Strategic Planning – Technique as Course
The word “strategic” is usually mis-utilized, primarily simply because it implies each significance and intelligent evaluation. There is a fantastic deal much more to method than these two connotations. Technique is about the overall program and course of an enterprise. In military use, strategic targets are not just critical targets, they are targets that have an effect on the enemy’s capacity to wage war. In strategic preparing for company, strategic objectives usually drive at one particular of three concerns:
one. What do we do?
2. For whom do we do it?
3. How do we beat our competitors?
For illustration, introducing a major new item line is typically strategic simply because it alterations (1) and potentially (three), while requiring an outstanding knowing of (two). Strengthening worker rewards, although virtually usually essential, is only strategic if it is closely tied with (three). (I could publish an total book on why treating staff nicely is virtually constantly part of competitiveness in the greatest firms, but that is a topic for another time).
So, in spite of the reality that such things may well be critical, it truly is truly rare to experience “strategic interviewing”, “strategic facility management” or “strategic communications”. Naturally, if you are in the facility company, probably working apartment buildings, you do have “strategic facility management”. For a typical widget manufacturer, even so, this thought is just an try to puff up the importance of a critical, but non-strategic situation.
“But”, some of you are surely saying, “will not facility management cause us to lose customers if we do it poorly?”. Definitely. And – at that point – the concern does grow to be strategic. A good analogy is to believe of your business as a ship. Something that helps get you from exactly where you are to in which you want to go can be strategic. A tiny leak in the hull that will not get any worse will not have an effect on your potential to get in which you are going – but a enormous hole that threatens to sink the ship will. A single is not strategic, the other is. On most ships – and in most organizations – your strategic level management and resources should be not be centered on the tiny holes, but rather steering to keep away from the rocks so that you get in which you want to go with out obtaining a large hole in your ship.
The up coming time an individual says “strategic this” or “strategic that”, ask oneself – is this man or woman actually speaking about some thing that has an effect on the course of my organization? It may support you emphasis on the things that will truly get you in which you want to go.
Copyright 2007 by Center for Simplified Strategic Preparing, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan – Reprint permission granted with full attribution.
