Strategic Planning Best Practice 4 – Ongoing Planning and Execution

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Market changes wait for no one. In today’s rapidly changing business environment, competitors and suppliers aggressively seek to gain a competitive advantage while government agencies and special interest groups continuously seek to further their agendas. These forces, acting together, demand an organization to be responsive and flexible to maintain its footing within the marketplace.

Ongoing planning and execution enables an organization to appropriately adjust to its changing operational environment. Effective response to marketplace changes is achieved by using a combination of event, routine, and annualized planning and execution activities. Event driven activities, triggered by abrupt marketplace changes, enable the organization to react to significant developments in the business environment. Routine and annualized activities help the organization maintain flexibility in response to slowly evolving trends.

About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

Strategic Planning Best Practice 3 – Strategic Discipline

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Executives seeking to focus their organization on mission achievement act with strategic discipline. By committing a significant portion their time and attention to the long-term direction of the organization, executives are more likely to recognize and properly respond to marketplace changes in a way that fully harnesses and focuses their organization’s energy on mission achievement.

Strategic discipline is demonstrated by managerial behavior that consistently and deliberately supports performance of a combination of planning, execution, and monitoring and control programs. Executives exhibit strategic discipline by maintaining awareness of marketplace trends, preparing for planning activities, reinforcing program execution, and making decisions and directing actions that drive the organization to appropriately respond to market factors. Through these behaviors, executives focus the organization’s attention and activities on mission achievement.

About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

Recommended Resource – Essentials of Strategic Management

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Essentials of Strategic Management (4th Edition)
by J. David Hunger and Thomas L. Wheelen

About the Reference

The Essentials of Strategic Management (4th Edition) by J. David Hunger and Thomas L. Wheelen focuses on the founding principles and methods employed in both strategic planning and execution. Topics include strategy formulation, implementation, and control.

Benefits of Using this Reference

StrategyDriven contributors like this reference because its presentation is concise and direct while at the same time providing the detail needed to give the reader a fundamental understanding of strategic planning and execution. This book provides a full array of easy to follow tools and instructions that are ready for use by organizations of any size.

Strategic Planning Best Practice 2 – Prioritize the Mission

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Ideally, an organization’s mission statement would convey a singular purpose. However, mission statements often enumerated several purposes, such as creating shareholder value, contributing to the community, and offering workforce prosperity. When this occurs, organizations struggle to serve multiple masters.

Prioritizing the mission establishes the relative importance of an organization’s multiple purposes; focusing decisions and driving actions toward achievement of the organization’s primary purpose while allowing progress to be made on objectives of lesser importance. The amount of emphasis given to each purpose should make their relative importance obvious to all members of the organization. Additionally, decision-making should demonstratively reflect and reinforce the mission priorities such that a proportionate amount of managerial attention and organizational resources are applied to the achievement of each purpose.

About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

Strategic Planning Best Practice 1 – Make the Mission Measurable

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StrategyDriven Strategic Planning Best PracticeAn organization’s mission statement defines its purpose, its reason for being. These statements, however, tend to be broad and somewhat vague; making it difficult to identify the specific products, services, initiatives, and people that will most directly enable the organization to achieve its purpose.

Making the mission measurable provides the added clarity needed to focus decisions and drive actions toward achievement of the organization’s purpose. The mission is translated into a time-bound measure of performance rather than a specific goal. The value of competing alternatives can then be evaluated against the measure; offering executives and managers a mission contribution basis for the selection and pursuit of specific business opportunities.

About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.