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Effective Strategic Planning
Processes, measurements and accountability are the keys to success
by Victor Cascella

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OST BUSINESS LEADERS recognize the importance of strategic planning, but few succeed at translating their strategies into business results. One reason is that in many companies, more attention is paid to devising strategies than to carrying them out,and elegant planning exercises are often followed by poor deployment and implementation. The pervasive belief that a well-defined business strategy will implement itself only contributes to this oversight. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not even a brilliant strategy can ensure a quality implementation. No matter how well it’s

conceived by senior management, a business strategy becomesvirtually worthless when others in the organization misinterpret it, block it or simply don’t know how to act on it. There are three telltale signs of organizations that are poor strategic planners: 1. They lack strategic alignment at every level. To translate a business strategy into action, the organization must link it clearly to departmental, team and individual goals. Everyone should be ableto answer the question, what does the strategy mean in terms I can act on? When companies fail to provide the necessary linkage, employees don’t know how to support the strategy or, worse, tend to view it as something that doesn’t apply to them. 2. They misallocate resources. Effective strategic planning dedicates resources to making improvements in those areas of operation that are critical to acompany’s competitive advantage. When an organization doesn’t establish and clearly communicate these strategic priorities, resources may be spread too thin to make a real difference in any one area of the business or may be allocated to improvements that have no real impact on strategy. 3. They maintain insufficient operational measures. In addition to traditional financial and customersatisfaction measures, companies need appropriate measurement systems at the operational level to successfully implement a strategy.

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cess of those efforts and who is accountable for These help guide employees as they work to implementing process improvements. achieve strategic goals and determine the extent Organizations translatetheir strategies into action to which their changes and improvements supthrough processes. Though most businesses organize port the strategy. themselves around functions such as sales, finance To avoid these pitfalls, companies and upper manand HR, the products and services their customers agement must realize it’s not enough to formulate and receive are produced not by functions but byprocesscommunicate a business strategy. They must also es that cross functional lines, such as new product empower their employees to implement it. development, order generation and order fulfillment. That means they need to learn to define their business These are sometimes called “value delivery” or in terms of the core processes that deliver value to “core” business processes.2 customers, identify whichThey usually begin and end aspects of those processes will POOR STRATEGIC PLANNERS: with the customer and often contribute the most to strateinvolve people from many gic goals and encourage their Lack strategic alignment at every level. different departments and employees to come up with functions. As a result, core and carry through process Misallocate resources. processes tend to be big, andchanges and improvements because they act as the face that will result in a competiof the business to customers, tive advantage. Maintain insufficient operational measures. their importance is magniLike the Japanese practice fied even more. of policy deployment, which Most business organizations have three to six strives to mobilize organizations around their corpocore processes, and businesses in...