Strategic planning, as applied to Six Sigma, implies that the drawing down of elaborate and systematic planning of areas of concerns that have far-reaching and tactical implications at the project selection stage. The purpose of strategic planning is to have produced fundamental decisions and actions that guide successful Six Sigma implementation.

An Overview Of Strategic Six Sigma

Many CEOs are skeptical about the outcome of Six Sigma, despite huge annual spending. A critical component which helps integrate the visions of the leader with the functioning of the organization is strategic programming derived from “strategy deployment mapping”. This is said to produce an entirely new direction for the organization. The skepticism about the vision of building a future begins to gain momentum with the linking of visions to action plans and when it delivers tangible results. Six Sigma takes strategic planning to a different plane of thinking by delivering on this promise.

Success Begins With Planning

It should not be forgotten that the foundation for success is proper and adequate planning. Planning is the elaborate statement of vision by the leader of the company. This is true for both large corporations and smaller start-ups. The core of transforming organizational vision into tangible gains by employees has many steps to overcome obstacles on the path to achievement. Achievements will have to be translated to customer satisfaction for Six Sigma to be successful.

Sharing Of Vision

The vision which begins its journey with upper management needs to be shared by all the stakeholders. It may be difficult to demonstrate to employees that their actions relate to customer reactions directly. Another missing link that needs to be connected is the customer himself. The emphasis of Six Sigma is on factoring in customers & engaging them in defining needs. Deploying employees actively connects these disjointed needs. The powerful tools of Six Sigma highlight and simplifies the linkage between key elements, activities, strategies and finally the vision, paving way for smooth sharing of ideas. The methodology of Six Sigma communicates company vision effectively to all concerned in a language understandable by each of them.

Critical Mass

There is also a danger of leaders getting bogged down by trivial matters of day-to-day operations and numerous details. Two of the tools of Six Sigma (metrics), key requirements and differentiators, come to the rescue. These two metrics highlight the importance or irrelevance of some data and push for excellence on those that matter. The end result is helping leaders to envision the strategic importance of activities and steering clear of trivial, mundane things.

Deployment of Six Sigma can’t be disconnected from strategic planning and financial activities, either. If the decision to implement Six Sigma is a result of strategic planning, it means the leadership has recognized the need for complete retooling of the organization, no matter what phase it is in.

About the Author:
Tony Jacowski is a quality analyst for The MBA Journal. Aveta Solution’s Six Sigma Online offers online six sigma training and certification classes for lean six sigma, black belts, green belts, and yellow belts.

To be up there with the best strategic thinkers, you need to use the left and right sides of your brain, a skill which takes practice as well as confidence. Having the logic and creative sides to your skillset are of immense value.

Here are some skills that the very best strategic thinkers have, and use, every day.

They Have a Vision

They are great at both thinking with a strategic purpose as well as creating a Visioning process. They have both tools in their kit and they use both to complement each other. This form of supportive thinking and seeing the future, creates a way of thinking and evolving strategy that is focused and yet broad.

Make Time

In a busy businesses and organisations, be they small or large, making the time is vital. At the top of their game key strategic thinkers take time out. Maybe a retreat (maximum points!); maybe a day in a hotel foyer; maybe an afternoon somewhere/anywhere, with a blank sheet and a thinking hat on. Whatever works for them – but they do it.

Are Not Hasty

The clue is in the description, Strategic Thinking is not about today, tomorrow or next week. In close partnership with holding a clear vision for the business future, these two create the tomorrows of the future. But not tomorrow! This is shaping, coaxing, tuning for a quality business performance in the years to come. Great exponents take time to fine tune, revise and engineer quality futures!

Absorb and Notice

They are truly aware. In any business, there are clues, often subtle, both internal and external, to help guide future direction and realize opportunities. Great Strategic Thinkers take all of this in, so that as they set aside time to think, they have a full deck of information to guide them. Sometimes, it’s an ‘aha’ moment on vacation, when they observe something that resonates; it might be on a morning walk out in the country; it might be what someone says as they serve them coffee. Making links, however tenuous, is what makes this work so well.

Review Often

The best Strategic Thinkers check that their thinking has been validated. Is it going to work, against a world of regular, consistent and yet sometimes volatile change? This activity is a moving target, so to build a better understanding, snapshots; benchmarks and regular stocktaking are all very useful to confirm the quality of the thinking – and absorbed into the skillset for their and their organizations future.

Learn from Experience

Over time, these folk use their experiences, small and large, to think better on strategic issues. This makes their use of this time really efficient and particularly effective. There are learned short-cuts to the perhaps more formalized strategic planning process and experience is a huge, valuable added bonus.

Use a Team

By utilising more than just their own brain (though this is vital for some of the process!), those great at Strategic Thinking bounce ideas off others in the workplace and encourage their input above and beyond their delivery of the day job. The old adage that 1+1=3 in the input of thinking is hugely valid. And 5 people make a much more significant contribution than 2 – and so on!

Realism Rules (A Little!)

Although they create ideas very openly, key strategic thinkers have a sense of realism and honesty about what is achievable in the longer term. This is not to hold them back; more it is to deliver success. They underpromise and overdeliver, whilst also ensuring that the day to day business of the organization – the ‘now’ – is served adequately too. That’s what gets the business paid today, whilst building the future of tomorrow.

Have Clear Milestones

By creating checks in their thinking, to review progress, they have the opportunity to tweak. They have an innate ability to spot the twists and turns necessary. A 5,000 mile journey by a jet plane reaches the destination only by regular and consistent course checks and adjustments.

Are Non-Judgemental

Because the route to a successful future is not bounded by judging their, or others, thinking as they get creative – that is for elsewhere – better ideas flow. Open minds are encouraged and the detail tested later. Open minded thinking needs real checks and balances – but AFTER the openness has stimulated the breadth of imaginative ideas only such freedom can provide.

In the most successful organizations over the years and decades, where the test of time has shown them the excellent businesses they are, the Sony’s, Coca Colas, Nokias and Toyotas of this world think ahead and encourage great Strategic Thinking at least somewhere in their busness plans.

In a cut-throat today world of this year’s bonus and dividend, big business has a tendency to look short-term and manage that efficiently and well. A sustainable future needs more, whatever size your business is.

Planning tells you what is going to happen, post-mortem tells you what has happened Both planning and post-mortem are essential management tools needed to achieve corporate objectives, as well as to prevent the recurrence of the same mistakes. Planning for change must be the ever-present concern of every executive. At the same time, if events do not happen as planned, a post mortem is to be conducted so as not to repeat the same planning errors.

General Dwight D Eisenhower’s famous quote, “Planning is nothing and planning is everything” was a response to his cynical colleagues, who believed that, because plans never survive first contact with the enemy, planning was a waste of time. In the corporate world, quite often, strategic planning gets thrown out of the window because of mounting short-term pressures to perform and deliver the bottom line.

Those who fail to plan are ultimately planning for a post-mortem. It is not that postmortem is unimportant but companies should always plan to succeed and minimize the occasions to do post-mortem on failed projects. Planning companies outperform those non-planning ones.

Crises and the unexpected changes are no longer a rare, random or abnormal part of our lives. They are built into the very fabric of society and modern-day corporations. While not all crises can be foreseen or even prevented, all of them can be managed if we plan strategically and tactically for what is humanly possible. The impacts of the crises can be minimised if one has a thorough understanding of the basics of crisis planning and management.

Tactical is short term planning whereas strategic is considered long term. Strategic plan looks at the forces in the external environment and responses to them. Tactical planning usually covers one year and is the stepping stone of the strategic plan, which normally covers three to five years.

Having post-implementation analysis or post-mortem is also critical. Just as a postmortem reveals the cause of death, a corporate post-mortem can be extremely revealing. You learn from your past mistakes and get all the feedback. It functions much like a resurrection experience, enabling you to have a new lease of life or second chance. In physical term it is reflection. Without this, the same mistakes may be made all over again and lessons learnt earlier will come to waste. This is why there is a saying that history repeats itself. Two world wars were fought within a short span of less than 30 years. Empires and dynasties fall and rise because of a lack of reflection and committing the very same mistakes that ushered them into power in the first place.

Post-mortem job is dull and boring particularly when it is preceded by overwhelming success. But it is also from reflecting upon your successes that one can avoid the pitfalls of failures in the future. Good managers always find out what has gone awry not so much to apportion blame, but to ensure that the same problems do not surface again. This is why some companies conduct exit interviews with departing staff to ascertain if there are more issues than meet the eye. Even chaos has its patterns. The post-mortem is the process to ascertain the patterns of things that have gone wrong so that these mistakes will not be repeated in the future. In the past, three strikes and you are out.

Today, one strike and you are history. This is because today’s world is highly competitive and you may not have a second chance. Through one mistake, miscalculation or strategic error, your competitors can steal away your customers very quickly. Your margins for errors are very thin as resources are scarce. This amplifies the importance of post-mortem to minimise repeating the mistakes

Dr Mike Teng (DBA, MBA, BEng) is the author of best-selling book, “Corporate Turnaround: Nursing a Sick Company back to Health.” He is known as the “Turnaround CEO in Asia” by the media.
http://corporateturnaroundexpert.com

Strategic planning of course it’s something that you should be doing for the good of your company, but actually taking the time and dedicating the resources to make it happen is often difficult. It’s like daily exercise – you know you would feel better if you fit it into your schedule and you know that it’s good for you, but somehow you just don’t get around to it.

However, you really should get around to conducting strategic planning and you can use a business-to-business peer group to help you get there.

How do you use a peer group to help you and what is a peer group? More on that in a minute, but first, let’s focus on strategic planning. Strategic planning, whether it’s long term such as a 5-year or 10-year plan or shorter term such as a 1-to-3 year plan, accomplishes several results for you:

It forces you to create or rework company goals and objectives, based on current and near-future business and industry trends.

Many business owners fail to undertake strategic planning because to do so effectively forces them to face the way things really are, instead of the way they wish they were. A group of peers who are sincerely interested in each other’s well being will help then with this challenge.

It engages you in the process of reviewing budgets and company financial forecasts to predict future earnings. When a group of peers are involved with the business owner, in an atmosphere of confidentially, instead of stakeholders and advisors, honest appraisals are more likely – since their peers will make them justify their projections based on their own experiences.

It helps you to estimate current and future human resources needs as well as capital investment needs for buildings, equipment and other resources.

Honest strategic planning will help the business owner identify skills not present in their core managers and supervisors and, based on the experiences of their peers, offer solutions and options for addressing these shortcomings. Each member of the group is likely to have faced and addressed similar challenges and each person will learn from the successes and mistakes of their peers.

It assists you in conceptually imagining branding and image opportunities as you plan the overall objectives of marketing and public relations campaigns and activities. Every business, no matter how small or unsophisticated, has products or services that are going out of phase and others still in development.

Often it is these soon to be extinct products that are generating the greatest sales and maybe even profits. When strategic planning is done honestly with the help of peers the experiences of each member are brought to bear on the future and the need to focus on the future so product and other decisions are made before they become mandatory for survival.

Best of all, the theory that you’ve heard before regarding the exercise of documenting something on paper resulting in you following through with it holds true with strategic planning.

Once you’ve put a plan into writing, you will find, even if you don’t take that plan out of your file for six months or a year, that the very act of writing the information down and committing it to a document file, results in you following it, at least to some extent – guaranteed.

Now, what is a peer group and how can you use it for strategic planning? Business to business peer groups provide circular mentoring or reciprocal coaching opportunities (to use the trendy terms), allow you to brainstorm regarding issues, ideas and solutions with people who have dealt with similar problems and situations.

A peer group can function efficiently and effectively via regular telephone conference sessions, creating an advisory council of peers that will become a trusted source of advice, add a measure of accountability to your initiatives and provide a sounding board for the ideas of others and yourself.

When strategic planning becomes a focus of a peer group, planning becomes an accountable activity with periodic goals set to complete tasks and report back to the entire group. The members of the group hold each other accountable to move the planning process along, breaking it into manageable tasks with timeframes set in order to achieve them.

And when you are continually collaborating with your peers, you are developing your strategic vision over a longer period of time – hopefully forever, than you would ever do if you were paying some expert for every hour they spent with you and the member of your business.

Your strategic business plan is more or less based around two fundamental things. The first one is your necessity to be in business and the next is your ability to do business. No home based business person can deny this, and in addition to acknowledging this most of them will also acknowledge that they don’t know much about planning. Good strategic planning needs a thorough understanding of the reasons for your being in business in the first place.

Why Are You In Business?

Many people have their own reasons to start home based businesses. Reasons range from additional income generation, to stay home moms to those who can’t afford office space. The reasons define the outlook of your needs fairly well and thus your strategic plan should adjust itself to meet your goals.

Strategic Planning

Whatever the reason could be for your getting into business, it is fairly certain that you have chosen a line of business you are comfortable with. Strategic planning as applicable to work at home businesses should focus on three fundamental points. The first one being the lowest investment and fixed cost, the next is the potential for continuous revenue generation. The last is the potential for expanding the home based business into a small or larger business at some point in the future.

1. Choose A Business In Which You Have Core Strength: This means you can enjoy certain advantages by starting a business in which you have your basic strength. For example, if you spent half of your career as a dancer, you’ve already got a head start if you start a dance class or a dance costume designing business. Your strength lies here because you have already established relationships in the circle that comprises your customer base.

2. The Investment Factor: If yours is a start up business, you can’t possibly invest all your savings or retirement benefits into the business. You will want to minimize recurring costs like telephone bills and stationery. Your fixed costs will also come down by reducing or eliminating commuting. Today, you can’t think of a business without a home computer. This saves a lot of time and money by handling your bookkeeping and communication needs electronically (email and Internet). If necessary, you can try using your home equity for a secured business loan.

3. Choose A Business That Has Potential For Logical Diversification: Every business reaches critical mass after a certain point. Then you will need to critically evaluate the need for diversification. If you started off as an online editing and proof reading service provider, the next logical step for you is to diversify into copywriting jobs or data entry. Diversification is not expansion but adding another line of business without discarding your core strength.

4. Keeping The Revenue Cycle Continuous: This is crucial for the sustenance of the business. Most start-ups face this crisis for a reasonable length of time before becoming stable. But this can’t be achieved just by good planning or being good at producing merchandise. It requires a sense of urgency and the desire for selling more. It takes a lot of maturity to turn away from avoidable expenses.

About the Author:
Tony Jacowski is a quality analyst for The MBA Journal. Aveta Solution’s Six Sigma Online offers online six sigma training and certification classes for lean six sigma, black belts, green belts, and yellow belts.

Many businesses are still focusing on yesterday’s problems at the expense of forgoing future opportunities. The best chess players always have a strategy in place. But in businesses, future planning seems to play second fiddle to analyzing of past performance. Architects would not build a house without the architectural plans because selecting the wrong layout or laying the wrong foundation or using the wrong building materials could result in disaster. The house can collapse on you after you move in. A strategic plan is the architectural blueprint for your business.

Executives always have the excuse for not doing strategic planning. They reckon that things are changing so rapidly. It does not make sense to do ten or even five year planning as events will change and it is not possible to preempt changes any more. It is true that nowadays environment changes are very rapid and that makes long-term planning even more difficult. Non-strategic planning companies give the excuse that planning results in paralysis through too much analysis. It is also true that some companies cover their backs with expensive market research and spreadsheet analyses.

However, one should not throw out the baby with the bath water. As a matter of fact, it is even more critical to have strategic planning during turbulent and rapidly changing environment. It is like the Titanic, which had the most modern technology in her times but did not plan for eventuality and disaster when it hit the iceberg. We are living in difficult times today and tomorrow things may be worse. With the possible threats such as terrorist attacks, infectious diseases like SARS, bird flu, mad-cow diseases etc, it will be naive for any CEOs to think that they are immune or protected.

One must not be fooled into thinking that a company is successful because it has a good strategic planning system in place. Your success may be coincidentally due to a buoyant market or weak competition. Also, one must not be mistaken that the use of processes such as the annual budget is tantamount to application of strategic planning. If the data is purely internal that is sales figures and product costs, it is not strategic planning. You need to factor in the external factors such as customer data, competition, economic trends, etc.

Also, studies of successful companies such as IBM, Procter and Gamble, 3M found that new innovations and great ideas do not originate from the centralized strategic planning department at the headquarters. Most of the good ideas and innovations were generated from outside the industry or the people who regularly interact with the customers. Strategic planning must not remain in its ivory tower but should incorporate the realities of the ground.

The former chairman of General Electric (US), Jack Welch drew on the strategies of the Prussian general and military writer Clausewitz, Karl von (1780 -1831). One of Clausewitz’s theories included an explanation of why a military leader could not devise a complete battle plan and then stick blindly to it: “Man could not reduce strategy to a formula. Detailed planning necessarily failed, due to the inevitable frictions encountered. Strategy was not a lengthy action plan. It was the evolution of a central idea through continually changing circumstances.”

His own strategic thinking matched that of the general. He constantly reinvented GE over the years as circumstances and the competitive environment shifted. There was an evolution to Welch’s strategic thinking and each major initiative built on the one that preceded it. He would wage one ‘battle’ and then wait to see how the results panned out. In tracing the evolution of GE during his tenure, Welch has drawn a stair-step-like chart that depicts the stages of GE’s culture change. Work-Out laid the foundation for Best Practices, which created a platform for Process Improvement such as Six Sigma, etc. Preparation of a strategic plan may not guarantee success but failure to do so is certainly a recipe for disaster.

Yogi Berra once said that “if you don’t know where you are going, you will likely end up somewhere else.” The same is true in business. Unless you have a carefully crafted business strategy, you are essentially flying blind.

Former U.S. President and military commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower, remarked that “a finished plan is generally worthless, but careful planning is absolutely essential.” In other words, while a given plan may change based on what happens with your business, taking the time to thoroughly examine where your firm is now and where it is headed gives you the information to make course changes intelligently, against the backdrop of a clear business strategy.

Kmart, a leader in the discount retailing industry in the late 70’s, had close to 1900 stores and average revenues of well over $7 million per store. Wal-Mart, on the other hand, was a much smaller retailer with just over 200 stores and average revenues per store only half those of Kmart. But just ten years later, Wal-Mart had become the largest and highest profit retailer in the country with an annual growth rate at 25% per year with a 32% return on equity.

What happened? Kmart’s response to business challenges was to try to seal off and defend its markets, a common tactic years ago when the industry was characterized by defined markets, stable customer needs and clearly defined competitors. Wal-Mart found competitive advantage by realizing that success would not come from capturing and holding a market but by being nimble and responsive to changing market conditions. It built business processes and core competencies in such areas as transportation and information sharing which allowed it to respond to rapidly changing conditions and move inventory quickly to serve store-by-store customer demand.

Kmart’s inability to respond to changing market conditions and to continue to ride a dead strategy eventually led to its reorganization under Chapter 11. It’s a fact that those organizations that adapt to changing conditions thrive and grow. Those that remain unaware or misjudge these challenges and opportunities and fail to develop a new business strategy eventually die.

Why Build a Strategic Plan? In a word, the answer to this question is focus. Strategy creates context for operating decisions. It establishes the playing field and provides guidance for decision-making about the types of experience and skills needed by employees, how marketing and advertising should be positioned, the priority of initiatives, how to structure the organization, and a host of other issues. A plan is necessary to guide decision-making, channel resources and define direction. Because of that, building a strategic plan should be well worth the time it will take to develop it, debate it and secure agreement on its direction.

Strategy is the way in which an organization meets the challenges and opportunities of its environment. It is often an overused and misunderstood concept. Strategic thinking does not necessarily imply long term. In some industries, long term is less than one year. It is not tactics, though strategy needs to be supported through tactics. It doesn’t necessarily imply something big. The decision to move across town may have more human impact than the decision to do business in another city.

Strategy is a set of choices that defines the nature, direction and value system of an organization. It is not a document. It is a mindset which should be understood by every person in the organization and used to guide all decision-making within the organization. In developing strategy, leaders make conscious and informed choices about who they are and what they stand for:

* What are our core values and beliefs?
* What markets and customer groups will we serve?
* What products or services will, or will we not, deliver?
* What competitive advantages will cause us to succeed?
* What core competencies must we have to fuel our growth?
* What infrastructure, core processes and resources must we have to succeed?
* What financial results will we achieve?
* What should be our planning horizon?
* What is the quality-of-life contribution we want to make to our customers, our employees or the places in which we operate?

Next, and the hardest part, is plan implementation. In the United States, the average firm only achieves about 63% of its strategic plan. Studies also show that 90% of strategies that fail do so because of lack of execution. Research in the last several years has pinpointed many reasons why business plans fail, including the following:

1. Poorly understood strategy — most organizations have a strategy but, according to one study, fewer than 5% of their employees know what the strategy is.
2. Weak strategy execution — Studies show that up to 90% of strategies fail due to execution.
3. Inability to adapt to change — Once a business makes plans, the chaos of everything changing around it may gradually erodes those plans unless the organization can adapt. Many cannot.
4. Lack of a systematic approach – When an organization reaches a certain size, lack of alignment between different people or departments who handle different functions may hamper success.
5. People are not engaged – An engaged worker is one who is personally committed to the goals of the company. Unfortunately, 90% of the time what passes for commitment is compliance. If you cannot get people engaged, no improvement will last.
6. A gap between knowing what to do, and doing it. Many things can get in the way including substituting talk for action, employee fear or mistrust of management, using the firm’s history instead of sound judgment to dictate action, and badly designed or complex measures.

In the end, a solid business strategy and implementation plan may not solve all of your problems but those firms that do plan enjoy a much brighter track record. Plan well and beware of the pitfalls in implementation and you can enjoy your best year yet.

Strategic planning and strategic leadership styles vary just as the employees and owners of companies involved in the planning process differ. Visit local bookstores or check on line to see hundreds of books claiming to have the secrets to a successful business and easy strategic planning. Technology and the Internet has forced companies to make changes. Has the ability to get along with and manage others changed? Many businesses today are international. Constant news reports keep everyone updated on issues affecting the business world. The skills needed to effectively manage others have not changed that much. Rather employees today are not as willing to put up with poor leadership or bullies in the manager’s office, anymore. Employees have more choices and they expect leaders to be authentic.

Strategic leadership is defined as determining where an organization is going and how to get there. Years ago this was called long-range planning. Decisions then were made by upper management behind closed doors. Today strategic planning is likely to involve individuals from all levels of management and staff. Companies are learning the best way to achieve excellent plans and full company support is to involve individuals from all levels of the business.

Strategic leadership usually involves planning. Companies do not achieve their goals accidentally or by luck but rather by setting goals. Companies use different methods for strategic planning. They are based on the type of business, the mission statement or the marketing strategy. Basically the steps are the same with each model, some models are more complex and detailed. Small business owners and companies alike should adapt strategic planning to fit their situation. It’s helpful to review how other leaders determine business strategies. It’s critical to know leadership of a company is not one size fits all.

Thinking about where a company is going leads to discussions on what they do their product or service. Without this knowledge strategic planning will not work. Sometimes companies write their mission statements during this stage of planning. Mission statements range from one simple sentence to numerous detailed paragraphs. Regardless of length the intent is to state the core purpose of the corporation what’s at the heart of the business. Companies then elaborate on their mission statements by adding vision and value statements.

Value statements usually deal with customer type, target markets, business activities or things they will not do. Moral values and public sentiment sometimes play a role. Companies that misjudge this often lose customers and market position. Vision and value statements, just like mission statements, are unique to the business. Truett Cathy, the owner of Chick-fil-A, is a good example. They will never open their restaurants on Sunday. This planning stage is sometimes referred to as strategic analysis.

Howard Behar, author of “It’s not about the Coffee/Leadership Principles from a Life at Starbucks” defines his leadership philosophy as people are more important than the coffee. He believes when companies take care of their people employees and customers the business is profitable. Sometimes companies struggle to define their product. In the above situation many individuals define coffee as the product. Yet their strategic leaders define it as people. It helps to go beyond the physical product to see what need the product fills. Companies can’t engage in strategic planning until there is clarity and agreement on what needs the company fulfills.

When determining the purpose of a company it is critical to analyze the environment they operate in. What’s the competition? What are they doing to generate sales? What future trends might affect the business? If they market to a certain segment do they need to change or update their services? Are they using the most up to date technology available? How does the Internet apply to their business? Should they shift from a local to an international focus? Questions such as these help strategic leaders decide what major issues the company faces as well as potential opportunities available.

Once a company completes strategic analysis it’s time to add the details. What actions are needed to fulfill their mission statement while balancing their values and vision? At this point the process becomes very detailed and specific. Usually there are multiple goals or objectives. It’s helpful to divide these by product, task, location, customer, or some way unique to the business. Each of the divisions has a different manager with different tasks/goals specific to that aspect of the business. It’s not enough to say the company wants to increase business. It’s better to be very specific. How does the company want to increase their business? How do they plan to do this? Add dates, amounts and numbers.

The company has determined their mission and what’s needed for this to happen. At this point the strategic leader usually releases details to the employees. The managers of each division usually report back to their managers with a trickling down effect. Team leads/managers explain the strategic plans during team meetings. Sometimes this announcement is kicked off with much promotion – lots of bells and whistles. Employees sometimes walk away thinking it’s just another year. Strategic plans do not affect me. Employee acceptance of mission and vision statements is largely determined by their involvement in the planning process and their attitude toward management.
Employees can struggle with the goals attached to mission/vision statements. To insure companies meet their goals, strategic planners include responsibilities, timelines and accountability in the mission statement. Sometimes this involves change which employees do not always embrace. If negative consequences result from unmet goals, employees usually have negative attitudes. Management doesn’t always recognize the feelings or issues of their employees. It’s essential that all employees understand what’s expected of them. Take time to answer their questions. Encourage teamwork. Listen.

Strategic plans usually involve budgets. Everybody likes money especially in their paycheck. If a company is doing well financially, and the new strategic plan does not include cutbacks, this is good news. But on the other hand, if money is tight, and the employees will not receive money as expected, this is bad news. Usually employees think of themselves first. When presenting a new mission statement to employees they typically think what’s in it for me. If the company needs to cut corners or eliminate positions, this causes stress for everyone involved. Part of strategic planning includes how to deliver strategic plans to the staff. A good leader makes sure this is done in a positive way with consideration for the feelings of everyone involved.

Strategic planning isn’t just for corporations. Small businesses, even a sole proprietor, benefit from making strategic plans on an annual basis. Usually the small business owner

starts a company because they are good at one thing, but many times they don’t have the skills needed to develop a successful company. They provide a product or service but don’t know how to analyze the market, set goals, promote their business, or manage money. Writing a mission statement – determining where the company is going and how to get there – puts the business owner closer to the road of success.

What ever success you are looking to achieve you need to have a strategy to get there. Once you have your strategy on how you are going to attract and get new clients you need to implement at least portions of your plan. Many businesses have failed for lack of commitment to their overall strategy.

For an example let’s say that you have a local business and you have decided one of your strategies will be to put up flyers, in public places that may cater to your clientele. Now let’s say that you have a business that does custom drapery. Knowing who your clients are and how much a person will pay for your custom drapery will determine where you will post your flyers. Where are the most effective spots to get specific clients for your business? Probably home shows, or expos, home stores like home depot, or Pier One (if they allow you too), upholstery shops, or dry cleaners etc.

When you have a strategy to put up flyers, it has to be week after week, and month after month. You don’t just put up a flyer one time and then wait to see what happens. I have discovered that it takes about three months of flyers to get a customer. Now let’s say that you also have a strategy to contact interior designers, specialty craft people, and furniture builders, house or condo builders, showroom designers and other related service providers. Again you need to commit to sending, following up, and making sure that they have enough of your flyers or information. It is not their job to make sure that you are restocked.

Another possible strategy that you may have is to advertise on the internet. Where will you have the best results? Probably on sites that also offer similar custom services, or home sites, or commercial real estate sites that offer living solutions to their traveling clients. You could make partnerships with such companies that every time someone is looking for custom drapery they refer clients to you.

These are good strategies to build business but you have to be consistent and follow through. You will have to keep updating your ads on the internet or in magazines or targeted niche newsletters. Like Custom House or Design on a Dime. You will have to keep replacing your flyers, you will keep faxing your information to prospects, and you will have to keep getting new names of new house buyers and so on.

That is working your strategic plan. On your plan you
could have 10 or more steps of how you are going to grow your business and then you need to take consistent action towards that overall plan. Testing is very important as well. When you test you then know what actions are working and what is not.

Most times you have to trust your instinct as to whether your steps and plan will get you to where you want. For an example: I want an online business that is bringing in clients and that is making money for me whether I get up in the morning or not. The steps of my plan is creating articles for an e-zine, to plan an year long e-mail campaign of information that I will send out, to set up an auto-responder to send out the newsletter, and to create a membership driven website with tons of content that has audio and video features, and to advertise the newsletter and website once I’m finished. So right now I’m not making money for this project. But I believe in the plan. I have written nearly sixty articles and I’m submitting them to the web. I have already reserved a domain name and I have the web host in place for that final moment when it all comes together. The e-zine is nearly done for a year out, and I will now start loading the contents into my auto responder and working on creating audio content for the membership side of the website. Even though the website is not even built yet if I follow up on all the steps of my strategic plan I feel that I will get my goal of an online business that can thrive on automatic pilot.

If you work your plan too you will achieve your over all goal of where you would like to take your business. Don’t give up. You have worthy goals and they deserve to be completed. Break it down into steps and work the steps and you will build an empire.

Strategic plans only help organizations when they are kept active and implemented. The strategic plan defines the business direction. That direction is based on the future, the vision of the company. Before an effective strategic plan can be developed a clear and compelling vision is needed. Visions are optimistic, the ideal picture of the future. The strategic plan is the map to the vision and then only effective if it is implemented.

Strategic plans can sound intimidating and overwhelming to many small business owners. The most effective strategic plans are those that are simple, completed with the leadership team and key people in the company. Complex documents that consume excessive amounts of time to create don’t guarantee success. In fact, the large and cumbersome strategic plan can be so overwhelming that it just doesn’t work.

Start with vision. Write down what you envision for the future. What does the future of your business look like? What do you want for the future? Vision stories are inspiring, it’s your dream. Once you have created your vision you can begin building strategies.

The vision is the destination, where you are going. The strategies are the map that gets you to the vision. Company values are the guide or the “compass” in our map metaphor for making decisions along the way. Values keep you oriented and in alignment. When values are out of alignment the company is off track; not moving in the direction of the vision.

Strategic goals can be limited to the top 6-10. By having fewer goals the plan is able to stay alive and in front of you. By alive, it means that the plan is always where you can see it, use it and keep working on it.

To set strategies for your business first look at the vision, the different aspects of the vision. Brainstorm all of the goals, all of the strategies for each aspect of the vision. With brainstorming it is important to get all of the ideas out and write them down without judging them or editing them. Often the best idea comes from an idea that at first look seems too wild or crazy. Ideas jump off of other ideas.

Once you have brainstormed all of the ideas, prioritize them. Often ideas can be grouped with similar ideas. This can help in the prioritization process. The goal is to narrow the list down to the top 6-10 strategies. What are the goals or strategies that will give your business the future you envision, that will create a breakthrough that will produce the results that you want? Those are the goals that you should be selecting as top priorities.

Creating a powerful strategic plan is just one of the first steps. Many organizations have strategic plans that are well thought out and crafted. Where they fall short is in the implementation of that plan. Implementation is the key. If you fail to implement, the results will not be what you set out to achieve.

Implementation is the result of focused and continuous action. Strategic plans don’t just happen on their own: they require your attention. By keeping the plan in front of you and the team responsible for the plan, focus is maintained. Regular meetings about the plan also keep the plan moving in the right direction. Check-in meetings hold people accountable. When teams don’t meet and don’t keep their eye on the plan, the day to day interferes and the status quo remains. In order to make changes in the results that you achieve there has to be intention and commitment on the part of the team. The check-in meeting gives the team the opportunity to review what is happening, what is interfering with the results they want and need and make the changes necessary to change the outcomes. Through the intention of the leadership, the plan and the team, the culture of the workplace can shift from one of non-performance to one of performance

focused.

Performance focused companies are companies that are thriving. The energy performing teams shifts the energy of the whole organization. It becomes more positive and contagious. People become excited about the vision, the plan and their implementation of the plan. Results create energy and excitement that keeps the plan moving, it propels the plan.

Organizations that produce results have a clear vision of the future; have a plan that is simple and strategic; and they work on the plan all the time. Their actions are designed to move that plan forward. They don’t let themselves or others get in the way. By implementing the strategic plan organizations achieve results.