Chapter 2: Strategic Planning

Fundamentals

Lesson1: Before You Begin Planning Page

-A strategic plan defines what your organization stands for:
 It defines the market where you compete, and how you compete in that market. 
 It's the definition of the goals you're going to pursue and, more importantly, the initiatives
you're going to pursue to achieve those goals. 
 It's also going to help you allocate your very limited resources to pursue those initiatives and
reach those goals. 

Why is a strategic plan so important? 

 First, it provides focus for your efforts and your limited investments. 
 It gives your team something to rally around and be excited about. 
 And lastly, it helps you identify the risks and opportunities you're going to face in the
market, and then plan for those risks or exploit those opportunities. 

Three principles of strategic planning:

 First, set a clear direction and stay in your lane, versus meandering and pursuing strategies that
change every year. 
 Second, say no to distractions. It's very easy to get caught up in the wow that looks like a cool
initiative, let's pursue that. 
 The third is making sure you diversify your bets. You have limited pools of money and people
and time, making sure you don't put all your eggs in one basket and instead pursue
initiatives that are spread across different time horizons, different markets, and different
products. 

Avoiding major strategic planning risks

- Strategic planning takes a lot of time and a lot of energy. It is a high resource type of exercise.

 Unfortunately, many times that process can be a worthless pain, and the worst thing that can
happen with a strategic plan is everybody puts in all this effort, and then it gets archived, put on a
shelf, and never looked at again. 

Now there are some warning signs that you can look for to determine if your strategic planning process
is flawed. 
  First, initiative proliferation -  
- Do you have to use multiple pages just to add up all the different initiatives you're thinking
about pursuing? 
 The second risk is thinking too small. 
- All the initiatives that are on your list are really small, incremental improvements to your
business and don't really advance you to your strategic goals. 
 A third is thinking too big. 
- All the initiatives are huge, and everything has to line up perfectly, and it's a really large bet
that you're taking with the organization. 
 Starving the kids.
-  Many organizations have a large profitable business unit, and then they have a lot of
smaller ideas that are going to be more rapid growth. And the risk is you invest all your
resources in the big known business and you starve those smaller businesses. The problem
is you're starving your future in doing so. 
 Random initiative generator. 
- You look at all your initiatives, and they all seem really great, but when you try to figure
out where they're taking you, there's no clear direction. An example I've seen when I
worked in a strategic planning group, and I first arrived in the group. I said, "Let me see our
strategic plan." I was handed a list of 37 acquisition targets, and I said, "This is great. "These
all look like interesting companies "that we should think about pursuing, but where's the
plan?" Well, that's the plan. It wasn't a plan. It was a random list of companies that
competed in the market we were in, and we didn't know which of those acquisitions was
going to be attractive and which ones were distractions. 

And our first task was fixing that strategic planning process, setting direction and putting some
focus to the initiatives that we pursue. 

Strategic planning process: Overview

- Strategic planning is an inherently simple process. 

Major tools and steps that you're going to follow your strategic plan. 

1. First, you need to set direction and stay in a lane. 

- That begins with articulating the vision, the mission and the goals of the organization. 
- Once you've set that destination, it's important to define the organization's core
competencies. What are you great at? And how are you going to compete in the market?
2.  Defining strategic filters. This is the heart of the method. 
- These filters are going to be the objective functions you're trying to achieve. They'll be the
evaluation criteria you'll use as you analyze the initiatives that you are or are not going to
pursue. 
3. Say no to distractions. 
- You're going to stay focused. You'll use tools like a two by two matrix to evaluate which
opportunities should we pursue? And which ones should we avoid? You'll take all the
 initiatives on your list and run them through those strategic filters to identify the ones that
are high value and high potential and the ones that should be avoided. 
4. Draw the line. 
- Strategic planning is about focus and you'll have your list of initiatives. You're going to
identify the top ones, the bottom ones and resource them appropriately, and only work on
things above the line for which you have resources. 
5. Make sure you have a diversified portfolio of initiatives, and then executing the strategic
plan. 
- You'll look at your initiatives in terms of are they long term? Short term? Do they balance
your core competencies? Are they balanced across products or markets or services? You'll
look at your portfolio and how it evolves over time.

 So as you go through the strategic planning process, there will be major tools and frameworks you'll
apply at each step, and you're going to come up with a very clear plan with a prioritized set of initiatives.

Strategic planning process: Tactical needs

The typical cadence of a good strategic planning process will have:

 People working individually doing some pre work. 

 Then you'll come together as a team and work on things like your vision, your mission, guiding
principles. 
 Then the team will go away and do individual work to evaluate some initiatives. 
 They'll come back together to go through a prioritization meeting. They'll go away again as
individuals and do deeper analysis on initiatives. 
 And come back together to do final planning and resource allocation. 
 And the deliverables that come out of this strategic planning process will be a strategic plan in
the form of a document. 

You'll have a defined set of core competencies for what your organization is great at. You'll have a
prioritized list of initiatives that you're going to pursue. And an implementation and sequencing
plan where you've identified which initiatives, when and what resources are we going to
allocate. Now, I'll cover all of these tools in future chapters of this course, but just remember that
your planning process is going to be a balance between working together and working as individuals.

When you run your strategic planning process, you should do it all at once in a multi-day
offsite.- False
Lesson2: Defining the Strategic Environment

Assessing the market

- As you begin your strategic planning process, it's important to assess the market you're competing in. 

A classic tool for doing so is Porter's five forces. Dr. Michael Porter, who's a professor of strategy, came
up with this set of:

five forces to evaluate all the different dynamics that can affect your organization. 

 First, look at competitive rivalry, how many competitors are in the marketplace? How do they
behave? How are they distributed by market share? How do they go to market, what are their
core competencies? 
 Second, look at the threats of new entry. So there's the existing set of competitors or there are
new competitors who will enter the market. Evaluate how much does it take to get into the
market? Will I have to build huge factories or can I just launch a website to compete against
you? So understanding those threats of new entry. 
 Next, look at the threat of substitution. You have your products, what other products could
meet that need for your customers? Understand what customers are buying, not necessarily
what you're selling. 
 Then you have to evaluate buyer power. So these are your customers buying from you. Are you
the big player in the market or are your customers? For my firm, there's a great deal of buyer
power. I sell to large companies and I'm a small training firm. So there's a lot more buyer
power that I have to deal with. 
 Next, you need to look at supplier power. The people who are providing raw materials and
inputs to your business. Are they big, are they small, how much power do they have from a
pricing standpoint?

 And by looking at all five of these dynamics, you'll be able to identify where are the major
threats, where are the opportunities that we can pursue? And it can generate some interesting
insights when you're rigorous about going through this process. 

When I worked at Scotts Miracle-Gro, we were going through our strategic planning process. And as
we were looking at the threats of substitution, our CEO came up with a very interesting insight. We
were in the lawn and garden industry and we sold lawn and garden products to consumers. When
we looked at the threat of substitution, the entire team was saying well the substitutes are our
competitor's lawn and garden products. Our CEO said no actually, Google and YouTube are the
threats of substitutes. We all scratched our heads and said what do you mean? He said what we're
really competing for is the consumer's time. And is that consumer going to spend their discretionary
time in their garden working on their trees and shrubs and lawn or are they going to spend their
time on YouTube and Google and the internet? And it was a very clear picture of where the threat
came from, and it led us to approach our business very differently. So by doing this assessment of
 Porter's five forces across your entire market and your organization, you'll be able to identify where
the major threats and opportunities are that your organization faces.

Conducting a SWOT analysis

- Another tool you can use to assess the environment you're competing in is called the SWOT analysis. 

And SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. And typically, it's drawn on a
grid. 

 For strengths and weaknesses, those are typically within your own organization, capabilities you
have or don't have. 
 As far as opportunities and threats, they can either be internal or external market-facing
opportunities and threats. 

So let me walk through an example. As you build a SWOT analysis, you'll want to have the team
together and have people throw out their ideas. And it's generally a brainstorming session. 

Internal

So perhaps we start our SWOT analysis and we look at our strengths. And our strengths consist of the
brands we have, how efficient our supply chain is, the strength of our sales force and how well they sell
our products, safety within our manufacturing plants, our recruiting information technology, and maybe
our financial position. And as I've laid out the strengths, notice they're all internally-facing capabilities of
the company. 

Then I look at weaknesses and ask people where our gaps are. And we may have gaps in our expense
reporting process, our information technology desktop support for our laptops, our digital marketing
program, our intern program, and our acquisition integration skills. Because we've done acquisitions
before and they really haven't gone that well. 

External

Now we start looking outside the organization at our opportunities and threats that we
face. Opportunities might be the growth of social media and how we can take advantage of it, the
bankruptcy of Acme, one of our main competitors, our ability to sell third-party products through our
supply chain, and an opportunity to do couponing of our products at retail. 

And then last, we look at the threats that we face within the market, as well as internally. We may have
threats of our customers are going to push us on pricing, our competitors may be poaching our talent or
thinking about it, the weather in Ohio where we have some of our operations may be a threat, Acme
being bought by one of our competitors could be a threat, and also, economic trends that we
face, because our products are a consumable and they're discretionary by consumers. So if the economy
worsens, our sales could go down. 
And once I've looked at that total picture, I'll have a better sense for the strategic environment that I'm
going to be building my strategic plan in.

Extracting insights from a SWOT analysis

- Once you've conducted your SWOT analysis, it's time to refine it. You should be looking to synthesize
ideas and look for major themes that emerge from the SWOT analysis. What I recommend when you do
this is :

 first, let's eliminate things that aren't going to be major strategic themes. 

- So looking at our SWOT, we might say that plant safety, while its important, is not a major
strategic theme. Nor is expense reporting or IT desktop support. They're important but
they're not strategic. We look down and say couponing isn't that big of a deal. And in our
threats, we say Ohio weather, while it's important, it's only two percent of our market. 

- So now we've shortened the list that we can look at to identify major strategic themes. As
we look at our themes, and we look at the items across the entire SWOT, perhaps we notice
that we have strengths in brands and supply chain and sales force.

-  And then we look over and say, "Well we have some problems "in our digital marketing
program." There's huge social media growth. And the economy is a risk. So what I generally
have here is a major strategic theme around sales, marketing, branding, and how we go to
market.

-  I then look at what's left and I find out, well, we've got some things around our financials
are very strong. We're not that good at acquisition integration. Acme has gone bankrupt,
our biggest competitor. And there's a large risk of somebody else buying Acme and bringing
them back into the market. So there may be a major strategic theme here around
acquisitions, whether we look at acquiring Acme or taking defensive actions to prevent that
acquisition from hurting our organization. 

So you look at your SWOT, get rid of the things that aren't major strategic themes, and then try and
synthesize those major themes because that's ultimately going to feed into the initiatives that you think
about pursuing and prioritizing as the highest priority items within the ultimate strategic plan.

Lesson3: Settign Strategic Direction

Defining the direction

- When you set direction for your organization as part of the strategic planning process, there are four
elements to doing so: 

 Articulating your mission, - Why does your organization exist? What is its purpose in the
world? 
 Vision - If we're fulfilling that purpose, at some point in time, where are we going to
be? What do we want to achieve? What do want the organization to look like at some
future point?
 Guiding principles - are the rules you want your team to live by. How do you want people in
the organization behaving, especially when the boss isn't around? What are the lenses
you're going to look through as you try to evaluate decisions?
 Goals - Try to quantify these. It may be X number of customers by a certain date, or dollars
of revenue, dollars of profit, a margin percentage, being able to put out hard numbers by a
certain point in time to orient the organization and say, "Here's what we're shooting for." 

Some of the pitfalls of this step of defining where you're going:

 First, many vision statements and mission statements are way too long. 
- I've seen some that have spanned multiple pages. To the extent possible, make them short,
clear, and free of buzzwords. 

- Next, your guiding principles need to be clear enough that everyone in the organization
understands them and can apply them, even to the smallest actions. 

- And last, your goals need to be aggressive, but pragmatic. If they're not aggressive, the
organization isn't going to push itself. They're not going to innovate to try and fill that gap
between where they are and where the goal says they should be. If the goals are too
aggressive and you're not pragmatic, people will look at the goal and say, "There's no way
we can achieve that," and they just give up.

 So as you define it for your organization and set out that mission, vision, guiding principles, and goals,
you'll be providing clarity for where you want the organization to be in the future.

Creating a misison statement

- When you go to set direction for your organization, you need to clearly articulate your mission. Your
mission is why the organization exists. 

 It should be a cultural reflection of your values, your beliefs and the philosophy of the
organization. Try to make sure your mission statement is clear, brief and understandable to
everyone. Employees and people outside the company. 

 Your mission should clearly specify what business your organization is in and where you
compete. And you should word it in a manner such that it can serve as a rallying point for
the organization. People should be excited about living that mission. 
Let me share a few examples that you may be familiar with the companies, but not necessarily their
mission statements. eBay's mission, "To provide a global trading platform "where practically anyone can
trade practically anything." 

Johnson and Johnson. "Be the world's largest and most comprehensive manufacturer "of health care
products serving the consumer, "pharmaceutical and professional markets." 

All of these are simple sentences. They clearly articulate what business the organization is in and where
they compete. It helps everyone in the organization and outside of it know what this organization stands
for and what its total purpose is.

Defining the organizational vision

A vision should provide a clear picture of where you want to be as an organization in three to five
years. 

Why three to five years? Anything less than three ends up being too tactical and people don't focus on
generating big ideas. Anything further out than five years, there's too much ambiguity in the market. It's
hard to see that far into the future because the world can change so much.

So, defining what your organization is going to look like three to five years from now can provide a very
clear target for people to shoot for. 

Building a Vision Statement:

1. State a value proposition - articulate what value your organization creates. Let people know
here's why we exist and here's how our customers benefit

2. Ambitious and realistic - Ambitious because it'll push the organization to innovate and be
aggressive and push hard. However, you need to make sure it's realistic so they don't look at it
from day one and just give up.

3. Excites employees –

4. Market Differentiation

5. Concise

All of these are big ideas, but they clearly scope here's what we do, here's the market we do it in, and
here's how we're different from our competitors. And the entire organization knows what they're
working toward. So, when you articulate your vision, think three to five years out and put something
aggressive out there that people can be excited about.
Refining the mission and vision

- While generating a vision and a mission statement might seem like an intimidating exercise, there's a
pretty simply way to do it. 

1. Recruit Stakeholders for brainstorming - Bring in the head of the organization, people from multiple
functions, and look to involve people from multiple levels of the organization. Essentially, what you're
going to create is a brainstorming session. 

Carve out two or three hours to do each of the vision and mission statements. 

2. Pass out to everyone what exists today - Let them see the current vision, the current mission. Have
them identify things that they really like about it and things that they don't. 

3. Pass out the SWOT analysis and Porter's five forces to understand what the risks and opportunities
are in the marketplace

 And then it gets fun. Pick a scribe, preferably somebody who's been a scribe before for brainstorming
sessions, and ask people to throw out phrases that describe a vision and a mission for the
organization. The scribe shouldn't judge anything. Write down everything everybody in the room
says, and you'll know when to stop, when there's a lull. People will generally run out of ideas. Once you
hit that lull, go ahead and send everybody out on a break. You, as the scribe, then need to identify the
most common phrases, or groupings of phrases, and assemble them into a statement. 

Refining the statement:

 Clarify and eliminate buzzwords

 Remove redundant words
 Reduce to one or 2 sentences
 Share and get feedback

Clarify any buzzwords, things like leverage or best in class. Those can be throwaway terms. To the extent
that you can put precision to them, you'll have a crisper and more compelling vision and mission
statement. And ultimately, you're trying to get down to something that's one or two sentences
long, that you can share with the broader team, get their feedback and refine. The way this process
might work is you get the team generating those ideas and they start throwing out things that may
identify markets or products that you're going to pursue. 

For my firm, we're a training firm, and when we sat down and laid out our vision and mission, we went
through the same exercise. When we looked at the mission of the organization, I asked for ideas and
people threw things out like best in class, premium, top end, distinctive. They also threw out training,
marketing, getting into new markets, identifying different training opportunities, and different
classes. People said leadership, decision making, strategy, Excel, PowerPoint, and there were all
different words that were coming out, and I captured all of them on a screen. And then we stepped
back and we said, "what are the common ones?" And all of a sudden, there were some pretty clear
groupings. There were words that all represented the top end of the market versus commodity type of
training that was very common in the marketplace. There was a clear type of class that we were going to
pursue and other ones that we weren't. And there were clear participants that we wanted in our
classroom. When I saw groupings of directors, vice presidents, CEOs, managers, those were much more
common types of phrases than call center associate or front line associate. 

And when we stepped back and looked at all those different groupings, we were able to assemble a
mission statement that said we sell leadership training to management and executives, to large
corporations throughout the world. But we had to go through that exercise to figure out what the
organization stood for. So when you go through this exercise, just capture all the ideas, good, bad and
ugly, then step back, look for the synthesis, look for the common themes, and hammer it out into a
clear, crisp, compelling vision and mission statement.

Guiding principles and goals

- The last two elements of setting direction for your organization are articulating your guiding principles
and your goals. 

Guiding principles dictate how you want the organization to behave, especially when your leaders
aren't around. You're setting out a principle that an associate can use when they're confronted with a
situation where they don't know what to do. What lenses do you want them looking through as they're
evaluating those decisions? Because if you have clear guiding principles, the actions they're going to
take will be consistent with the direction of the organization, which ultimately helps you achieve that
vision and mission. 

In terms of your goals, you're going to set out those metrics, those things that after a year, two years,
five years, you'll look back and say, we achieved those goals. Try to make them as measurable as
possible. It can be a dollar, how much revenue, how much profit. It can be a number of new customers
that you add. Those guiding principles and goals need to be clear enough that they guide behavior, help
people behave in a manner that's consistent with the organization's mission, and those goals should be
driving you to achieving your vision over time. They need to be aggressive and pragmatic so you get that
balance of I know I can achieve this, but I'm not really quite sure how I can get there so I need to
innovate and push to be able to do so. Let me share some ideas around what guiding principles can be. 

I've worked with many organizations around the world to define what they want in terms of behavior
from their associates. Some guiding principles I've heard that are great are things like, "Would I give this
to my family?" The organization was in the consumer packaged goods industry and when people were
trying to figure out whether they make an ingredient change to a product or a packaging change to the
product, they asked their people to step back and say, if you made that change, would you be
comfortable giving that product to your family? If the answer was yes, go ahead and make the change. If
the answer's no, stop immediately. 

Other guiding principles I've heard. "Be net exporters of talent." This is how we want our managers in
the organization to behave. Being a net exporter of talent means bringing people in, helping them
develop, helping them grow, challenging them, and building their skills and then, once they've reached
that next level, push them off to the next team. Send them to the next great opportunity in front of
them. And then, bring in more people behind them, and the net effect of that is you're generating more
talent for the organization than you're bringing in. Now, think of the behaviors that this can lead
managers to take. They won't hoard talent anymore. The notion that I've build somebody and they're a
high performer, but you know what, I'm going to discourage them from going to the great new
role, would run counter to this guiding principle. So, by putting this principle in place, that organization
is going to achieve that goal of having a more talented organization. 

So, think about what you want your organization to look like in the future, how do you want your
associates to behave, and then be able to put in place a principle that they can understand when they're
faced with a decision. Now, in terms of goals, laying those out very clearly and then sharing them across
the organization, but letting the organization figure out how to get there. I've been in organizations
where we had revenue targets or retention targets. My organization today, I lay out a goal for
myself. Every year, I want this many more client logos on our website, so I want to force us to get out of
the comfort zone of serving clients that we currently serve, which is great and we love doing, but we
need to continue to grow so I want new logos on the website. When we land a new client, we add a logo
to the website, and that's a metric that I track because it helps me achieve my vision for our
organization down the road. So, think about what the goals are of your organization. What's the vision,
where are you trying to go, and what set of goals will help you get there? And by articulating them
clearly, the organization is going to drive in the right direction.

Goals should be aggressive and pragmatic

Lesson 4: Determining how you’ll compete

Core competencies: Starbucks example

- One large aspect of strategic planning is deciding where you will or will not compete. A way I
encourage organizations to think about that is to look at their core competencies. 

A core competency is something your organization is great at. 

Examples of core competencies:

1. Product quality
2. Innovatiion ability
3. Suply chain efficiency
4. Brnad Strength
5. Technology Infrastrcuture

Allow me to offer a couple of examples. Starbucks, I would argue that their two core competencies are
the quality of their product and their service. Proctor and Gamble. Their core competencies would
be marketing and product development, and their primary competencies are the ones they're going to
play to first. 
So once you've identified your two primary core competencies, it's helpful to plot them against one
another on a grid, and looking at competency one and competency two, and understanding will the
market or the product or the initiative you're pursuing rely upon that core competency and how much
from low to high and low to high for each of those two core competencies. 

For situations where an initiative or a market or a product plays very well to core competency one and
very well to your second core competency, those are the types of opportunities that you should
own. You should own that market. You should try to own that product category. 

For opportunities where neither core competency comes into play, and they're both irrelevant, those
are the types of opportunities you should avoid. Because it's very difficult to be successful in a
market where a product category where you don't have the required skills to compete there. 

Now there will be opportunities where your primary core competency does come into play. You should
pursue those opportunities and they should be reasonably high priority. 

For other opportunities where your second core competency comes to play, but less so for your primary
core competency, the one thing you're really great at, you should consider pursuing those
opportunities. Because those opportunities might be attractive, they're just not as perfect of a fit as the
ones where you own or your primary core competency is going to drive your success.  +

Focusing with core competencies

- Once you've identified your core competencies, you should then look at the initiatives that you're
thinking about pursuing to determine what your approach should be. 

Examples of Potential Initiatives:

 New markets
 New products or services
 Or new capabilities

This can mean markets you're thinking about entering, products or services you're thinking about
launching, or new capabilities you're thinking about building. 

Let's imagine Starbucks was conducting this exercise. And as we define their core competencies, their
primary core competency is the quality of their product from low to high in terms of the relevance of
that competency in whatever initiative they're thinking about pursuing. The second competency that we
looked at was their service delivery capability. Again, that competency being low to high in terms of its
relevance for pursuing an opportunity. 

Let's evaluate some opportunities. Let's say they were considering launching a new holiday coffee
drink. Well, as we look at the axis of product quality, this would be their product that they're
launching, so it would be very high in terms of using that core competency. And that product would be
sold by their baristas in their existing stores. So their ability to deliver service, that competency would
come into play very much. So they should own that particular product category and pursue it
vigorously. 
Now let's look at an opportunity where they have instant coffee that they're going to deliver to your
home. So again, it's their product, so product quality, that competency, is very relevant, however, their
service is irrelevant because they're not delivering it in their store. That's the type of opportunity that
they should pursue, given the relevance of their quality of product. Another opportunity may be selling
coffee mugs in their existing stores. And these are mugs that are created by another manufacturer. So,
their quality competency doesn't really come into play. It's not their product. However, their ability to
deliver service is very relevant since it's being sold in their stores by their baristas. So they should
consider that opportunity. Last, if they're looking at launching a new product line, but that product line
is going to be a low cost, commodity type of coffee product where the quality of the product is not very
relevant, they're outsourcing the production of it, so it's low, and it's going to be delivered in discount
retail stores that they don't own, entirely new retail chains. So their ability to deliver great service is
completely irrelevant. That's the type of opportunity they should absolutely avoid. So as you look at
your organization's core competencies and understand what you're great at, you can then use that to
look at any opportunity you're thinking about pursuing, be it a new product, a new market, or a new
initiative, and plotting on this grid to determine what your initial approach to that opportunity should
be. And that will then help you prioritize the initiatives you think about pursuing, and the ones that you
don't.

Lesson 5: Evaluating and prioritizing opportunities

Understanding strategic filters

- Being able to evaluate the initiatives you're going to pursue as part of your strategic plan is at the core
of the strategic planning process. You need to be able to identify what the high priority initiatives
are and what the low priority initiatives are.

 Strategic filters

- A common set of criteria that everyone across the organization is going to use to conduct
those evaluations.
- Those filters are going to be things that are important to your organization, things like this
idea meets a customer need, or it helps us be differentiated versus our competition, or it
has an acceptable level of complexity. 

Those filters are going to screen out initiatives that aren't consistent with the stated direction of the
organization. And they're going to be customized based upon the needs of the organization. 

For example, if you need to grow internationally, you probably need a filter that says helps us be more
global. And if the initiative does that and gets you into new countries and new geographies, then it
would be high on the priority list. And if it doesn't and it keeps you domestic, that initiative would be
low. 
To understand how much risk they're going to have you take on, and there are five things to look at as
you evaluate that risk. 

 First, consider how relevant are your existing capabilities. Are the strengths you have today
going to be relevant to the initiatives you pursue tomorrow?
 Second, look at your channels. Will we be distributing our products through the same
channels, or will we be entering new channels? For example, if we sell through retail today and
we're looking at selling online only tomorrow, you're going to be taking on more risk with a
newer channel. 
 Third, looking at your cost structure or the infrastructure. If the cost structure and
infrastructure required to pursue an initiative is similar to what you do today, then it's lower
risk, and if it's not, then it's higher risk. 
 Customers. Will you be serving the same customers, or are you going after new
customers? Obviously, new customers carrying higher risk. 
 And lastly, will you be running against the same competitors, or are you going to
compete with different ones? So once you've generated your filters, do this back-check against
these five criteria to understand are your filters going to direct you in a riskier direction, or are
you going to play it safe? And the right answer lies somewhere in the middle. You want to take
on some risk because that's going to create new opportunities for you, but not so much risk that
you're risking the enterprise. And by creating this consistent set of filters, you're going to be able
to evaluate your initiatives quickly and effectively and stay on your stated path to reach your
goals.

Creating strategic filters

- When you go to create your strategic filters, it's an exercise very similar to the exercise you'll do to
create your vision and your mission. You're going to look to get the right people in the room, the
manager of the organization, their direct staff, people from functions that support the team, and look
for people from multiple levels of the organization to be involved.

Take a look back to the organization's core competencies that you defined. Look at your vision, your
mission, your goals and your guiding principles because those are all going to be filters that help keep
you going in the right direction. When you generate your filters look for qualitative and quantitative
filters. You'll want things that say this is what we are as an organization, and some of those quantitative
filters to say these are the metrics that are important to us. And then you're going to get everybody in
the room and conduct the same whiteboard exercise where people throw out ideas as far as what they
think the evaluation criteria should be for judging the initiatives you're going to pursue.

Have people throw out their ideas like a classic brainstorming session, and then when there's that lull in
the conversation go ahead and send them out of the room on a break and look for common themes.
Once you've got those common themes, whittle it down to a manageable list. You're going to end up
with anywhere from six to 12 filters. Any more than 12 filters, you have too many criteria. And then ask
yourself, which of these filters are going to be hard filters versus soft filters? A hard filter is if the
initiative passes that filter, it stays in the process. If it fails, it's immediately dead and you don't even
run it through other filters past that point. A soft filter is something where you're evaluating it from a
low to a high scale. And you're determining if it's high on that filter, it's highly attractive, and if it's low,
it's just going to move it down on the priority list.

Allow me to offer an example. I recently worked with a youth organization that was focus on sports. And
this was a nonprofit organization where they were trying to articulate what their strategic plan should
be. When we into the filtering exercise, people threw out all sorts of ideas in terms of how they should
judge their initiatives. Things were is it fun, things like, will it help build sportsmanship, will it drive
fitness, will it prepare people to be Olympic athletes, is it going to be financially attractive for the
organization, does it help us bring in people from new geographies? And they threw out all these ideas,
we looked for the points of commonality and we threw out things that only showed up once like, hey
let's build some Olympic athletes, there was only one mention of that. However, things like fun or
sportsmanship were really prevalent, and those became filters for evaluating the initiatives the
organization was going to pursue later on. So once you've gone through the exercise, whittle it down to
those six to 10 themes, and start with them as your initial set of strategic filters for evaluating your list of
initiatives.

Applying strategic filters

- As I mentioned, in the strategic process, there are times the team comes together, and there are
times they go off on their own to do some homework. This is one of those times. 

When they get ready to apply the strategic filters, what you need to do is assign homework:

 Take the list of initiatives, everybody should contribute all the ideas of what the
organization might want to consider doing. 
 Once you have that list of initiatives, break it up amongst your team members. 
 Identify who should be evaluating which set of initiatives, and then take the strategic filters that
you all agreed upon and distribute them. 
 The homework should be have everybody go through each initiative they're assigned and
document how that initiative stacks up against the strategic filters. 
o For filters that are hard filters, they need to determine: Does this initiative pass or not
pass through that filter? For ones that are softer screens, they should be able to
identify: Is this a low, medium or high? In terms of how this initiative scores against that
filter. 
 When they go through this exercise, you should give them a template to do it. And when they fill
this template out, not only do they need to say whether it's high, medium or low, they should
also document their rationale. I think this one's a high because it would help us grow globally. I
think this one's a low because it wouldn't affect that many customers. Having them articulate
that rationale is going to be key for later on when you start comparing initiatives one against the
other. 

Now, people's analysis of this is preliminary. You need to understand that when they go out and
they look at these filters, not everybody is going to have a common understanding of what the filter
means. And that's okay because the process is iterative, and over time, you're going to calibrate the
organization on what each filter means, what a high, medium or low really is. And that's what you'll
 do in a future step of the process when you bring the team back together. So as you ask your people
to apply the strategic filters, give them the best understanding you can of what the filter means,
assign very specific initiatives for them to evaluate. Give them a deadline to come back with that
evaluation, and make sure they document their rationale. And when they do so, you'll be well
prepared in future steps to compare all the initiatives in your portfolio.

Comparing and prioritizing initiatives

- Remember, strategic planning is about focus and prioritization, so you can properly allocate very
limited resources to the highest potential initiatives that you can pursue. 

This is one of those steps of the process where you're going to bring everybody back together to
evaluate the initiative portfolio. 

So the inputs to this step of the process are for everybody to have completed their scoring of their
individual initiatives relative to your strategic filters. And then you're going to distribute those
evaluations and discuss, because you want everybody on the team calibrated as far as what a filter
means and what a high truly is, or what a low truly is. You're going to share all the initiatives and ask
each initiative owner to walk the group through their scoring and to defend how they justified that
particular score on that specific filter. Once you've gone through all of the initiatives on the list you need
to discuss with everyone the points where things are different, where one person says this initiative is a
high and somebody else has an initiative that's a high and they're not in agreement. Now an easy
example is a financial filter, and perhaps one person has an initiative that's worth a million dollars and
they say that's a high. Another person has an initiative that's worth $50 million, and that's a high. Well
when you go through this calibration process that's where you're going to identify those points where
people are not consistent. And one person will end up changing their scoring on that particular
filter. And this first person would take it from a high, maybe to a medium or even a low. So expect these
rankings to change as part of this discussion, and the output from this step is a consistent list of
initiatives where everybody is in agreement on the scoring of them, so that you're ready to prioritize
them in future steps.

Conducting deep analysis of high priority ideas

- Once you've been through your filtering exercise to identify your highest priority initiatives, you need
to do deeper analysis. For those top initiatives on your list, you're going to assign them to individuals for
further analysis. 

Part of that evaluation will require them filling out templates. Within that template, you're going to ask
them to fill out multiple aspects of this initiative. 

Initiative Analysis Components

1. Initiative Description - First, provide a description of what the initiative is. 

2. Value Proposition - Then identify what the value proposition is of doing that project. 
 3. Target Customers - Identify who the customer's going to be. Sometimes it's an external
customer, sometimes, it's an internal customer group. And articulate clearly the benefit that
that initiative delivers to that customer. 
4. Point of Differentiation - For external facing initiatives, identify the point of
differentiation. What sets you apart and how does this initiative drive that separation between
you and your competitors? Refer back to your core competencies. Hopefully, if an initiative is
truly differentiating you, it's going to be tied directly to one of your core competencies. Also, be
sure to identify which competitors this initiative could affect. Many of our organizations face
multiple competitors for different products or different geographies and it's helpful to
understand if you take an action, which competitor will be affected, because you need to
understand what their response might be down the road. 

Next, look at the resources that will be required to implement this initiative. Understand the people,
the capital, the expenses. Think about external partners or vendors who might need to be involved
in making this happen. Take a look at your milestones and put together your best guess for when
you'll have market validation of your initiative, when you'll have the infrastructure scoped and
built, when you're going to test it, when you expect to launch it. 

5. Identify Milestones - Whatever the major milestones are, from idea to end market, identify
what they are and put tentative dates to them. 
6. Define the owner,
7. Categorize the opportunity type. Is this a growth initiative? Is it a cost reduction
initiative? Identify the market you're going to impact with this. 

One of the biggest pieces of analysis you need to do with your high priority initiatives is the detailed
financial analysis. 

 Net Present Value (NPV)

 Return on Invetment (ROI)
 Internal Rate of Return

You'll need to understand things like what's the revenue this could generate, what are the savings if it's
a cost reduction effort. Understand it over time, how does that revenue ramp up in year one, two,
three. 

And lastly, understand the execution considerations. 

 Teams - Will there be impacts on the sales team

 Marketing campaigns
 Core operations, customer service,
 Technology
 Risks from an operational standpoint of implementing this initiative. 

By doing all of this detailed planning, you're going to have a much clearer picture of what this initiative is
going to take to get executed and what the initiative should deliver as part of your broader strategic
plan. 
Because in future steps of the strategic planning process, you're going to need to provide that entire
picture of what all of your initiatives can deliver to the organization. So making sure you're doing the
detailed analysis now will not be wasted effort later on.

Initiative prioritization: Drawing the line

- Prioritization is one of the most important aspects of a good strategic planning process. So once
you've generated a list of initiatives, it's important to understand what the priorities are and the
resources that those initiatives will consume. 

So let's look at an example of a prioritization list. I've got my list of seven initiatives and they've been
ranked from highest priority to lowest priority. And that priority is driven by my strategic goals of the
organization, so the qualitative things, as well as the financial goals and the hard metrics that are going
to help me understand which initiatives deliver the highest financial return. 

I then need to look at, for each initiative, what resources will be required to complete it. In this example,
I've got the cost of delivering on that initiative, in hundreds of thousands of dollars, of what it will take it
implement it. I've also looked at some of the functional resources that would be required for each
project. So for example, marketing, sales, IT, and operations. And different initiatives need different
types of resources to complete them. Once I have my priorities and I understand the resources
required, I need to go through an exercise called "Drawing the Line." And that's saying, "I have a finite
pool of resources "that I can use. "And when I run out of those resources, "I should not be pursuing any
initiatives "that are below that line." Because it's going to dilute my efforts and reduce my possibility of
success. 

So for example, if my limiting factor was budget and I only had $500,000 to invest, I would start at the
top of my prioritization list and look at the cost of the initiative and work down until I ran out of
money. And in this case, I would have to stop after initiative C, because I will have spent my
$500,000 and I should not work on anything below that line until I get additional budget or we decide as
an organization to reprioritize something and move something from above the line below it and move
something from below above. But that requires a re-prioritization. Another example might be a
functional resource is my limiting factor. So let's say I only have one marketing person on my team and
budget is not a constraint. Well again, I start at the top of the list with my resources and my highest
priority initiative. I can assign my marketing person and then my second highest priority initiative. But
then I run out of marketing people. I don't have additional resources available to pursue that next
initiative. So in that case, I need to draw the line after my second initiative. And I would not pursue the
third one until I got additional marketing support. Another example, let's say sales was my limiting
factor and I have 10 salespeople. Again, I start at the top of the list and I start working down it and
say, "This one requires sales, so does this one, "so does this one," and by the time I get down
here, that's when I run out of sales resources. So I would pursue all of the initiatives on the list until the
point where I run out of salespeople. So as you look at your prioritization list and you have them sorted
from highest to lowest and you understand the resources that will be required to pursue that
initiative, work your way down from the top of the list and be disciplined about stopping when you run
out of that limiting resource so you can focus on your highest priority initiatives, get them executed
successfully, and then move further down your list.
Once you have your prioritization list, you need to: - Drawing the line ensures you only work on
top-priority initiatives that are properly resourced.

Once an initiative owner rates their initiative on the strategic filters, those ratings should NOT be
changed. – False

What rating scale should you use when you apply strategic filters to initiatives? – high medium
and low

Lesson6: Assessing Your Initiative Portfolio

Applying the 2x2 matrix

- Another tool you can use to prioritize your initiatives is called the two by two matrix. 

The way a two by two matrix works is you look at two objective functions of your organization, and plot
them against one another, and then place your initiatives on that grid. 

So the example I've got here, first, I look at profit. And that's the most important objective of my
organization, and I'm going to assess my initiatives from low profit to high profit. Then I look at growth
rate of the organization, how much will this initiative help my top line grow for the company. 

And again, I look from low to high. And what happens is, the two by two matrix will help me
prioritize. And initiatives that are high profit and high growth are my priority one initiatives. Next, since
profit is most important to me, anything that's high profit, even if it doesn't get me a lot of growth, is
going to be priority two. Initiatives that get me a small amount of profit, but are high growth, are going
to be priority three. And then initiatives that get me very low profit, and very low growth, aren't even
prioritized, I should avoid initiatives that don't deliver on either objective function. So let's look at
placing some of our initiatives on the two by two matrix. Perhaps initiative A is reasonably high
profit, and very high growth. Initiative B is going to be extremely high profit, it's the most profitable one
on my list, and moderate growth. Initiative C, it's around the middle. It still delivers a high level of
profit, a moderate level of growth. Initiative D is actually lower on the growth scale, but it still delivers a
good amount of profit. Initiative E as well is pretty close to what I get from D. Now I'm really getting
down on the list. Initiative F is reasonably low profit, but it's going to enter a new market, and help me
grow quickly. And initiative G doesn't deliver very much profit at all, and there's virtually no growth
associated with it. And what I've done, is said, of all the initiatives I've got, and for the two objective
functions of my business, I've identified my highest priority initiatives that I'll pursue first, the ones I'll
pursue second, the ones that I'll pursue third, and the ones I should probably avoid. So as you're
conducting your strategic planning process, take your initiatives, think about the objectives that are
most important to your business, plot your initiatives, and that should help confirm what your priority
list is.

Creating multiple diversification views

Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video

- Strategic plans can be complicated because you're trying to drive multiple objective functions. So it's
important once you've built your priority list, to make sure that you have balance across all the
objectives you're trying to achieve. The way I like to do that is to create multiple looks through a two by
two matrix and see where my highest priority initiatives are showing up on that matrix. So for example,
let's say I've got 30 initiatives on my entire list and five of them are my top priority initiatives. So first, I
evaluate them based upon growth rate, how fast will they help my company grow, and profitability, how
profitable is this initiative, this particular product. And when I plot all 30 initiatives, those five top
initiatives help us grow very rapidly and they are very high on that axis. And they're very profitable, so
they're very high on that axis. And looking at the portfolio through that lens of growth rate and
profitability makes sense. But we're not done. Now let's look at other objectives that we have. And we
may have two other strategic objectives of growing internationally and selling premium products as
opposed to commodity products. I then take that same list of 30 initiatives and I plot them on that two
by two matrix. And what I might notice is, those five top priority initiatives end up really low on the
grows internationally axis, because they're all focused on our home country. I may also look at those top
five products and say, wow, these are all commodity products, they're not premium products, so they
score low on that, as well. And initiatives that were my top five now show up very low on my other
strategic objectives. What I need to do then is get my portfolio in balance. And I might say those five
initiatives are great from a growth and profitability standpoint, not so great from an international
growth and from a differentiation standpoint. So instead of doing all five, I'll do two, and then I'm going
to go pick three other initiatives that help me grow internationally and that help me launch premium
products to get my portfolio more in balance. So once you have your list of initiatives and you've
prioritized them, go back to your strategic objectives, build some two by two matrices, and look at that
portfolio through multiple lenses. And when you see it unbalanced, spend some time rebalancing that
list of initiatives so you can drive all your strategic objectives at the same time.

Assessing initiatives over time

Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video

- Another assessment you need to conduct when you look at your portfolio of initiatives is how does it
change over time. You've laid out a vision for what your organization should look like three years to five
years from now. It's important to understand if the initiatives that you're pursuing are going to get you
there. Allow me to illustrate. I worked with a financial services firm that had a huge core business in sub
prime credit card lending. And they had a smaller business in prime credit card lending. The problem
was new entrants were continuing to enter the market and challenge them in sub prime lending. Now,
they had a long list of initiatives they could pursue, and many of those initiatives were focused on fixing
that sub prime business. However, they had other initiatives that were much smaller in the near
term that were going to get into new markets, and new products, and new types of lending like auto
finance, and installment loans, and even having a bank. Now, when you look at the portfolio today, and
you look at the financial returns that those initiatives were going to generate, it was very clear that the
initiatives focused on the core business would have a bigger financial impact than those smaller new
businesses. However, when they looked at the portfolio over time, and they said the sub prime
business is declining over that period, and these new initiatives, these new smaller businesses, are going
to grow over that period of time, they understood that those smaller initiatives today had a bigger role
in the future. So as you look at your portfolio, it's important to look beyond this year's financial
impact. You have to appreciate the role that those smaller initiatives are going to play in your
future, and be able to prioritize and reallocate resources for that initiative portfolio to achieve your
overall vision.

Lesson7: Organizing for Success

Planning resources

Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video

- Once you have your prioritization list and you've identified which initiatives you're going to pursue and
the sequence you're going to pursue them in, it's time to allocate resources. I see organizations get this
wrong all the time, because what they do is they say, well, I've got these people filling these roles on the
team and this team is best set up to pursue this set of initiatives. And they let the resources drive the
initiatives they pursue. And what happens when you do that is you end up with a strategy by
default. You are constrained by the resources you currently have on your team and you're never going
to break out and do new things because the team is only capable of so much. The right way to allocate
resources is to say, here's my strategy, here's the vision, the mission, my goals, and my guiding
principles for what I'm trying to achieve. Here are the strategic filters that I'm going to use to identify my
highest priority initiatives. And once I have that prioritization list of what I'm going to pursue, then the
question becomes one of, what's the best organization structure that I can assemble to pursue that set
of initiatives? Sometimes what you find is your current organization structure is a complete
mismatch for what you're trying to do. And you need a different structure with different roles and
different capabilities. Once you've defined the right organization structure with the right set of
capabilities to pursue that strategy, then you identify your human resource needs to fill the boxes on
that correct organization chart. When you do resource planning this way, you're going to find you'll
swap out talent, you may move people from one team to another, you'll identify hiring gaps that you
need to fill, because you need a certain set of capabilities to deliver on this strategy. And once you've
done that, then you can go from aligning big corporate goals all the way down to individual goals. And
that's going to help you make sure that your teams are appropriately resourced.

Accountability

Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video

- The only way to ensure your initiatives get completed is to hold people accountable. Every single
initiative on your prioritization list should have a very clear initiative owner. One person you can hold
accountable for delivering results on that project. You'll need appropriate reporting and metrics to be
able to tell is the initiative on track or not. If an initiative is scheduled to deliver say, a million dollars by
the end of the year, and by June you're at 50,000, you should probably know that as soon as possible so
you can take appropriate corrective action to get that initiative back on track. The reporting and
metrics are a critical element of driving accountability. And those initiative owners must be held
accountable for managing the plans and delivering results. If they're not delivering, you as their
leader need to find out why. And if they need resources, your job is to provide them. If they're not
meeting expectations, they need your guidance and coaching and counseling to help them do so. Now,
many times you're going to defer on an opportunity or pass on something because you don't have the
resources available that you can hold accountable for driving the overall strategic agenda. Sometimes
you may be tapped out on your project managers. You don't have enough of them to do all the
projects, so you take the one gigantic project and perhaps defer it for three months. And move some
smaller ones up in the queue, because you do have the resources to do it. And again, then you'll be able
to identify the individuals who own them and hold them accountable for delivering those results. By
establishing clear accountabilities, you're able to balance the initiatives across your portfolio to make
sure they get done, and you're going to ensure that you get the results that you're promising back to the
organization as part of the strategic planning process.

The ongoing prioritization process

- Once you've been through your first strategic planning process, you'll have done a lot of the hard
work. Because you defined the filters for evaluating opportunities. And you've taken that initial list of
ideas that you had before. And filtered and screened and evaluated all of them. That's a great deal of
work. Don't let that work go to waste. Put in place an ongoing evaluation process so when new ideas are
brought forward, you can run them through the process, assess the idea and get it onto your
prioritization list. The way that process works is first, you have to define an owner for the
process. Somebody should be responsible for collecting all new ideas, and then running a regular
prioritization meeting. I recommend at least a quarterly prioritization meeting. Anything longer than
that, you're going to have a large backlog of ideas. And many times you don't have enough new ideas to
run a process like that every, single month. So quarterly ends up being about the right cadence. This
ongoing process consists of first, people generating new ideas. There are new initiatives coming up
every single day. Next, they're going to do some preliminary discovery. Defining what the idea
is, articulating a basic value proposition. Understanding where it might fit in the overall strategy. Then
you'll pull out your strategic filters and do that preliminary assessment. If it fails on several of the filters,
kill the idea. Document it so it doesn't get put back in the process a year later. And if it passes the filters,
move it onto next stage, where you do deeper analysis. Once you've done the deeper analysis, the next
step is assessing where does it fit in the overall prioritization list. So take your list of initiatives you're
pursuing now look at the new idea, and see where it ranks against those initiatives that are already
underway. If it's below the line and you don't have any resources right now to pursue it, put it on the list
and get to it when you do have resources available. If it's a huge opportunity, consider moving some
initiatives down and stopping work on them to pursue this new idea. Or ask for additional resources so
you can tackle it now. Then you launch the ideas, monitor their progress and iterate as needed. So if you
need to fix the idea, document whatever the fix is. Put that fix back in the prioritization process and
pursue it as appropriate. If you put in place this ongoing prioritization process you'll find that those
strategic filters will keep your initiatives focused on your overall strategic goals. And you're going to be
able to get more ideas done, more quickly because you're going to focus your resources on the highest
value initiatives.
The ongoing prioritization process

- Once you've been through your first strategic planning process, you'll have done a lot of the hard
work. Because you defined the filters for evaluating opportunities. And you've taken that initial list of
ideas that you had before. And filtered and screened and evaluated all of them. That's a great deal of
work. Don't let that work go to waste. Put in place an ongoing evaluation process so when new ideas are
brought forward, you can run them through the process, assess the idea and get it onto your
prioritization list. The way that process works is first, you have to define an owner for the
process. Somebody should be responsible for collecting all new ideas, and then running a regular
prioritization meeting. I recommend at least a quarterly prioritization meeting. Anything longer than
that, you're going to have a large backlog of ideas. And many times you don't have enough new ideas to
run a process like that every, single month. So quarterly ends up being about the right cadence. This
ongoing process consists of first, people generating new ideas. There are new initiatives coming up
every single day. Next, they're going to do some preliminary discovery. Defining what the idea
is, articulating a basic value proposition. Understanding where it might fit in the overall strategy. Then
you'll pull out your strategic filters and do that preliminary assessment. If it fails on several of the filters,
kill the idea. Document it so it doesn't get put back in the process a year later. And if it passes the filters,
move it onto next stage, where you do deeper analysis. Once you've done the deeper analysis, the next
step is assessing where does it fit in the overall prioritization list. So take your list of initiatives you're
pursuing now look at the new idea, and see where it ranks against those initiatives that are already
underway. If it's below the line and you don't have any resources right now to pursue it, put it on the list
and get to it when you do have resources available. If it's a huge opportunity, consider moving some
initiatives down and stopping work on them to pursue this new idea. Or ask for additional resources so
you can tackle it now. Then you launch the ideas, monitor their progress and iterate as needed. So if you
need to fix the idea, document whatever the fix is. Put that fix back in the prioritization process and
pursue it as appropriate. If you put in place this ongoing prioritization process you'll find that those
strategic filters will keep your initiatives focused on your overall strategic goals. And you're going to be
able to get more ideas done, more quickly because you're going to focus your resources on the highest
value initiatives.

Running the strategic planning process

- If you decide you're going to go out and run a strategic planning process, there's a set of very tactical
steps that you're going to take. Let me walk you through what the normal strategic planning process
looks like. First, you're going to communicate to everyone that you're going through a strategic planning
process and you're going to identify the resources required to build the strategic plan. You'll identify
team members and send out a project charter saying here's who's involved representing which
areas and here's the work that they're going to do and get their commitment from them and from their
managers that they're going to be involved in the process. Next you'll conduct the first series of
meetings where everybody gets together. You'll explain the overarching strategic planning
process, articulate what the deliverables are coming out of that process and then you'll start working on
the content. The content from that first set of meetings will be the SWOT, the mission, the vision, the
guiding principles, the goals, and your strategic filters. You'll also want to assemble that first initiative
list of all the ideas that everybody has that you're going to want to evaluate. After that meeting comes
time for homework. That initiative list needs to be parceled out to the members of the team, everybody
should have clear assignments around which initiatives they're going to evaluate. They'll complete their
homework which is looking at each initiative relative to the strategic filters. Once everybody's done that
you bring the team back together. During that meeting, you're going to through initiative by initiative
and each owner is going to justify why they rated that initiative the way they did against the strategic
filters. The output of that second set of meetings is an initial prioritization list with the highest priority
initiatives identified and owners assigned. Now comes more homework. Those owners will go out and
do that deeper analysis on every one of the high priority initiatives. When they complete that
analysis which includes the market validation, the financial analysis, the execution considerations, you'll
bring the entire team back together again. Now it's time for resource planning. You'll look at that
priority list, you'll validate the top list of initiatives that you're going to pursue, and then identify the
resources you have and how you're going to allocate them to those initiatives that are above the
line. After that it's ongoing execution. You'll have the owners who are accountable for their
initiatives, they'll be implemented, they'll be tracked, and you'll report back to that steering
committee on the progress of the overarching strategic plan. In parallel with that, you should be
launching that ongoing prioritization process, so as new ideas come in, they can be added to the
strategic plan and you can update your efforts accordingly. As you go through this process, that
communication, when you bring people together and send them away, is a key role that you're going to
play as you run this strategic planning process.

It defines the purpose of a company or organization – organizational plan

The process of creating a hierarchical sense between objectives, initiative or sense – Prioritization

These are rules that should be lived by members of an organization – Guiding Principles

is the “forte” of a company, an area where the company is great at – Core competencies