Excerpted from the book, Take Charge! How Leaders Profit From Change, by Greg Bustin.
Nothing sets a top-performing company apart from the market like a team united around common understanding working a plan to achieve common goals.
Yet hundreds of organizations fail to achieve their objectives each year because they fail to overcome their assumptions about their colleagues, their company, and their competition. Did you know that only one in four companies integrate the annual planning process with implementation?
Well-run companies use the annual planning process to establish measurable objectives, build budgets and set performance benchmarks for the coming year. Exceptional companies leverage the planning process to give themselves something more. They view strategic planning as a springboard to evaluate new revenue opportunities, strengthen their competitive advantage and ensure the entire organization is energized around a common purpose.
Are you sure your team is pulling in the same direction?
Have you maximized your competitive advantage, or are you satisfied to let your competitors set the pace?
Is your team equipped with an agreed upon plan to achieve your objectives?
Effective planning, therefore, is more than a budgeting exercise – though financials are clearly important. The best leaders rely on four principles that date back more than 5,000 years to harness change and drive their organizations toward their full potential.
Lessons of the Pyramids
About 2950 BC, ancient Egypt was emerging from a period of uncertainty and discontinuity and was becoming a unified nation-state. As the Egyptians adapted to the changes brought on by this unification, King Djoser commissioned the world’s first pyramid, establishing a reign of 21 years that is thought to have been politically and economically stable.
The pyramids – and the infrastructure surrounding their planning and construction – hold valuable lessons for leaders responsible for creating a framework within an organization that must address change, including insights into planning and implementing significant initiatives.
As you and your team balance the need for fast, sustainable results against the strategic long-term interests of your business, keep in mind these ancient principles that are essential as you undertake any strategic planning process. Here’s a quick look at one of these principles:
Decide how good you want to be. The ancient Egyptians considered it critically important that when they died “their physical body should continue to exist on earth, so they could progress properly through the afterlife,” writes historian Dr. Aidan Dodson. Because of this belief, “providing proper eternal accommodation for the body after they had died was very important to them.” Hence Egyptian leaders took every step possible to make their final resting place the best it could be.
This is the first principle of effective planning: aim for excellence. Begin your planning process for aiming for excellence and examining opportunities for continuous improvement, rather than maintaining the status quo.
Southwest Airlines uses its annual planning process to identify new ways to make itself better. Each year, the company identifies one to three corporate goals (i.e., “improve the airport experience”), and then this goal cascades down to departments that develop strategies, action items and budgets, and then onto all employees, then onto suppliers and, ultimately, to customers. It’s the type of planning, thinking and implementation that has made Southwest Airlines number one in customer satisfaction for three consecutive years and a high flier on Wall Street.
Your changes may not be as sweeping as those of an emerging civilization nor as grand as the design and construction of pyramids, but times of change still make employees and bankers nervous and make investors impatient for innovation, growth and profitability.
7 Steps to Success
The best planning exercises can be powerful tools for any organization, and they are critical for those wrestling with change and uncertainty. How you structure the planning process and how you use what the planning process produces often separates leaders from laggards.
Our work with companies to address the opportunities of growth or the realities of threats relies on a proprietary process that’s based on 100 critical questions, numerous creative exercises and the collective experience of senior strategists. We’ve found that when leaders are asked a series of questions – provocative, insightful, direct questions – an organization’s greatest potential is revealed.
All successful companies rely on seven fundamental concepts that they incorporate into their planning process. Here are three. Do not underestimate the effectiveness of these deceptively simple concepts.
- Involve all decision-makers – Gathering the entire senior management team (even via videoconference or conference call) helps you discuss issues holistically and eliminates the silo approach that’s counter-productive to team building and breakthrough thinking.
- Bring an open mind – Our planning process starts with a Discovery session that begins by asking, “What do you want to celebrate one year from today?” Encourage honesty and “possibility thinking.” Opportunities, fresh perspectives and new solutions emerge when constraints are suspended.
- Set a concrete objective – An objective is a dream with a deadline. Make it specific.
Is your planning process structured to harness the changes occurring inside and outside your organization?
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Copyright 2008 by Greg Bustin & Co., unless otherwise specified. All Rights Reserved.
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