Recipe for Successful Strategic Performance

Stan Abraham, Ph.D.
Professor, Cal Poly Pomona
President, Future By Design, Santa Monica, CA

This presentation comprises a whirlwind tour of the ingredients necessary for strategic planning to pay off and how they should be "mixed." First, organizations must be clear on why strategic planning is important and why they engage in it. Some maintain that the main purpose of strategic planning is to increase shareholder value, while others say it's all about creating an agenda for change. Still others claim that its true purpose is to educate all key people in how and why the organization's environment is changing as a basis for making strategic decisions. Finally, one keynote speaker from last year's conference said that an organization's goal should be to find a unique market space (a monopoly) and its strategy how to get there. It's even possible to do strategic planning and attain several of these purposes simultaneously. So, the process chosen must be designed to achieve the purpose(s). Some organizations simply go through the motions, achieving no change, no improvement in performance, and no increase in shareholder value, while at the other end of the spectrum, organizations do continuous strategic thinking (searching for opportunities and better strategies), engage their key people in participative decision-making, take calculated risks, increase shareholder value, and implement their strategies seamlessly to achieve exceptional results.

But using a good strategic-planning process, valuable though it may be, is not enough. Just as a wonderful soup is a creative blend of healthful and tasty ingredients, so also is successful strategic performance a creative blend of continuous strategic thinking, effective leadership, good managers, a parallel focus on execution, key performance indicators, an adaptive and customer-focused culture, and adequate financial resources. In fact, successful strategic performance cannot happen without all of those "ingredients" being properly done. After commenting on each of these areas in turn, the presentation ends with some sage advice on how to put it all together. The business press is full of stories of CEOs and companies that implicitly believe that just attending to some of these areas ("using only some ingredients") will be enough to be successful; but they are wrong, and their subsequent poor results prove it.

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