Strategic Planning for Renewal
(Notes and excerpts from a briefing to a Korean management group.)
Many Managing Directors, Owners, Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), Chief Operating Officers (COOs), Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) are fine-tuning strategy, reconsidering markets or simply rebuilding the business for profitability. Most of them use consultants to assist with the preparation and completion, ensuring:
- Rigor,
- Comprehensiveness
- The least amount of dead ends.
Executives in different countries and industries use the Business and Organizational Renewal methodology as a guide for thorough analysis and timely decision making.
- This process itself does not provide the answer.
- The answer is crafted by executives and the management team because they are the ones who lead implementation
The step-by-step Renewal framework helps improve the capacity of top management to:
- Step back from day-to-day operations and think strategically,
- Agree a way forward,
- Achieve the planned outcomes.
Moravec and Associates consultants facilitate the Renewal exercise.
Examples of questions to test the strategic plan for completeness:
- Does management have the creditability of stakeholders?
- Do analysts and portfolio managers believe management's vision of the future seems likely to optimize value creation in the volatile, globalizing and connected economy?
- Does the company have the ability to execute its stated strategy?
- Were the Why and What questions answered? (for direct reports)
- Were the How and Who questions answered? (for direct reports and their key leaders)
- Can the strategy be summarized in several simple, compelling sentences that are understood and can be repeated using the words of the workforce?
- Are benefits - value adds - delineated as well as the costs and risks?
- Is the execution of the strategy funded: money, time, change management resources, facilitation?
- Do measurements exist that the workforce uses to assess accomplishments?
A strategic plan that is not implemented is not a plan and is not strategy.
An example of an approach:
- Assess the reality. Do a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis of the business and organization. Receive input from the direct reports of your direct reports as well as suppliers and customers.
- Analyze the top items in each of the four categories - strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats - to root out the forces driving them.
- Define goals and measurements for each root cause.
- Identify only one or two actions for each root cause and illustrate the impact on measurements. These are the strategies and intended results.
- Define execution with assignments and resource requirements. Each execution plan is detailed by the individual or teams accountable for delivering the result.
Strategy is creating the future of the business.
- Strategic planning is an ongoing management process that is not calendar driven and is not an event.
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