Why Strategic Planning
In our last blog post, we discussed what strategy is. In this post, we want to convince you why you should have a coherent strategy for every part of your organization and spend the days of your organizational life focused on executing that plan. (We’ll cover execution in a later post.)
An organization without a strategy is like a team without plays. Imagine the 11 members of your favorite football team trying to win a game without every member of the team knowing the plays. Now imagine there are 100 or 1,000 members on that team. What would that be like – total chaos.
For many of us organizational leadership can feel like herding cats…nearly impossible to move everyone in the same direction. But you know what? It’s not the cats’ fault! It is ours, the leaders. If you haven’t cast a vision for the future of your organization and taken the time to create a strategy to achieve that vision, it is your fault that your people need so much direction.
How do we know that creating and executing a great strategy for your organization is the absolute best thing you could spend your time on? There are a ton of tools available to executives, all supposedly delivering faster growth and higher profits, but which are the most effective?
Bain & Company, one of the world’s leading consulting firms, performs a yearly survey of over 10,000 executives. These executives are leaders of some of the world’s largest and most well run organizations. In the survey, they asked them what tools they used for their organizations and which were the most beneficial in delivering growth and increasing profits. The chart below provides the results of the survey.
Does this give you an idea of where you should be spending your time?
Strategic planning is not only the most used tool, it also by far the tool that executives are most satisfied with. Mission and Vision statements are a key building block to a good plan and benchmarking is a tool that most sophisticated organizations use when they are developing their strategies. Customer Relationship Management – again, this is always a part of a good strategy. The 4 most used and most effective tools to grow faster and with higher profits are part of a great strategic plan. That is WHY you must create and execute a great strategic plan!
It would be different if these tools were priced out of the reach of most businesses, but they’re not. In fact, there are books you can read and tools you can use to get started right away. You can start with an assessment, like the quiz on our website or our e-Course that will take you through the primary steps to create and implement a great strategy.
If you have any questions, check out the other resources on our website, contact us, or join in the conversation by asking a question on our blog. We hope to see you on our website soon!
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