A Second and a Half
These days, organizations need all the help they can muster to maintain a slim second and a half lead over the competition and navigate around or through the unprecedented number of environmental threats that loom in the business environment. In the November 2011 article, How Your Competition Affects Your Strategic Plan, we explored the threat of new entrants, the power of buyers, the availability of substitutes and the power of suppliers. Even in a seemingly successful business enterprise, it doesn’t take long to lose your competitive edge. Threats can and do emerge from every direction. This article focuses on threats from competitors as well as other parts of the business ecosystem.
Seeing Around Corners: Can You Improve Your Strategy Execution?
Strategists cannot see around corners, but most of them will tell you that the best way to predict your organization’s future is to invent it. Innovative products and exceptional service offerings come as a bi-product of having the right business strategy and executing it well. The truth is, no business ever makes deliberate plans to fail, but inventing the future requires strategy and execution to come together and work in synchronistic harmony - and that’s where the trouble waits.
Executive Imperatives For 2012
Most of us like to operate from a list. Lists help us organize our thoughts and actions, serving to remind us about something that we would likely otherwise forget. Given that, it seemed like a good idea to offer-up a short list of business-related New Year’s Resolutions this week - all pertaining to the “organizational maintenance” items that we know need our attention but likely have neglected in terms of action taken.
What Are You Expecting To Get Out Of Your Strategic Planning Process In 2012?
Most companies do strategic planning because they desire success, but do they expect it? The actual expectations from strategic planning seem to vary wildly when executives are pressed on the question. When you drill down a bit further, something disconcerting is revealed. Many executives share a disconnection between their desires for success from strategic planning and their actual expectations from the process. Why is this?
Why Organizational Innovation Is So Difficult
In all ecosystems, organisms that evolve to survive the elements of their environments will likely continue their existence. Those that do not continue to evolve will most likely perish. Likewise, for business organizations to evolve, they must innovate their products, services, technologies, policies, processes and structures to capitalize on social, economic and industry trends within their environment. This is easier said than done. Organizational Evolution theory indicates that improvements through innovation are challenged by the complexity of business structures themselves, compounded by our own inability to comprehend the impacts of innovative ideas when presented with them. So what does it mean to evolve an organization and what are the secrets to doing it successfully?
Half-baked Strategies
The business world is full of examples illustrating failed strategies and implementation tactics. Each specimen of failure presents innumerable lessons to be learned and not repeated. It sounds so simple when you say it fast, “Have a good strategy and a good plan to execute it.” Despite the seemingly simple principles involved, the same strategy-related mistakes continue to be made.
Fight Complacency: Plan Strategically and Execute With Urgency
If you commute to work at an office, each morning likely starts with the same routine. You drive to work in traffic. You have the morning radio show tuned in, providing news and traffic updates that you hardly listen to because it is on mainly to provide background noise. Then you arrive at work. After finding a parking spot, you gather your laptop bag, keys and coffee and enter the building to begin the walk past the rows of cubicles and offices that you pass everyday. Before going to your desk, logging in and getting to work - you follow your routine and go first to the break room for a coffee refresh. Then your iPhone rings, cutting through the hum of the vending machines and fluorescent lights. You are being frantically summoned into the executive boardroom to attend an emergency meeting. Your routine was suddenly shattered and now your pulse is racing. Any minor disruption to your routine can increase the flow of adrenaline in your system and cause a slight anxiousness to creep into your psyche. It doesn’t take so much of a disruption as was described above to have an effect. Quite simply put, we do not like change and we love predictability. Hence, it is not a stretch to grasp why complacency can creep into our businesses and our performance expectations.
When Did Bankruptcy Become A Business Strategy?
When did filing for bankruptcy become a part of corporate strategy? It seems to have become formulaic within modern business practices. Mismanage the business, amass debts that you cannot repay - then casually ease into bankruptcy court and turn on the public relations machinery to spin the whole thing as a positive for the customers and employees. Although creditor driven bankruptcy does occur, it is far from the norm. In the overwhelming majority, the decision to file bankruptcy has been made internally by the executive team as a path out of their troubles. So why has it become more acceptable for so many businesses to announce filing for bankruptcy? When did the stigma become passé?
The Priority of Prioritization
Let’s face it, in corporate strategic planning, we have to choose our battles. As much as we try to stretch our limited resources, the fact remains that they’re still limited. Choosing our battles isn’t a negative thing; it merely refers to the fact that we must select the opportunities (targeted outcomes) that will earn our limited energy and resources.
Strive For The Customer-centered Ecosystem
When you see excellence in quality and service, you likely are witnessing the outcome of a well understood and well managed ecosystem. That is because value creation is maximized when strategic planning addresses the full spectrum of internal and external components comprising the ecosystem. In last week’s article, the discussion dealt with how strategic planning must be balanced between the internal workings of the organization and the external world in which organization resides and operates. This week’s discussion focuses on how the ecosystem should be at the heart of the planning process, and it why it should be customer-centered.
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