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The Most Successful Companies of the 21st Century are Strategy Focused Businesses

Table of Contents

The Most Successful Companies of the 21st Century are Strategy Focused Businesses			1
	Significance		2
	Srategic planning best practices – minimum requirements for effectiveness		2
	The Most Successful Companies of the 21st Century are Strategy Focused Businesses		2
	The Principles of Strategy-Focused Organizations		3
		Principle 1: Translate the Strategy to Operational Terms.	3
		Principle 2: Align the Organization to the Strategy Synergy is the overarching goal of organization design	3
		Principle 3: Make Strategy Everyone’s Everyday Job	4
		Principle 4: Make Strategy a Continual Process	4
	Strategic Planning Best Practices		5
		Develop A Systematic Approach	5
		Strategic planning best practices for engaging commitment	5
		Strategic planning best practices for defining purpose and setting targets	6
		Targets for corporate performance	6
		Forecasts	7
		Strategic planning best practices for appraising the organization in its environment	7
		Strategic planning best practices for deciding strategies	7
		Strategic planning best practices for executing strategies, monitoring results and taking corrective action	7
		Critical Element 1: Strategic planning and budgeting are both essential, but they aren’t the same thing	8
		Critical Element 2: Strategy amplifies the voices of the front line and customers	8
		Critical Element 3: Resource allocation is purposely undemocratic	8
		Critical Element 4: Don’t let the earth’s rotation around the sun determine when you make decisions	9
		Critical Element 5: Leaders focus on the most important decisions and simplify the rest	9
	Conclusion		9
	Strategic focus and systems theory		9
	Strategic focus and related concepts		10
	Strategic focus and the theory of business		10
	Strategic focus and strategic intent		10
	Strategic focus and Hedgehog Concept		10
	Strategic focus and fit and position		10
	Keeping a strategic focus current		11
	Strategic focus and innovation		11
	About the Strategic Planning Process		11
		See Also	12

Significance

In order to lead the business to its greatest competitive advantage, there must be a mechanism to focus the organization on what it will do best and keep it from getting distracted by other opportunities that come along. This mechanism is the strategic focus of the business.

The strategic focus is that intersection of three critical elements of the business model:

1. The organization’s passion — its compelling purpose composed of values, mission, vision, and goals that inspire and motivate the members of the organization,
2. The value proposition of the business — what the customer values in the offerings and rewards the organization for doing, and
3. A distinctive competency — what the organization can be best in the world at.

Strategic planning best practices – minimum requirements for effectiveness

Before looking in more detail at what some of these corporate planning best practices are, let me point out that elsewhere on this site, I have argued that there are five fundamental procedures that are the essential minimum for an effective strategic planning process. These procedures include:

1. Engaging commitment
2. Setting long term strategic objectives for improved performance of the organization
3. Generating strategic options
4. Evaluating and deciding on strategies
5. Monitoring implementation of the strategies against the long-term objectives.

The Most Successful Companies of the 21st Century are Strategy Focused Businesses

These companies commit their energy to:

Strategy: Make strategy the central organizational agenda. The Balanced Scorecard allowed organizations, for the first time, to describe and communicate their strategy in a way that could be understood and competently implemented.

Focus: Create great emphasis. With the Balanced Scorecard as a “navigation” aide, every resource and activity in the organization was aligned to the strategy.

Organization: Mobilize all employees to act in fundamentally different ways. The Strategy, or Balanced Scorecard, provides the logic and architecture to establish new organization linkages across business units, shared services, and individual employees.

The Principles of Strategy-Focused Organizations

When discussing how they achieved these breakthrough results, the executives continually mention two words: alignment and focus.

To be continued…

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