these changes do not require immediate, disruptive and, perhaps, risky re-structuring moves. Clear structural changes indicated by an adjustment in business strategy should be undertaken to maximize the long-term structural benefits without compromising existing revenue streams, customer and employee relationships and market position in the near term.
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 your strategic planning:
Limit your market segments.
Limit the size of your team.
Cut out low-impact exercises (at least temporarily).
The Risk of Cutting Exercises
Cutting out certain exercises from your strategic planning can save time, but it comes with risks. The danger is that we don’t always know which exercises will provide key insights and which ones can be skipped. Simplified Strategic Planning was designed to cover all important areas without wasting too much time on any single one. However, there are ways to trim the process without losing important insights.
Three Types of Exercises to Consider Cutting
1. Exercises That Rarely Add Value
Some exercises are included because people expect them, but they don’t always contribute much. One example is the Mission Statement (worksheet 6.1). While mission statements were popularized in the 1980s, what matters more is that everyone understands the mission. Many organizations waste time debating word choice and punctuation in a mission statement, or worse, end up with a bland statement that adds no value.
2. Exercises That Are Valuable in Some Cases, But Not Others
Certain exercises are important in specific situations but not universally. For example, the Supplier Market Assessment (worksheet 1.4) is critical in some industries but unnecessary in others where supplier markets aren’t a major concern. If supplier markets don’t affect your industry, this exercise can likely be skipped for the year.
3. Exercises That Don’t Need Revision
Some exercises, like the Goals worksheet (6.2), don’t change much year to year. If your goals remain consistent, you can skip this worksheet in future cycles.
A good rule of thumb is to ask, “Will skipping this exercise lead to a significantly different strategy?” If the answer is no, you can probably skip it.
Exercises You Should Never Skip
There are some exercises that you should always include in your planning process. These include:
Industry Scenario/Winners Profile (4.7/4.8)
Strategic Assessment (5.1)
Action Plans (7.X)
Personal Annual Schedule and Time Worksheet (9.1 and 9.2)
Skipping any of these can lead to poor strategies and weak implementation. These exercises often uncover insights that you won’t get from other parts of the process.
Conclusion: Tailoring Strategic Planning to Your Needs
If you’re looking to streamline your strategic planning, it’s worth consulting with us to ensure you’re making the right cuts. We regularly assist companies in this area and are happy to offer guidance.
For smaller companies, our monthly strategic planning process spreads the workload over 12 months, making it more manageable. This plan includes an extra one-day meeting to focus on your key strategic issues and costs as little as $1,000 per month, making it an affordable option for smaller organizations while still providing powerful results.
Faster strategic planning can lead to a better plan at a lower cost of resources.
This is the second in a series of three articles about ways you can do your strategic planning faster.
The first article discussed limiting the number of market segments you analyze to reduce the time needed for planning. Today, we will examine limiting the size of your team.
The basic idea in these approaches is to limit the time you spend on things that will have limited value. The time it takes to do strategic planning is one of the biggest reasons why some companies don’t do it at all. While strategy itself has incredible value, not every part of the process is equally valuable. An experienced facilitator can help with this a lot, but here are the three easiest changes to make with Simplified Strategic Planning:
Cut out low-impact exercises (at least temporarily)
Understanding how limiting the size of your team will speed up strategic planning you need to consider two things: first, the important benefits of creating and managing your plan with a team, and second, the cost of adding more people to the team.
There are two things that one person simply cannot do as well alone as a team in strategic planning:
Assure all important perspectives are addressed
Bring the necessary commitment to implementation
As any organization grows, the ability of one person to cover both of these important inputs to the planning process diminishes, because one person can only do so much. As I’ve worked with many companies of various sizes over the years, I’ve noticed that the insistence of the founder or CEO on covering too many of the roles in planning results in a serious impediment to growth. This effect is so pronounced that I’ve seen many new companies rapidly grow to the limit of one person’s ability and then stagnate for years, achieving little appreciable growth after the first surge.
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.
When you add more people and perspectives to your team, you should be adding perspective from a strategically critical area as well as implementation horsepower. The implementation element is key because execution is best when key executives feel they had a role in creating the strategy. As a rule, each person you add can bring in more perspective and better commitment to your implementation.
If more people means better perspective and implementation, why would you want to limit the size of your team? The reasons lie in team and meeting dynamics. First, you want your team to trust each other and the team process. This only happens when team members feel they have enough time to contribute to the conversation. When the team gets too large, the time each member gets to contribute shrinks, unless you make your meetings longer. In larger meetings, it is also harder for a team to feel confident they can have an honest discussion. In my experience, people in larger meetings treat the discussion as a series of speeches delivered to an audience, which limits the feeling of trust in the process and creation of a holistic plan.
Meeting dynamics are another key part of this issue. Every person you add to a meeting will feel entitled to voice their opinion and discuss disagreements that arise. This takes time, and the management of the team can come to dominate the process if the team size is too large. A professional facilitator can manage a larger team, but the sense of ownership and commitment you want from the meetings will decline when team size gets larger than about 10 people. This effect increases exponentially with team size, so a team of 20 people is less than half as productive as a team of 10 people.
In my practice, I can get a team of ten people through the entire Simplified Strategic Planning agenda in the schedules we present in the book and seminar. If you are not a practiced facilitator, you may find a smaller team is necessary to follow these schedules. The meetings will definitely go faster if you have five or six team members instead of seven, so I will often recommend this when a client is concerned about getting through the entire agenda quickly.
In my next article, I’ll discuss the third way to speed up your planning: cutting out low-impact experiences. It’s the most difficult of the three, since each step in the Simplified Strategic Planning is designed to deliver a well-rounded strategic plan, but we’ll examine some of the steps that can be safely bypassed in certain situations to get your planning done faster.
If you’re interested in getting the power of strategic planning with a smaller investment of time, I’d highly recommend our monthly strategic planning process. This takes the time out of an annual retreat and spreads it out over 12 months, with additional steps added to track and improve your implementation. For smaller companies, this is an ideal way to do your planning with a smaller commitment of resources while assuring a great plan and better execution. If you sign up at the link below, you’ll get an additional free one-day meeting added to the monthly schedule, to enable you to pay more in-depth attention to your strategic issues. At only $1,200 a month, this schedule is designed to be far more affordable than the regular Simplified Strategic Planning process and will be especially useful for smaller organizations.
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 back your planning process, we will be sharing some approaches we have used in the past – along with the issues that they bring.
The basic idea in these approaches is to limit the time you spend on things that will have limited value. While strategy itself has incredible value, not every part of the process is equally valuable. An experienced facilitator can help with this a lot, but here are the three easiest changes to make with Simplified Strategic Planning:
Limit your market segments
Limit the size of your team
Cut out low-impact exercises (at least temporarily)
Article 1 – Limit your market segments
Market segmentation helps make better strategy. A targeted segment strategy that delivers value to specific customers is one of the easiest ways to distinguish your business, especially if you have larger, more established competitors.
As a general rule, the more segments you have, the finer the focus you can have on specific groups of customers. This doesn’t mean you should have hundreds of segments, but it does mean you will find value in adding more segments as you grow your business. The downside of each added segment is that it takes time to research analyze and formulate a strategy for every one of them. In my practice, I put a hard limit of 10 segments on all businesses, because when you have more than ten of anything, it becomes unwieldy and time-consuming.
In smaller companies, one, three or five segments can make much more sense than ten, because you can spend less time on research, analysis, and strategy. Here are some critical questions to ask when looking at your segmentation:
Do we offer a different value to this segment?
Do we compete differently here?
Does this segment ask for things that other segments do not?
Is our competitive position stronger or weaker in this segment?
As an example, consider a company that sells plumbing services. A simple breakdown might separate home plumbing services from commercial properties. That might be enough for a small business to understand the needs and preferences of their market. With a little more effort, you might break up each of those markets by customer preferences for speed, cost, fixture types, quality or specific technical abilities, yielding 10 or more segments. Good segmentation in strategic planning starts with an understanding of who you are selling to, and why they choose to buy from you. This means it’s quite helpful to ignore any segment you aren’t currently selling into.
How do we reduce the number of segments even more? To begin with, most segments revolve around 2 to 4 attributes that are important preferences of most customers. In plumbing for retail stores, it might be speed, quality, and cost. This means that other, similar segments that are driven by those three preferences could be combined with retail stores, so, for example, it wouldn’t be surprising to find theaters, restaurants, and even light manufacturing lumped together in a segment we might call “light commercial” While data gathering and analysis may be a little murkier with this combined segment, the plumbing supplier likely faces the same competitors in each subgroup and will succeed with the same strategy.
When I’ve worked with companies for several years, it’s not uncommon to see similar segments combined in this way. It’s helpful for keeping the strategy meetings shorter, and it rarely loses the value that the original segmentation brings.
The main drawback to look out for when reducing the number of market segments you use in strategic planning is the danger of treating very different customers as if they are the same. If you have a bunch of 10-year-old customers and a bunch of 20-year-old customers, no one will appreciate you taking the average and treating everyone like they are 15 years old. This means you need to make sure you aren’t losing an important factor when you combine segments, and that can take some careful consideration.
Since each market segment leads to 3 research worksheets and a separate strategy in Simplified Strategic Planning, it’s easy to see that cutting from 10 segments down to 3 would chop a big chunk of time out of both preparation and the strategy meetings themselves. If you have limited resources or are pressed for time, this is a very useful step to take in simplifying your strategic planning.
In my next post, I’ll discuss the usefulness of limiting the size of your team, with some of the pros and cons of that approach to simplifying your strategic planning.
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 not visible on the surface. Here are some clear advantages companies with excellent cultures have today:
Low employee turnover
Simply put, employees who enjoy the culture they work in don’t leave. This doesn’t mean you reap the benefits by paying them less, it means you benefit from employees who learn to be truly professional in delivering to your mission.
Easier access to top talent in hiring
Prospective employees are attracted to companies with better cultures. Today, more than ever, a bad company culture will leak out online, no matter how much you try to police it. Given a choice between an employer with a great culture and one the has a poor culture, many of the best employees will choose the great culture -even if it pays less.
Higher efficiency
A good culture helps your employees feel excited about your mission. While some missions are easy to get excited about, if you sell a boring product or service, you need a culture that celebrates the value you create for customers. Such a culture elevates productivity by helping all employees to remain focused on the right things.
Fewer issues with poor decision making
In a great culture, bad choices will still be made, but they will be treated as learning opportunities and improve the business. Poor cultures often lead to rewarding people who avoid responsibility, which leads to ridiculous efforts to shift blame rather than to understand what caused a problem in the first place.
A better bond with customers
Good culture doesn’t just mean happy employees, it means employees who are happy to deliver value to your customers. Too many companies assume customers can’t tell how good or bad your culture is, and that just isn’t true. I’ll go a step further and say that your attempts to whitewash a bad culture are likely super transparent to your customers as well, so you should probably avoid wasting time and money of trying to put lipstick on that pig.
A stronger brand
A great culture is an incredible support for a great brand. Simply put, brands are worth building because they help customers understand the value behind them. A great culture can help make that value real and obvious to your market.
So, of course the answer is, a great culture is certainly an asset to a company that has one. I’ll go a step further and say that culture is one of the best strategic differentiators of great companies. The reason it’s so great is that culture is hard to build and nearly impossible to copy.
That brings us to the real problem most companies have with culture as a strategy: it’s difficult. You can throw a lot of time and money at culture and find you still have a long way to go. Don’t despair – the cultures of great companies that you know and admire were not created overnight. One secret weapon you have that can help build a better company culture is strategic planning with good execution.
I didn’t say just strategic planning. This is because most companies that do strategic planning have terrible execution, achieving about half the objectives that people who stick to Simplified Strategic Planning do. Execution doesn’t just give your strategy traction. Good implementation helps to build your culture because your team, when they see it, understand that your strategy isn’t just lip service. When you execute well, your team gets the message that your organization means what it says, and it will act on the vision and values you bring to the table.
One of our best – and most affordable – options for creating and implementing great strategy is the Monthly Simplified Strategic Planning program. Companies can use it as 1:1 coaching for the CEO or other key strategic decision makers, or they can actually complete a collaborative plan with the facilitation of one of our highly experienced professionals – you choose what works for you!
If you aren’t using Simplified Strategic Planning, or you did it years ago and want to revitalize it, this program is the easiest way to assure you get your strategic plan done and then implement your plan.
Buy-in is a way of describing the emotional attachment your team feels to the strategic plan and the efforts required to execute your strategic plan. As organizations grow, this element 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. There are three key issues you may encounter with buy-in, and each has some specific remedies.
Not getting buy in
This is perhaps the grandaddy of all strategic planning problems, and it naturally grows out of the way companies grow. In the beginning, one person does strategic decision making in a business , then a small team, and then a growing cadre of managers.
In the first transition – from an entrepreneur-run business to one run by a management team, leaders often struggle to let go of their roles. This includes both decision making and execution of strategic projects. Failing to let go clearly limits both the support given the plan by the team and the horsepower available to execution, leaving the single owner or CEO burdened with all the tasks in both creating and executing strategy. While some energetic CEOs may manage that burden in creating strategy, as the company grows, the amount of work required in executing strategy well crescendos to an unmanageable volume. We often see the effect of this in companies that reach a plateau of growth despite having a brilliant and energetic CEO.
T0 remedy, obviously, a collaborative, team-based approach to developing and implementing strategy excels. There is simply no substitute for a well-managed planning process with a team of responsible executives for building both and understanding of, and buy-in to, the strategic plan.
Getting buy-in the wrong way
Knowing the importance of buy-in sometimes leads businesses leaders to try to build buy-in by having a “team-based” process that does a poor job of getting real buy-in. This almost always happens when some aspect of the process leaves key people feeling disengaged. The three most common causes of that disengagement are:
Being ignored
If you bring someone into the process, you need to value and listen to their input. This is hardest if key people on the tream disagree with the input. It’s vital to assure everyone is heard and no one – not even the CEO – dominates the discussion.
Complexity and overwhelm
If your planning is cumbersome, hard to understand, or has so much data that team members feel they are drowning in information, they can easily disengage. The best way to combat this is to simplify key answers. Use fewer words if possible. Also, try to digest information into easily grasped ideas. It also helps, of course, to use a simplified process and check in with team members frequently about their understanding of what you are doing.
Not seeing relevance
Team members who don’t see how the strategic plan will help them or make a difference in their work may come to view the whole process as irrelevant. Such members may need to be drawn into the conversation and clearly shown the value of the process in the focused world of their jobs.
Too much buy in
This one is a little more rare, but it does happen. If buy-in is good, more buy in should be better – but that’s not true. I like to think of strategic planning as navigating a ship. It’s a critical task, but that doesn’t mean every crew member should have their hand on the steering wheel. In Simplified Strategic Planning, we emphasize getting input and commitment from team members at the appropriate level. This means that operational employees need to bring insights into improving the operation. You should not be looking to them for solutions to financial issues, for example.
As a rule, involve as many people as practical in elements of the plan, such as the action plans. If you do this, you’ll want to allow time to bring everyone up to speed on what you are doing and why. You will also need extra time for collaborative communication, since the number of people involved can greatly increase the time needed to discuss strategic issues.
This list may not be exhaustive. If you have seen other issues with buy-in that have led to strategic problems, I’d love to hear about your experiences. Also, if you’d like to discuss how we avoid these issues in the Simplfied Strategic Planning process, feel free to reach out. There is no charge for a short conversation about the issues you’re seeing in your planning process, and we are always happy to offer solutions.
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 thousands of people in different industries. Here are some common issues I see:
The main issues we encounter boil down to just four areas: Information, Buy-in, Process and Strategy Execution. While execution is by far the most common (most companies only achieve 30% of the strategic objectives they set), the others are sometimes hard to spot, and will contribute to problems with execution in their own way.
This week, I’ll just look at the first problem area, information. I will examine the remaining three areas in subsequent postings.
Information is key to a rational planning process. If you make important decisions without information, your planning can end up just being a fantasy about how you’d like things to go. Additionally, team members need to have a shared foundation of information to efficiently make good strategic decisions. These are the three most common issues we find:
The wrong amount of information. This can be too little or too much. How much is enough? My sense of this is that you need enough information to create a valid, usable picture of the key systems behind your strategy. By systems, I mean the things that drive customer behaviors, supplier markets, operations and the economy in general. How these systems are today, and how they will change in the future, are the most important things a team needs to understand to create a winning strategy
Assumptions and data. Most people mix assumptions in with their data. Assumptions are temporary estimates of probable future developments, and they are not immutable facts. So many strategy disasters begin with assumption errors that many try to avoid putting any assumptions in their planning process – but this is a mistake, too. In order to plan for the future, you must make assumptions. The key to avoiding most assumption errors is to be clear about which assumptions you are making and building flexibility into your plans so you can adapt to changes in this information.
Sources and estimates. People tend to want to find definitive sources that tell us how big a market is, or what competitors’ market shares are. For all but the largest (mostly commodity) markets, this data simply doesn’t exist. That means that you will need to make intelligent estimates about some data. Fortunately, you don’t have to be perfectly accurate in your estimates (though it helps). Unfortunately, most people are intimidated by the process of making good estimates from a skeleton of reliable data. One of the key pitfalls here is spending too much time and money trying to get perfect data, when it is largely impossible and usually unnecessary.
Have you encounterd other issues with information that has led to strategic problems? I’d love to hear about your experiences. Also, if you’d like to discuss how we avoid these issues in the Simplfied Strategic Planning process, feel free to reach out. There is no charge for a short conversation about the issues you’re seeing in your planning process, and we are always happy to offer solutions.
Last week, I reviewed the pros and cons of our new monthly schedule for strategic planning. If you’ve been using Simplified Strategic Planning, you might find the new strategic planning schedule useful.
Month 1 – Situation Analysis
In the first meeting, as with our traditional schedules, you’ll review your market segmentation, and assign homework relating to markets, competition and environmental forces.
Month 2 – Capabilities
Meeting two is devoted to reviewing the homework from month 1 (there is a lot!) and the close examination of strengths and weaknesses of your company.
Month 3 – Competency and Opportunities
In month 3, we work on the strategic competency of your organization, and use that as a springboard to brainstorm your perceived opportunities. Coming out of that session, opportunity screening worksheets will be assigned as homework.
Month 4 – Assessments
In the fourth meeting, we review the opportunity screening worksheets, threats and the industry scenario. Based on previously completed homework, we will also frame the strategic assessments and discuss their implications.
Month 5 – Winner’s Profile and Strategic Issues
The fifth meeting starts with a review of the industry scenario, which is then used to create a winner’s profile. The rest of the meeting is devoted to your top strategic issues.
Month 6 – Strategic Issues
The strategic issues discussion is concluded in this meeting, along with noting specific modifications to your strategies and possible objective topics.
Month 7 – Strategies
Based upon everything in the previous meeting, the team outlines their vision for the future of the company, including specific market strategies for each segment.
Month 8 – Objectives
We start this meeting by reviewing the mission, then generate objectives. Action plan team leaders are assigned for implementation management, and the action plans are homework for the next meeting.
Month 9 – Action Plans
The team uses this meeting to review and revise the action plans that were prepared as homework for each objective. Budgets and time worksheets are homework for the next meeting.
Month 10 – Budgets and Schedules
In meeting 10, the team reviews resource availability for the coming year’s implementation initiatives. The resources include both time and money.
Month 11 – Action Plan Scheduling
The team schedules all action steps on each action plan, based upon resource availability.
Month 12 – Communications
From this point on in the strategic planning schedule, we review action plan progress at the beginning of each meeting. The team also reviews the strategies and objectives, to create summary documents for communicating your strategic internally. The cycle repeats the next month, starting over with the month 1 strategic planning schedule.
This schedule is comfortable for a team that is new to Simplified Strategic Planning if you can devote one day per month to the meetings. Experienced teams – or those who can do a more challenging pace – can get through this schedule with half-day meetings every month.
If you’d like to use this schedule, those who’ve attended our seminar can request a more detailed schedule by emailing us. If you would like to attend our next online program, click the button below.
