Strategic Planning Monthly: Archive
Each month, Method Frameworks publishes our Strategic Planning Monthly, a newsletter packed with new articles on topics like:
Strategic planning- Operational planning
- Change management
- Corporate culture
- Business process transformation
Additionally, each month we introduce planning papers and downloads that are available in PDF format and complimentary to our readers.
Catch up on the current month's edition and access newsletters from previous months using this archive.
Subscribe to receive emailed monthly editions of Strategic Planning Monthly.
2012 Newsletters
January Edition, 2012 | Access Here
Featured article:
When Did Bankruptcy Become A 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?
This article explores the changing landscape of corporate bankruptcy and our views towards the ever increasing use of bankruptcy as a business strategy .
2011 Newsletters
December Edition, 2011 | Access Here
Featured article:
The Inputs Into Strategic Prioritization
Strategic Prioritization Systems
Business leaders are constantly faced with opportunities they would like to pursue and situations where they must choose between them with care. There are hundreds and thousands of shiny new ideas and opportunities that glitter and sparkle with appeal, lying in wait to tempt us. The opportunities may come in the form of a potential acquisition, an investment in a new product or service line or perhaps simply the contemplation of expanding our office space to accommodate the growth we sense is coming soon. Regardless, such “desirements” are all around us.
This article explores the evaluation structure of a strategic prioritization process and discusses the variables providing input to the process .
November Edition, 2011 | Access Here
Featured article:
Is Your Business Telling You It Needs a Break?
Balancing Growth and Rejuvenation
We must listen to the signals our business is sending us. Organizations get tired and need rest cycles too. Not quite the same as we humans need rest, but instead, organizations cannot endlessly expend energy without replacing it along the way. Like humans, businesses need cycles of work and then rejuvenation. Constant full-speed acceleration, without maintaining the organizational pistons, will wear out the engine and momentum will slow. This means that balance is needed between the need to constantly move the organization forward and the need to recharge energy and celebrate successes along the way.
The relentless charge creates fatigue and burnout within the organization and can lead to an exhausted and ambivalent workforce that is detrimental to growth, innovation and operational excellence of our business. That does not mean that we cannot push or should coast along and slack-off in regards to advancing the betterment of our businesses. However, it does mean that we have to have a formula mixed correctly in order to fuel our business for the long-run. We need to think in terms of running a marathon and not a sprint. Given that, the formula must be calibrated our culture and it must also be attenuated to our business strategy and goals.
This article explores successfull business growth strategies.
October Edition, 2011 | Access Here
Featured article:
Board Involvement In Corporate Strategy
Changing Norms
Up until the early-2000‘s, corporate boards might have rubber-stamped their approval of the CEOs strategic plan without the need for much involvement in its formulation. A new era has dawned and board involvement in strategy has changed dramatically over the past five years, perhaps forever altering the board / management working relationship.
This article explores into the new relationship shared by executive management and their corporate board of directors.
September Edition, 2011 | Access Here
Featured article:
Lining Up The Pillars Of Your Strategy
Syncing Strategy With Operations
Is your organization’s strategy embodied in your business operations? How confident are you, as the champion of your strategy, that it is on track within the layers of your business operations?
This article delves into the issue of obtaining and then maintaining strategy synchronization of strategic goals with operations and execution tactics.
August Edition, 2011 | Access Here
Featured article:
Breaking Out Of The Box
Examining the roles of internal and external strategist
Human behavior and organizational behavior have at least two major points in common. Both gravitate towards traveling in the same well-worn paths, favoring the feeling of safety that repetition brings over the feelings of anxiety and fear that often accompany change. A second point of commonality is that both humans and organizations can be steered in the wrong direction by subscribing too heavily into “groupthink”. Both behaviors can lead to flawed logic and / or incorrect underlying assumptions becoming institutionalized into our way of thinking.
Whether it is a result of groupthink or the result of resisting fresh thinking and new approaches, business strategies do suffer as a consequence of wrong-headed thinking. Can an external strategist help break the cycle?
July Edition, 2011 | Access Here
Featured article:
The M&A Market Is Hot, But The Results Are Not.
2010 saw the first worldwide annual gain in merger and acquisition deal-making since the financial crisis, according to the New York Times’ DealBook, and 2011 was called the “year of M&A” by Forbes. With all the attention on mergers and acquisitions (M&A) of late, there’s a good chance your organization has been faced with the prospects of attempting or at least considering one for itself.
June Edition, 2011 | Access Here
Featured article:
Does This Business Strategy Make Me Look Fat?
"Innovate or die". A widely-accepted rule of business states that if a company fails to continuously innovate it will fall behind and eventually die. From this, common wisdom says that organizations must gear their business strategy toward continually increasing customer value. The trouble is, for many executives, the innovation-minded strategy falls to the wayside amidst the real and intense pressure they face to deliver short-term bottom line results. As such, when the economy goes through a down cycle and sales slow, cost-cutting ensues and takes over as the prevailing strategy. And the dichotomy lives on.
May Edition, 2011 | Access Here
Featured article:
Strategic Planning: Business Executive Essentials
When strategic planning is done well, with a mature and robust process that guides the effort to ensure completeness - the outcomes can be powerful and position the organization to dominate the competition. Yet only a small percentage of organizations operate with mature planning models that yield complete and comprehensive strategic plans. The majority do not fully operationalize their strategy to get maximum benefit.
April Edition, 2011 | Access Here
Featured article:
Besting Your Plan's Performance
If plan governance isn’t instilled as a core element of the executive team’s reality, focus on accomplishing strategy wains quickly. Why? Much like humans, corporations get distracted and can lose energy and focus. A condition similar to Attention Deficit Disorder (A-D-D) can afflict companies and infuse busy, yet non-strategic activity and behavior throughout the ranks of the organization. Because time flies past rapidly and organizations face so many daily distractions, that the interference begins to blur the big picture for all but the most focused executives. Ideally, to keep focus sharp and to get the "real" benefits from planning, strategic plans should be refreshed quarterly, updated annually and rewritten every three years. It should be an ongoing part of business operations to re-check against plan goals and objectives.
March Edition, 2011 | Access Here
Featured article:
What Holds Companies Back From Developing Great Strategies?
Recession weary executives have a new challenge to face. Times have changed and businesses must re-evaluate their pre-recession strategies. The elephant in the room is in full view, but organizational leaders do not like to talk about it or even think about it. Yes, the elephant in the room, that no one likes to address, is outdated strategy and the need for new and improved strategic thinking. Making change to the way we have operated in the past in difficult. A starting point for change is to correct the self-inflicted organizational dysfunction that occurs during strategy development. Half-baked strategic decision making based on wishful thinking and antiquated assumptions must stop now. Corporate strategies will never be perfect or foolproof, but they can be systematically improved through process changes and “testing” strategies ahead of committing to them and gambling our reputations, jobs and the very life of the business. To see our economic recovery continue, we need to see smart strategies from our business leaders and the brilliant teams of people working for them.
February Edition, 2011 | Access Here
Featured article:
Evaluating Strategy and Planning Effectiveness.
Strategy and the planning associated with creating and implementing it is all about the results, but how do you evaluate your process for strategic planning and know if it is on track or as optimized as it might be? This article should help you to objectively evaluate your strategy's effectiveness and make improvements to the planning process used by your organization through identification of some potential issues and risks that may exist in your current planning world.
January Edition, 2011 | Access Here
Featured article:
The Change Management Process: Accomplishing Change and Making it Stick
There are times when an organization must go through serious transformation. By this we mean the type of game-changing metamorphosis that requires corporate leaders to devise a new vision which must then be adopted by staff members and ultimately put into action. Transformational change is only possible with a legitimate sense of urgency and effective change management that is orchestrated with a change management strategy.
2010 Newsletters
December Edition, 2010 | Access Here
Featured article:
Change Agents: The Power Behind Effective Change Management
Change-agents are those within our organization who help facilitate strategic transformation. We need change agents on our side to clear the path, especially when it comes to making “game-changing” change. But how do we enlist the type of change agents to make critical changes possible?
When you consider the components of successful organizational change the qualities of a game-changing change agent become clear.
November Edition, 2010 | Access Here
Featured article:
The Critical Step of Current-state Analysis & Review in Strategic Planning
What is the definition of success and how can you get there if you don’t know where you are starting from? Obviously it makes sense that you need to know your point of origin to determine the optimal route to your desired destination. If that is the case in our day-to-day lives, then why do so many forget to apply that simple concept in business – and in this case – in our business planning? This article focuses on a major step of critical importance in your planning process – a review and analysis of your organization’s current-state. What needs to be reviewed within the organization and how does doing so influence the planning outcome? The current-state analysis phase of corporate strategic planning involves gaining a “business truth” of where the organization is today so that it is possible to plan effectively for moving from the current reality to the desired results.
October Edition, 2010 | Access Here
Featured article:
How Long Should It Take To Create A Strategic Plan?
Some time back, Method Frameworks published a tongue-in-cheek article entitled “Your Strategic Plan in Seven Days” (order now and get a free 2-minute egg timer!). The truth is, it is possible to accomplish the creation of the enterprise strategic plan in a relatively short time...provided the foundations are already in place. The keystone to remember is that the organization must have a mature and effective planning process that is already working and can serve as the plan’s foundation in order to be able to refresh both strategy and execution tactics relatively quickly while still accomplishing the creation of comprehensive and usable plan artifacts. If that foundation isn’t there, it is time to build it.
Just compiling goals and timelines into a spreadsheet that gets sent along with a meaningless report in a binder doesn’t cut it. That becomes worthless data to all involved in the organization and will not accomplish the results strategic planning should accomplish. No, the “magic binder” won’t perform miracles.
September Edition, 2010 | Access Here
Featured article:
The Golden Thread: Linking Strategy to Execution
Aligning corporate strategy to operational execution is critical, yet most organizations fail to continue the planning effort beyond the corporate planning process - into the operational layers of the organization. By doing a good job in this area, organizations will have established the necessary links from strategic goals to execution of the goal-supporting initiatives. Those links and the governance to manage overall progress at a plan-level constitute the “golden thread”.
August Edition, 2010 | Access Here
Featured article:
The Role of the Internal Versus the External Strategist
Can an external strategist be an asset to an established corporate strategic planning team? There is clearly no substitute for the value provided by the internal strategist and the homegrown planning processes that fit the organization like an old well-worn baseball glove. But can this value be enhanced by an outsider’s involvement?
This insightful article explores five factors that can lead to success or to failure from the perspectives of the internal and the external strategist, offering objective analysis of the roles both play in corporate strategic planning.
July Edition, 2010 | Access Here
Featured article:
The Double Win: Six Factors For Achieving Sustained Growth in the Top-Line and Profitability
Achieving and then sustaining top-line growth requires sound strategy and a lot of hard work. Quarter-over-quarter revenue growth is strong evidence of an organization with a well-conceived strategy that has achieved operational excellence in areas like new customer acquisition, existing customer retention and innovation in product / service value creation. But what about achieving sustained profitability when growing the top line? That can be more challenging. This article explores six important factors needed for positioning your organization for the double-win of sustained growth and profitability.
June Edition, 2010 | Access Here
Featured article:
Where Did "Why" Go?: The Role of Critical Evaluation in Strategic Planning
Why? It is an inquiry we don’t make often enough. “Why?” is the simplest form of a question, yet when it is asked, it cannot help but be thought provoking. “Why”, “what if” and other forms of critical evaluation promote discussion and lead to improvement in our decision-making process. Even so, we all too often elect not to use these words from of our repertoire. Instead, they are often replaced by, “sounds good to me” or or some other form of passive acceptance. We should reflect on the importance of this elegantly simple but powerful trigger for critical thinking and make sure we do not allow “why” to become part of a forgotten business vocabulary. This article explores the the importance of critical evaluation in strategy planning and asking, “why?”
May Edition, 2010 | Access Here
Featured article:
Strategy Misalignment: The Symptoms, Dangers and Treatment
Strategic misalignment occurs when operational initiatives are not in sync with the defined key outcomes of the organization. Strategic misalignment is insidious. It creeps into organizations silently, tenaciously takes root and over time begins to undermine successful organizations. There are tell-tale symptoms to watch out for and many dangerous implications when it goes untreated.
This article reviews the symptoms to watch for; evaluates the damage that occurs over time if left unchecked and reveals methods to correct the ailment and reverse the damage that occurred.
April Edition, 2010 | Access Here
Featured article:
Your Strategic Plan in 7 Days
Is it possible to create a corporate strategic plan in a week? The answer depends on many factors and this thought provoking article by Method Frameworks examines the question. The answer depends from where you are starting. Are you starting from the most current plan? What results are wanted out of the process this time around? What are the definitions you want to attach to “strategic plan”, and to “done”?
March Edition, 2010 | Access Here
Featured article:
Enterprise Myopia: Is Customer Value Being Overlooked?
Is your organization’s strategy overlooking the most important stakeholder – your customers? This is an insightful article that might help you decide.
With some simple but elegant changes to the strategic planning process, businesses can avoid committing this cardinal sin. By refocusing business strategy on value creation for the end-customers, organizations can avoid business myopia and blind spots that mask the slow erosion of competitive advantage they may have enjoyed in the past. This article addresses the key challenge of keeping the customer in mind when setting strategic and operational goals and offers concrete approaches to accomplishing customer-centric planning from the business and technology leader’s perspective.
February Edition, 2010 | Access Here
Featured article:
The Top Three Things CIOs Must Do in 2010
Many IT executives consider 2009 to be the “lost year”. Forward momentum slowed to a crawl where Information Technology (IT) spending was concerned. Businesses went into a holding pattern and focused on reducing overhead and hoping for flat growth in revenue at best. Enter 2010, a new year and decade full of exciting business opportunities for companies, but also coming with guarantees of fresh challenges for technology and business leaders alike. The CIO, now more than ever, must be focused on the revenue-producing activities of the business enterprise in order to add value and be viewed as a major producer within the organization. But what can we do as the CIO to stay one step ahead of the business and keep the CEO happy? This article discussed three goals CIOs should focus on during 2010.
January Edition, 2010 | Access Here
Featured article:
The 2010 Twelve-step Checklist to Help You Evaluate Your Strategic Business Planning Process
Have you given much consideration to the possibility that your strategic and operational plans may be far less effective than they could be? How would you begin to measure the effectiveness of your current plan? This article should help you to objectively evaluate your own process and self-diagnosis potential issues that may exist in your organization's current planning world. As you read this article, answer along as we ask the questions to help you honestly evaluate your current business planning process.
