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Chapter 3

Team Planning: The Catalyst for Successful Strategy

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”

Peter Drucker

“You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.”

Yogi Berra

“Where do you want to be five years in the future?” I was facilitating a firsttime strategic planning meeting for a high tech company that had hit a wall.

“That’s a question we’ve never been asked before,” Lee, the CEO remarked. The executive team members, being mostly technical people, started calculating. “If we continue to grow at the same rate we have every year, then…”

“No!” I exclaimed. “Where do you want to be in the future? I’m not asking for a forecast, projection, or fantasy number.” As I went around the table, asking each person in turn to answer the question, we discovered the solution to the mystery of the company’s dysfunction. Casey, the director of development, envisioned a small, private, craftsman-like company based in one location. Mark, the director of sales, saw their future as a large, public company with multiple products. Mitchell, the operations manager, visualized multiple manufacturing locations around the world. Jaime, the controller, just wanted the company to be profitable. Every day the executive leadership team was making decisions shaped by their individual visualization of the future, a future where the company was simultaneously big and small, private and public, physically concentrated and spread across the globe. Was it any wonder that as each of these executives drove toward what they thought was a shared vision of the future, they were frustrating another executive driving in the opposite direction?

The strategic planning process succeeded in getting every executive pointing in the same direction with profound effect. “Even if nothing else had been accomplished,” the CEO told me, “the alignment became a catalyst for execution.”

The strategic planning process succeeded in getting every executive pointing in the same direction with profound effect. “Even if nothing else had been accomplished,” the CEO told me, “the alignment became a catalyst for execution.” (In chemistry a catalyst is a substance that speeds up a chemical reaction, but is not consumed by the reaction; hence a catalyst can be recovered chemically unchanged at the end of the reaction it has been used to speed up, or catalyze. In business it is someone or something that causes a big change.)

Chapter focus

The strategic planning process that creates the strategic plan is even more important than the plan itself. This chapter outlines how to make strategic planning a sustainable, step-by-step team planning process rather than a random event. It discusses the value of aligning people’s personal visualizations of the company’s desired future so they reinforce each other and create synergy. It also provides a model that clarifies and links each element of the strategic plan – vision, mission, strategy, and strategic goals – so that the model provides a stable platform from which you can initiate, complete, and realize the rewards of your investments in strategy.

Timelines

Chemical reaction times can vary wildly. Mix barley and yeast with a few additional ingredients, bake for an hour, and you have a loaf of barley bread. Mix barley, yeast, and other ingredients, ferment over a month or more, and you have a mug of beer to enjoy with your bread. If you mix barley and yeast, ferment and distill it, then pour it into a charred white oak cask, in three to thirty-six years you can enjoy a glass of fine whisky.

Similarly, executing different elements of your strategy will produce varied results over different time periods. What you plan to accomplish within the next one to ninety days is tactical. What you plan to accomplish within the next five, ten, or thirty years is strategic. In every case, you need to invest company resources today to achieve your planned results.

Strategic planning organizes and anchors a company’s investments in the future. When you make an investment you need a platform that will remain stable long enough to complete the investment and realize the reward. To deliver real results, you need a good strategic business planning process that provides the stable platform for making sure everything you do today is consistent with where you want to be in the future.

The elements of a strategic plan and the Progress Pyramid™

A strategic plan has six basic elements – vision, mission, strategy, strategic goals, key results, and action steps. Each element has a different period of stability. Visualize your plan as a pyramid made up of six stable investment platforms (see The Progress Pyramid ^TM). Tactical initiatives produce a result within days, weeks, or months. They don’t require a platform that’s stable beyond 90 days.

Why do you invest resources in those short-term tactical initiatives? It’s to progress toward achieving strategic results which can take years or decades of investment to achieve. Sustaining those strategic investments long enough to reap a return requires platforms that are stable for years or decades. As such, they must have an equally long stable platform. The written strategic plan documents these six investment platforms, each one stable long enough to enable a return on an investment. We will discuss each level of the plan further in this chapter.

The planning process can be more important than the plan itself.

The elements of a strategic planning process

The planning process can be more important than the plan itself. Strategic planning is a continuous process of answering three questions.

Where are we now?

Where do we want to be in the future?

What do we need to focus on over the next period to get there?

Get ready to plan

The planning process starts with establishing the team that will develop the plan. It’s unlikely that any single individual, outside expert, consultant, or even the CEO understands all the specifics of your company, market, and technology as well as the team of people who experience it day in and day out. Further, no outsider or single individual will execute your plan. Execution requires a committed team that understands not only what they are expected to do, but why they must act.

As we’ve noted earlier in the book, your planning team should have five to twelve members who can look at the business with the eyes of a CEO. A true executive is someone who seeks answers that optimize the entire organization, not just their department, people, or own position. The team should include the owner(s) and their direct reports, heads of major company functions, and one or two employees who will have a major impact on the company’s future. Sometimes it makes sense to augment the team with one or two outsiders who have a major stake in the company’s success. The team already possesses the knowledge needed to create the plan. If they don’t have the specific answers in their heads, they can identify questions to be answered as part of the strategic plan’s execution.