Strategic Plans ‘Gain’ Favor…. With a Little Innovation and Ingenuity

Joann Lublin and Dana Mattioli write that “Strategic Plans Lose Favor,” (WSJ.com, January 25, 2010, Theory and Practice)

Well, they’re certainly right if you’re taking the old school approach to strategic planning, like hiring a consultant, taking three months to do it, spending $150,000 or more, doing a SWOT and then reviewing your plan once a quarter or twice a year.

But, strategic planning actually gains favor if it’s designed for volatile, risky and uncertain environments.  We’ve done nearly 70 strategic plans in the last two and a half years.

Here’s our approach:

1. Do it fast:  three days, tops
2. Keep the plan simple, easy to remember:
   1. A three year horizon
   2. No more than six strategic objectives; three is better
   3. A one-breath strategy statement (25 words or less)
   4. A three year execution plan
3. Make it a team event: involve 10 to 20 people who will have to implement what they plan
4. Make it visual:  use fill-in-the-blank pictures to create the plan (we complete 36 pictures in three days)
5. Make it affordable: less than $25,000
6. Build a plan that quickly merges with ongoing operations:  start with current year tactics
7. Get into implementation quickly: assign roles and responsibilities within a week after finishing the strategic ...

   Wednesday, 14 April 2010

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Health Care Information and Cloud Computing

NSR Business Solutions

This Month’s Feature Article:
Health Care Information and Cloud Computing

Besides our ‘hot topic’ Blog (one column to the left) StrategyinaBox.com will also feature a ‘customer workshop’ Blog where clients take center stage and we share a highpoint or two about their workshop.

We’ll feature a new client once a month.

For our inaugural customer workshop Blog, we spotlight NSR Business Solutions (Sturtevant, WI), whom we recently had the privilege of facilitating through one of the most fascinating (for me) workshops of the 60 some odd we’ve done in the last two years.

The most fascinating part of their workshop occurred in day one, Activity 3, Anticipate the Future.

In this Activity the objective is to identify the industry and market factors likely to change customer demand over the next three plus years.  To do this, we first generate a trends data base of 250+ trends.  In the second step, we aggregate the several hundred trends into five to seven Trend Convergences or Mega-Trends.

The NSR team identified two of the most compelling environmental forces we’ve had to work with.  In a phrase, it was health care tsunami meets cloud computing, two ...

Thursday, 18 March 2010