The Strategic Planning Workbook

Neville Lake

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780749465001
• Edition: 3
• eBook ISBN:
  9780749465018
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

The Strategic Planning Workbook is an invaluable, ready-to-use guide to creating and implementing a strategic plan. Refreshingly free of the usual grand business models peddled by consultants, this book provides the concepts needed to do the thinking, the tools to gather the necessary information, the techniques to make your decisions and the frameworks to translate conclusions into action plans. With a strong focus on matching the right kind of strategy to your business and the all-important implementation of your plan, this fully updated new edition includes supporting videos to help you think like a strategist, understand your customers, analyse your competitors, understand the pressures and define your company's mission, vision and values.
In a clear and accessible style Neville Lake draws on a mixture of his own diagnostic tools, analytical techniques and decision-making processes, guiding readers through the key stages involved in strategic planning.

01

Getting a bigger brain

How to think like a strategist

The business wasn’t doing well.

Sure, every year it made more than the year before. But that wasn’t the point. With the customer contacts, position in the market, accumulated knowledge and intellectual property that they had, Malcolm knew that this business was maybe half of what it could be – or should be. He knew that if he could really focus all the resources in the business on those opportunities that would deliver the greatest benefits, the sky would be the limit.

In three months he was scheduled to lead a ‘strategic retreat’ with the senior management team. They had done these before, with the same result: a tedious repetition of each person’s ambitions for the future followed by some scrappy action planning. Then it was all forgotten a month later. If he was honest, the best part had been the dinner.

This time it would be different. This time he would force the group to ‘think strategically’.

Malcolm is right. All strategy starts with strategic thinking.

Strategic thinking is not the same as strategic planning. Strategic thinking involves stepping back from your organization so that you can view it in a way that helps you to understand what is important today, and what you need to do to make it successful in the future.

Strategic thinking is different from the kind of thinking that you do every day. For example, sketch your organization on a piece of paper. Draw the people (as matchstick figures if you need to – no one is going to see it), the premises, the bits of equipment that you use and the customers who are the lucky recipients of your outputs. Briefly list what people do, and what customers get.

Now draw another picture that shows how and where value is created for you and your customers, where the greatest areas of opportunity and the weakest links are, where there is untapped potential, where there is over-investment, where you are trapped by past decisions, and where you have the most direct path to increased profits. This is not such an easy picture to draw.

The second picture is a challenge because we typically think about our organizations in terms of what we do, not in terms of where the value is hiding or what we could be doing instead. You need a different approach. This is what strategic thinking is all about.

Contrary to popular belief, strategic thinking is not rocket science. It simply requires that you collect different data and use the right models to help you understand what really happens in your organization, and where the possibilities reside. It is a viewpoint that you will develop as you read this book.

By the time you complete all the chapters you will see your organization in terms of value, and what you need to do to deliver that value. You will be able to recognize sub-optimization and see opportunities. As you progress through the exercises you will learn how to gather the data that you need and how to apply the models that will make sense of that data. You can then achieve the future that you want, the returns that your shareholders deserve, and opportunities that your employees expect.

By the time you get to the end of this book you will wish that you had been familiar with strategic thinking right from the start. This chapter is designed to get the right kind of thinking started now. Consider it as the essential warm-up before the main event.

Strategic thinking can be summarized by three sets of four questions.

1. The really big questions

• What business are we in?
• What is possible for this business?
• What is our uniqueness?
• What is important to our success?

2. The key tactical questions

• When do we create value for our customers and for ourselves?
• Where are the areas of greatest opportunity?
• How much money do we want to make?
• What do we have to do to sustain optimal levels of performance?

3. The true operational questions

• What needs to be done?
• What gets priority?
• Who will do this and by when?
• What is the best way to complete the steps?

Within these questions are the insights that will help you to make sense of your organization today and that will lead you to develop it into the organization that it needs to be tomorrow.

In this chapter I have covered the big questions and the tactical questions, so that you have a strategic and tactical perspective before you start to gather the data. The operational questions are not described in detail here. These are embedded in the action planning activities described in this book. The other parts of the book are written so that you can collect information with others or lead discussions. This part is written primarily for you – to be enjoyed on your own to prepare you for all that is to come.

The really big questions

What business are we in?

There are three parts to this question: What business are we in now?, What business are we not in? What business should we be in?

What business are we in now?

There are typically two answers to this question. The first one is ‘Duh, that’s obvious. We do… (whatever your business describes itself to be on your website)’, and the second answer – which is a real description of the business.

The reason that there are two answers is that business terms are imprecise. If you were to collect up a bundle of organizations that all apparently did the same thing and pull each apart, the chances are that you would find that each had a different emphasis, each had different customers and each had different kinds of products/services. There could well be some that were so different that they were really in a different business altogether.

The problem is that an organization starts by using a label of some sort (white goods manufacturer, law firm, supermarket and so on). The label used is imprecise, and means different things to different people. This organization then evolves by small increments over time. Individuals still apply the label, and think of themselves as belonging to that kind of organization without seriously challenging what that label means, or checking if the label still applies.

A quick way to find out what business you are in is to independently ask three senior people to describe what the organization does, and which customers are the beneficiaries of these efforts. These three people are not allowed to use any labels or commonly accepted descriptions of organizations.

Then ask three ‘why’ questions – which quite simply means asking the question ‘why’ to the answer given, three times (‘to make money’ is not the answer at this point – it is too broad). The persistent use of ‘why’ (you can ask it five times if you think that you can get away without it being too irritating) forces people to get back to key issues. The chances are that you will have different answers from e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Imprint
• Table of contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• About the author
• 1. Getting a bigger brain
• 2. What are they thinking?
• 3. Getting into their heads
• 4. Who else is out there?
• 5. What are they doing?
• 6. Pressure points
• 7. What are we thinking?
• 8. Building the guiderails for the future
• 9. How to pick a strategy that is right for your business
• 10. Making strategy happen
• 11. Selling your message
• 12. Bringing it all together
• 13. Tricks and traps
• Appendix: Worksheets
• Index
• Full imprint