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Strategic Planning Best Practice 6 – Focus on Strength

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Time and again, organizations – like people – focus on overcoming weaknesses to improve performance. But like people, far more can often be gained by advancing the company’s strengths. Strength in this sense is not simply a corporate competency; rather, it is something the organization can consistently perform at world class levels.

Organizations focusing on their strengths realize several strategic advantages over their competitors. A focus on activities of strength implies reduced managerial attention and resource application to weaknesses; freeing these to further advance the company’s strengths. Workers feel a greater sense of accomplishment with the company’s increased success; improving employee engagement which often leads to an improved public image, both of which build on the strengths.

Focusing on strengths does not imply a lack of awareness or activities to eliminate weaknesses. In fact, it is important that weaknesses be reduced to a level that appropriately manages the risk of exploitation by competitors and minimizes their interference and distraction to the achievement of strength activities.

Additional Resources

StrategyDriven contributors recommend several resources that elaborate or compliment the Focus on Strength best practice including:

Organizational Strength

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t
by Jim Collins

Good to Great and the Social Sectors: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great
by Jim Collins

Jack: Straight from the Gut
by Jack Welch

Individual Strength

The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done
by Peter F. Drucker

Now, Discover Your Strengths
by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton

Strategic Analysis Best Practice 1 – Integrity Without Excuses

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StrategyDriven Strategic Analysis Article | Strategic Analysis Best Practice 1 - Integrity Without ExcusesFor any strategic analysis to be effective, it must be done with an open, honest assessment of the facts. Organizations acting with integrity without excuses seek to identify and eliminate instances where fact-based assessment conclusions are diluted by unrelated factors or opinion-based influences. This mitigation often seeks to justify action perceived as desirable when the fact-based evidence would suggest another course. Justification is frequently based on business factors that are not specifically value related or biases lacking a relevant performance basis.

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Additional Information

Additional information regarding strategic analysis can be found in the StrategyDriven whitepaper series Strategic Planning.

About the Author

Karen K. Juliano is StrategyDriven‘s Editor-in-Chief and Vice President of Communications and Marketing. Prior to joining the StrategyDriven team, she helped produce weekly programming for a Public Access Television station and served as a production assistant in the public affairs office at United States Naval Base, Philadelphia. To read Karen’s complete biography, click here.