Strategic Development

All organizations have two things in common.

   A Present ................... A Future

Change is inevitable and will occur whether

All organizations are perfectly designed for the

Strategic development is about change. How

Strategic development has 4 components:

 Awareness
 Planning

 Development

 Results

Organizations are necessarily focused on day-to-day operations. Managers in this environment believe
they just don’t have the time for controlled planning and development. Yet this is exactly the
environment where the benefits are truly significant.

In order to meet the realities of today's complex business world, smart leaders understand that their
highest payoff activity is to develop a culture where people want to be and want to do their best.

What Matters Most. Organizations that manage by a strategic plan, develop their staff potential and
develop a results oriented culture outperform their competition significantly. Successful leaders insist
on a continuous process of planning and development.

Great strategy doesn’t often come from one great idea. It’s more likely that a highly-developed plan
will emerge as an outcome of dedication to a strategy development process. Following a time-tested
process will produce valuable information for good decision making, which is the cornerstone of great
strategy. Don’t get me wrong, it helps tremendously to have great ideas, but great ideas after
thoughtful analysis will produce significantly better outcomes.
 Step 1
– Analyze – Look to the market for what opportunities exist. Assess which internal capabilities you
have that take advantage of these opportunities. Understand what limitations your own organization
may place on your ability to take advantage of these opportunities.

Example – Physicians are spending 11 hours per week online. That is three hours more per week than
just two years ago. Therefore, should our company start participating in social media engagement?

Step 2 – Decide – Based on the opportunities in the marketplace and your ability to sieze those
opportunities, decide where to invest your resources. It’s equally important to decide where not to
invest.

Example – We believe physicians will continue to look to the web for answers to their medical and
scientific questions, and our physician customers will turn to our contact center as the most preferred
source of information on the web. Therefore, we will not invest in consumer engagement via social
medial channels.

Step 3 – Design – Implementing the strategy decided upon in Step 2 will require investment in
capabilities. Internal organizations may need to be formed, partnerships developed, policies written,
and technology updated.

Example – A cross functional team will be formed to develop our internal social media policy with
specific physician engagement guidelines.

Step 4 – Act – Strategy decisions made in Step 2 and designed in Step 3 flow down to actions in the
form of performance objectives, budgets, and action plans.
Strategic Thinking: 11 Critical Skills Needed

By J. Glenn Ebersole (2014)

Strategic thinking is a process that defines the manner in which people think about, assess, view, and
create the future for themselves and others. Strategic thinking is an extremely effective and valuable
tool. One can apply strategic thinking to arrive at decisions that can be related to your work or
personal life. Strategic thinking involves developing an entire set of critical skills. What are those
critical skills? I offer the following list of critical skills that the best strategic thinkers possess and use
every day.

Critical Skill #1: Strategic thinkers have the ability to use the left (logical) and right (creative) sides of
their brain. This skill takes practice as well as confidence and can be tremendously valuable.

Critical Skill #2: They have the ability to develop a clearly defined and focused business vision and
personal vision. They are skilled at both thinking with a strategic purpose as well as creating a
visioning process. They have both skills and they use them to complement each other.

Critical Skill #3: They have the ability to clearly define their objectives and develop a strategic action
plan with each objective broken down into tasks and each task having a list of needed resources and a
specific timeline.

Critical Skill #4: They have the ability to design flexibility into their plans by creating some
benchmarks in their thinking to review progress. Then they use those benchmarks to as a guide and to
recognize the opportunity to revise their plans as needed. They have an innate ability to be proactive
and anticipate change, rather than being reactive to changes after they occur.

Critical Skill #5: They are amazingly aware and perceptive. They will recognize internal and external
clues, often subtle, to help guide future direction and realize opportunities for them and their
companies or organizations

Critical Skill #6: They are committed lifelong learners and learn from each of their experiences. They
use their experiences to enable them to think better on strategic issues.

Critical Skill #7: The best and greatest strategic thinkers take time out for themselves

Critical Skill #8: They are committed to and seek advice from others. They may use a coach, a
mentor, a peer advisory group or some other group that they can confide in and offer up ideas for
feedback.

Critical Skill #9: They have the ability to balance their tremendous amount of creativity with a sense
of realism and honesty about what is achievable in the longer term

Critical Skill #10: They have the ability to be non-judgmental and they do not allow themselves to be
held back or restricted by judging their own thinking or the thinking of others when ideas are initially
being developed and shared

Critical Skill #11: They have the ability to be patient and to not rush to conclusions and judgments.
Great ideas and thoughts require time to develop into great successes in the future to reach your
defined vision.
The greatest and most successful organizations in the world, over many years and decades, would
think ahead and encourage great strategic thinking at least somewhere in their business plans

A sustainable successful future requires much more, no matter how big or small your business is, and
a major requirement is strategic thinking. Therefore, I strongly recommend that you develop these
eleven (11) critical skills of a strategic thinker to use in your business and personal life to ensure
success.

Robert Bradford is President and CEO at the Center for Simplified Strategic Planning. He can be
reached at rbradford@[Link]