What is Strategic Planning? The idea is so overused that it is often confusing and not well understood. Perhaps the best definition comes from Boston Consulting Group founder Bruce Henderson. “All competitors who persist over time must maintain a unique advantage by differentiation over all others. Managing that differentiation is the essence of long-term business strategy.”
The MacNeil Consulting approach is that every Strategic Planning project needs to be thoughtfully customized and planned to match the client’s purpose, scope, time horizon, expected completion date and what will work well with the planned participants.
Wayne MacNeil facilitated Strategic Planning for many years at many levels and across many functions (including Corporate functions, sales, engineering & IT) within the Bose organization in North America and across 15 countries in Europe. He has also served as a senior consultant facilitating strategy in many other companies and sometimes as part of a performance recovery effort. He has worked with many approaches and methods which have been customized to the specific planning effort including:
- Corporate and business area definitions of purpose, mission, vision, core values, guiding principles, strategic intent, core competencies and definition of corporate level leading and lagging key performance indicators (KPIs)
- Reviews of the “Current State” across the planning scope e.g. financial performance, current market strategies, distribution channels, segmented products, market share, margins & pricing, emerging technology, technology roadmaps, competition strategies, competitive products, government & outside forces, identification of significant problems that have prevented the reaching of current goals (and root cause analysis)
- Exercises that define what has changed since the “good old days”, what is changing in every area of the landscape (scope of effort) and visioning of the “Future State” competitive and external environment (planning horizon)
- Managing of interim research and deliverables supporting the process
- Workshops that facilitate a collaborative process for ideation and reviewing the emergent strategic plan including alternative comparisons and group decision making
- Strategic planning for aggregate 3-5 year product plans as well as product and technology roadmaps
- Use of Models including
- McKinsey’s 7S Framework (Structure, Systems, Style, Staff, Skills, Strategy & Superordinate Goals)
- SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats)
- Porter’s 5 Forces
- Porter’s Value Chain
- Porter’s Generic Competitive Advantage Model
- RBL’s Corporate System Design Model (Dave Ulrich)
- Scenario Planning
- Customer Value Proposition Archetype Strategy
- Business Architecture Capability Modeling
- Capable Company’s Corporate Eye Chart
If you don’t know where you are going any road can take you there. Obviously, developing an excellent strategic plan is a major key to business success. The process of deriving the plan contains a lot of the value – not just from the content but also often from the forging of a common vision and increased collaboration across the management team. It is also vital to communicate that plan so that you leverage the knowledge and effort of all the people in your company toward its success. Let us help you build a strategic plan that differentiates your company from the competition and prepares your company to be confident in executing competitive advantage.
Use this link to contact MacNeil Consulting about Strategic Planning.
