• Strategic planning & mindset revitalization is chicken soup for the entrepreneurial soul.  It fills you up when you’re feeling empty.
• Strategic planning doesn’t deal with future decisions.  It deals with the futurity of present decisions.
• Your clients are your best teachers.  Their input must be an integral part of you strategic planning.
• Strategic planning is often approached like an egg & spoon race.  Competitors line up, race from part A to B, drop the egg (ball), and pandemonium ensues.
• Strategic planning is worthless, unless you have a strategic vision.

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• Live questions you have will be addressed directly on the webinar

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Building an effective strategic plan is much easier when the vision and mission of an organization is clearly understood.  When talking about both, the conversation can quickly become quite passionate, and it should.  Both tap into an organization’s reason for being, and beyond what these statements mean for customers, they are the glue that binds employees to the larger cause and gives insight on proper approach for strategy execution.

In an economic environment of uncertainty, risks seem to proliferate into areas of decision-making at more levels. Everyone wants to protect the company and their jobs. Yet, sometimes taking risks yield the development of an opportunity. Employees who understand the vision and utilize the direction of the mission in their work can make better decisions… not based on fear, but based on the purpose-driven work woven into great vision and mission statements.

So, by a course of habit when explaining the esoteric, we will use an analogy. The vision (turn the V upside down) is the apex, marking your destination of the future. It is the Everest of mountains: A Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal (BHAG) for most of us, and I think everyone would agree that unless you knew how to judge routes, use ladders, and rely on ropes, you would never ever attempt that climb. This is where the mission provides wisdom for choosing the right routes and tools to transverse and overcome obstacles along the way.

Employees are your expedition team in this journey. They need to understand that the destination is not base-camp. For your very survival, this kind of trek is not to be passively experienced; it requires keen observation and perseverance. This translates into the way decisions need to be made for companies, not from a passive approach but one of determination toward a BHAG. A company’s long-term survival rests on the collective impact of these strategic actions.

So, if you haven’t figured out a way to demonstrate strong support to the inspirations contained within your organization’s visions and mission, the time is now. Motivate your employees to exercise the guidance contained within your mission statement. Get them emotionally engaged with the splendor (yes, splendor!) of your vision, and watch how your strategy execution finds more refined direction and intent.

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1. Strategy Stat: Sustaining Growth
2. Question: The Customer Connection – How do I determine the importance of my customer comments/feedback in setting strategy?
3. Hot Topic: M3’s Take on the Wall Street Journal article “Strategic Plans Lose Favor: Slump Showed Bosses Value of Flexibility, Quick Decisions”
   1. Participant feedback that we found particularly insightful:  “To me, the idea of not doing strategic planning because “things change and we need to be able to respond in spite of our strategic plan” is like not doing fire prevention because “fires happen and we need to be able to respond.”  Similarly, not responding to a change in the environment because “it wasn’t in our strategic plan” would be like not fighting a type of fire because we didn’t plan on having to fight that particular type of fire.  We should do like fire departments do — fight the fires when they occur; work on achieving your vision of the future when you have the time and resources to do so.”

Download Presentation

Download Supporting Document for NPS

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Without getting into too many details here, the NPS goes way beyond measuring customer satisfaction, and with its scoring, companies can segment their customer base into categories aptly-named titles as promoters, passively satisfied or detractors.

We have clients currently using a system we built around this concept that includes asking driving component questions to help give further insight to what the NPS is revealing.   Based on the company’s value proposition, these questions give management keen insight provided straight from the consumer.

From our reports, we think using NPS and identifying key drivers accomplishes some key objectives that companies should be embracing:

1.  Gives companies a way to connect to their customers.

2.  Offers insight on how programs can be tailored to the needs and expectations of customers according to that customer’s potential impact to the business.

3.  Consistently gives insight that can be applied to business processes and service levels to improve the company’s offering.

4.  Provides data to update an organization’s SWOT, which can be used as a key for keeping any plan relevant throughout strategy execution.

Much has been said about the need to make sure Strategic Plans stay agile.  Well, we think NPS offers best practices insight for effective strategy execution and upkeep.  After all, who would discount the strategic value of consistent organizational insight according to the most vital stakeholder:  the Customer?

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The new year brings a fresh start, new resolutions, and new beginnings.  Lately on Twitter people have been buzzing about what their personal strategic plan means to them.  We all do some type of planning in our lives and at work, but how do we take it to the next level of a real, tangible personal strategic plan?

Strategic planning expert, Erica Olsen, uses this balance goal spreadsheet to aid in the execution of her own personal strategic plan.  It’s a great way to divide up certain aspects of one’s life and essentially create your own personal strategic plan.  So if you are one of those people that is eager to start their personal strategic plan, but do not know where to begin, here is the perfect aid to begin.

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Decisions made in an organization sometimes provide an opportunity for critique from staff, customers and even key stakeholders involved in the decision.  Many times, however, it is the cultural thrust driving decisions that needs to be understood in order to drive an organization past unconstructive scrutiny and toward effective strategy implementation and execution.

Take the functional-unit level as an example:  be it a department, a branch or any other arm of an organization that manages front-line staff and reports to a tier of leadership.  During strategy reviews, it is important to create open dialogue about challenges and opportunities.  After all, without open dialogue, executive-level reports run the risk of being incomplete or even misleading.

To accomplish this, make sure hefty binders or fancy presentations are not mandated parts of your routine strategic execution reviews.  Arrange the meeting so that the same people do not dominate session after session, which holds particularly true for management.  If subordinates wait to take cues from leaders in order to comment on controversial topics, then you are coming to a consensus based on conformity, not of rationalized data and creative inputs.

Instead, assign clear roles of responsibility when it comes to strategic actions.   If controversy or obstacles arise, seek expertise or examples outside the unit or organization that have been proven in similar situations.  Then when decisions have to be made they can be based on a healthy source of experience and information.   It is then the responsibility of leadership to make sure that decisions made are less of a mandate and more of a guide through strategic execution processes from which future actions can maneuver.   The result:  empowered ownership of actions and increased efficiency toward achieving your strategic objectives.

STRATEGY CHECK:  Empower your team by nurturing a strong, stable strategic process to guide actions.

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Leadership’s role is to go beyond task delegation and get out of the habit of seeing results as an after-the-fact element of any given objective.   Before any task gets delegated, leaders need to recognize the culture in which the company operates as a factor.  If the task were a boat, what kind of cultural currents would it need to navigate through in order to get from the point of origin to the destination port?

Analogies aside, the point is that leaders need to recognize and correct for the conditions that typically stray tasks off course.  Regular progress reports geared toward the attaining results can give leaders the insight they need to make these corrections as well.  If the corrections are vexing, then you look at the source of the tasks, the larger objective, and assess if the expectations of the objective are not in line with the conditions an organization might find itself facing, like extreme economic fluctuations.

It is within this function of effective strategy execution that a plan stays relevant and responsive to the storms that will undoubtedly arise with the passage of time.   Strategic plan implementation is not complete without this process defined.

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• The key elements of a successful strategic plan.
• Best practices to execute your plan and achieve results
• How to use MyStrategicPlan System for optimal results

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Finishing up this first week of February marks a time when most companies are just tying up their corporate retreats and strategic planning for the upcoming years.   These last few weeks on Twitter it seems as if everyone is coming or going from their organization’s retreat where they have mapped out their company’s strategic plan.  However, it is apparent that there is a gap between the retreat and the actual execution of the strategic plan.  So, what exactly can your organization do to keep their planning momentum going after their retreat?

Strategic Planning expert, Erica Olsen, tackled this issue in last month’s Strategy Huddle.

How Do We Lose Momentum?

• No progress
• Not relevant
• No WIIFM (what’s in it for me?)
• Canceling meetings
• Feels like busy work

How To Keep Your Momentum:

• Someone needs to own the process of strategic management in the organization
• Need specific tasks & deliverables
• Schedule you strategic update meeting right away (Making it from the retreat to the first update is where most people get lost)
• Energy & focus
• Need to motivate & inspire

Taking some of these thoughts/recommendations will help your organization execute your strategy and keep the planning momentum going after your retreat.

For more information on the latest Strategy Buzz and Other Resources, please visit us at our Resources Page.

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