Four best practices for strategic planning

Abstract

Purpose

The authors identify the practices that the companies that get the most benefit from their strategic-planning activities have in common:

Design/methodology/approach

The authors describe how successful companies achieve better strategic planning: They explore strategy at distinct time horizons. They constantly reinvent and stimulate the strategic dialogue. They engage the broad organization. They invest in execution and monitoring.

Findings

By focusing a standard process on addressing new questions, the strategic dialogue will remain rich, because participants will have new analyses to consider and fundamentally different ideas to discuss; so strategists – and business leaders – have to learn the “art of questioning.””

Practical implications

A good approach is to ask the leaders of the business units to identify the most important questions that the center should be asking them in today’s turbulent competitive environments.”

Originality/value

An high-value overview of strategic planning for the novice and seasoned practitioner alike. A well-chosen extended strategy team and an always-on monthly strategy assessment process can be a powerful early-warning system.

Citation

Kachaner, N., King, K. and Stewart, S. (2016), "Four best practices for strategic planning", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 44 No. 4, pp. 26-31. https://doi.org/10.1108/SL-06-2016-0046