Gather Employee Input Before You Try Managing Their Performance

Before you craft your performance management strategy, don’t miss this valuable tip for capturing your employee’s loyalty and valuable ideas. As our VP of Marketing Erica Olsen says, “recognition is the number one motivator of employees.” You can try yelling at them. You can try tossing money at them (well, probably not in this economy), […]

How to Implement Your Strategic Plan

Execute, execute, execute! That sentence (fragment) is terrifying on so many levels. Not only does it bring to mind pictures of being blindfolded, given a last cigarette, and placed in front of a firing squad, but even more scary it means once you craft a strategic plan you’re expected to make it happen.
Planning is one […]

Avoid the 11 Strategic Implementation Pitfalls

Wondering why your strategic plan never got implemented? Every year, organizations labor at planning, yet never seem to make it happen. Before you sit down with your team, make sure you’ve taken care of these potential traps:

Lack of ownership: The most common reason a plan fails is lack of ownership. If people don’t have […]

3 Perspectives for Getting Buy-in From Management

One of the most frustrating and futile exercises throughout the business world is attempting to implement a strategic plan without total management support. All of the thought put into planning and all of the work done though performance management focused on employees cannot replace this essential facet of your organization’s strategy: 100% buy in from […]

Half-Way Through 2008- How’s it Going?

So- you set your goals, you dreamed your dreams and now, here we are at the midpoint of the year. For some, July sped here at breakneck speeds. For others, the year has been creeping along. No matter where you stand, this is a fantastic time to take stock in your position: how far are […]

Whiteboard Video: How to Write a Mission Statement

MSP is extremely proud to announce our new weekly installment to the blog- “The Virtual Strategist: Practical videos packed with business essentials.” Each week, our VP of Marketing Erica Olsen will take complex or boring business concepts and make them simple and inspiring! This week: Mission Statements.

Stay tuned for more each week here at mystrategicplan/blog!

Excel is a great tool, but it’s a dumb one for Strategic Planning

This past weekend I decided it was time to finally fix my leaky faucet. So, the first thing I did was head out to the shed and grab my sledge hammer…
Not smart, you say? But you can’t possibly be telling me that a sledge hammer isn’t useful- nearly everyone I know has one. They’re simple […]

Why on Earth Would You Keep it Locked Away?

Here’s something you can file under “I can’t believe it - oh wait, yes I can.” This is the kind of stuff that makes me wonder how most businesses are even still operating. Are you ready for it?
95% of businesses don’t tell their employees what their strategy is. (source: Cognos report)
Seriously. Almost every business out […]

Strategic Planning: Innovation Killer or Enabler?

I came across two different blog posts today that are both wrong. They’re also both right.
Both posts claim that there is a problem with strategic planning. They put forth the assertion that strategic planning, drawing some of its foundations from external & internal analyses which are most often focused on past performance, cannot be flexible […]

Have You Checked your Business for Desire Paths?

Strategic planning and implementation, along with all of their smaller components, can become to some extent a predictable process. You research, you set goals, you plan and you execute. The whole process implies that for whatever ills you uncover, there is a prescription that will cure each.
But what do you do about the unexpected? What […]