These days, many CEOs know that they need a significant growth strategy. But before you leap into a strategic planning session with your executive team, make sure you set yourself up for success.
Many leaders neglect to first get buy-in to the goal of significant growth. Others fail to create a sense of urgency for change. Without agreement that such growth is not only possible, but necessary, any discussion of strategy is virtually useless.
Another common error is a failure to include all key stakeholders in the session. Limiting the planning to only the executive team, when others in the company are much closer to customers and competitors, reduces credibility and increases overall resistance to any subsequent plans.
Instead, clearly define the context for planning, making sure your team understands the specific expectations for growth.
Next, create that sense of urgency for change by requiring that participants complete pre-work before the meeting, such as a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis relative to the company's top three competitors. Have the team prepare a customer analysis, including a forecast of customer needs three, five and 10 years out, as well as an industry analysis of suppliers, buyers, new entrants and barriers to entry, to aid in identifying your most important market drivers.
Remember to invite top talent from the next level down. These are the folks who are actually accountable for the profit and loss of the business units and are a lot closer to the grass roots of the business. This will bring much-needed perspective to planning and speed strategy execution.
In addition, invite your external "rock stars" - people who have achieved significant growth in the same or a related industry - to help the team realize that significant growth is indeed possible. More work? Perhaps. But it will make your planning infinitely more valuable in the long run.
more...Strategy Maps by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton. More than a decade ago, Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton introduced the Balanced Scorecard, a revolutionary performance measurement system that allowed organizations to quantify intangible assets such as people, information, and customer relationships. Now, using their ongoing research with hundreds of Balanced Scorecard adopters across the globe, the authors have created a powerful new tool, the "strategy map", that enables companies to describe the links between intangible assets and value creation with a clarity and precision never before possible.
