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Strategic Planning Best Practice 4 – Ongoing Planning and Execution

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Market changes wait for no one. In today’s rapidly changing business environment, competitors and suppliers aggressively seek to gain a competitive advantage while government agencies and special interest groups continuously seek to further their agendas. These forces, acting together, demand an organization to be responsive and flexible to maintain its footing within the marketplace.

Ongoing planning and execution enables an organization to appropriately adjust to its changing operational environment. Effective response to marketplace changes is achieved by using a combination of event, routine, and annualized planning and execution activities. Event driven activities, triggered by abrupt marketplace changes, enable the organization to react to significant developments in the business environment. Routine and annualized activities help the organization maintain flexibility in response to slowly evolving trends.

About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

Core Performance Measures

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Recommended Resource – Good to Great

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Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t
by Jim Collins

and

Good to Great and the Social Sectors: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great
by Jim Collins

About the Reference

Written by Jim Collins, co-author of Built to Last, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t identifies the common qualities of companies that have been able to make the lasting transition from average corporate performer to industry standout. In Good to Great and the Social Sectors: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great, Jim Collins shares his insights to the corollary behaviors of social sector organizations that have achieved superior performance.

Benefits of Using this Reference

StrategyDriven contributors like Good to Great not only for its revealing and sometimes surprising findings but because these findings are based on hard data and direct interviews from both the good to great and comparison companies. We found the insights presented in Good to Great and the Social Sectors highly valuable in translating the for-profit company findings of the original text to the behaviors and programs supporting great government and not-for-profit company operations. Many of the best practice recommendations found on the StrategyDriven website exemplify behaviors and practices of companies seeking to move from good to great as described by these books.

Strategic Analysis Best Practice 1 – Integrity Without Excuses

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StrategyDriven Strategic Analysis Article | Strategic Analysis Best Practice 1 - Integrity Without ExcusesFor any strategic analysis to be effective, it must be done with an open, honest assessment of the facts. Organizations acting with integrity without excuses seek to identify and eliminate instances where fact-based assessment conclusions are diluted by unrelated factors or opinion-based influences. This mitigation often seeks to justify action perceived as desirable when the fact-based evidence would suggest another course. Justification is frequently based on business factors that are not specifically value related or biases lacking a relevant performance basis.

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Additional Information

Additional information regarding strategic analysis can be found in the StrategyDriven whitepaper series Strategic Planning.

About the Author

Karen K. Juliano is StrategyDriven‘s Editor-in-Chief and Vice President of Communications and Marketing. Prior to joining the StrategyDriven team, she helped produce weekly programming for a Public Access Television station and served as a production assistant in the public affairs office at United States Naval Base, Philadelphia. To read Karen’s complete biography, click here.

Strategic Planning Best Practice 3 – Strategic Discipline

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Executives seeking to focus their organization on mission achievement act with strategic discipline. By committing a significant portion their time and attention to the long-term direction of the organization, executives are more likely to recognize and properly respond to marketplace changes in a way that fully harnesses and focuses their organization’s energy on mission achievement.

Strategic discipline is demonstrated by managerial behavior that consistently and deliberately supports performance of a combination of planning, execution, and monitoring and control programs. Executives exhibit strategic discipline by maintaining awareness of marketplace trends, preparing for planning activities, reinforcing program execution, and making decisions and directing actions that drive the organization to appropriately respond to market factors. Through these behaviors, executives focus the organization’s attention and activities on mission achievement.

About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.