Strategic Planning and Beyond
Email This Post
- 
Print This Post
Hopefully you operate your company with a yearly business plan that includes a plan for sales growth and a budget based on reality. And, hopefully, you compare your progress compared to plan throughout the year and make adjustments accordingly. At the very least you should be using these tools. If you’re not, you’re driving the company bus with your eyes closed.
If you see value in planning beyond one year, you are probably doing some form of strategic planning. An effective strategic planning process helps you proactively determine the future of your organization by taking advantage of market opportunities that your competitors are not as well equipped to take on. An effective strategic planning process will have a direct positive impact on your company’s profitability and organizational results. If you are using strategic planning as a tool to lead your company, your eyes are open and you have a pair of binoculars, while your competitors are planning to buy some binoculars someday when they get a chance.
What’s beyond strategic planning?
While strategic planning can add significant results to your organization’s bottom line, there is something you can do beyond strategic planning to create breakthrough results. Management innovation. Management innovation is defined as anything that substantially alters the way in which the work of management is carried out.
Face it, the management models we use today were created by industrial age pioneers born in the mid to late 1800’s. But, we’re not in the 1800’s or the 1900’s any more, are we? Today’s challenges include globalization, deregulation, the pace of change, the impact of the Internet and so on. Our current management models were not designed to address the challenges we face today.
A growing list of companies are challenging their assumptions about their current management practices and creating management models that address the challenges in today’s society. The results are organizations achieving breakthrough results not even imagined possible by business or strategic planning. How did they do it? Fewer layers of management. Increased levels of accountability and passion. Every employee focused on delivering financial results. No, it’s not a dream. And, yes, it is possible.
Where do you find resources for management innovation? One resource that I recommend is The Future of Management by Gary Hamel. Warning! The material in the book, like the author, is a bit dry. OK, very dry. In addition, the book is aimed at Fortune 500 companies. You’ll have to do some translating to make appropriate application to your company. However, it’s a great starting point.
Where do you find resources to help you create and implement management innovation in your company? Call us. We’ve helped many organizations implement innovative management practices that resulted in our clients becoming leaders in industries where there hasn’t been anything new in years or decades.
Management innovation is game changing. Change the game before your competitors change it for you.
Interesting? Useful? Why not share it!
Yet again more sense spoken.
I very much agree with the concept of empowering your team. This gains greater commitment and understanding of the task and strategy.
Those parts of the business, where the Manager “holds” on to his information is oftenm in my humble opinion, where his team will under acheive.