Finance Quarterly December 2011

How “Strategic” is your Strategic Plan?

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Photo: iStockphoto

Most strategic planning goes awry or loses its intended purpose because the plan quickly transforms from being strategic to focusing on more day-to-day activities and reacting to short-term business pressures.

As you fine-tune your strategic plan for next year, take a moment to review your current plan and assess if it truly helped you chart the future course of your organization. Strategic planning is often an end-of-the-year, formal business activity that results in a high-level document outlining various goals, objectives, timelines and stakeholders. It usually serves its purpose and charts out a 3 to 5-year roadmap to get your organization from point A to point B after a certain period of time.

If your organization has struggled with making strategic planning a valuable engine to move the whole organization forward, take a moment and perform this exercise. Take each of your strategic plan goals and place them in one of three categories:

Executive Management should strive to strike the right balance to continue to provide the best products and services to existing clients while strategizing and planning for the future. If all of your goals fall into the first two categories, then you may not be investing or focusing enough on innovation.

Focus more on Innovation and Forward-Thinking Ideas

Executive management is under short-term pressure to increase revenues, improve performance and satisfy customers. Furthermore, business unit managers are well versed and more comfortable in handling daily processes. As a result, it is easier to focus on current operations. Here are some ways to also help generate more innovation and fresh ideas:

Julia Okinaka

• Implement the 20/20 vision test:

Solicit input from your younger employees and customers. 20% of your idea generation should be from participants in their 20s. They have their pulse on the newest technology and lifestyle trends.

• Create a fun, safe environment for idea generation:

During the idea creation stage, avoid perfecting ideas, passing judgment or discussing feasibility or cost. Often times, radical ideas can inspire more reasonable ideas later that would not have been otherwise thinkable.

• Engage employees from different parts of the business:

Empower employees from different areas of your organization such as sales, marketing, customer service, engineering, information technology, etc. to tackle problems and come up with ways to enhance your customers’ experiences.

• Involve and learn from your customers:

Expose your customers to your ideas early on and ask for their feedback before investing too much time or resources on solutions. Through this process, your organization will gain more insight into your customers’ needs and understand the potential relevance of your ideas in their lives. The result will be better solutions that more accurately address what your customers want.

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