The Strategy-Making and Strategy-Executing Process
Business success is all about effective strategies. They can be the difference between a company rising to greatness and a company sinking to bankruptcy. Well-crafted plans help a company visualize its objectives. The strategy-executing process requires constant adapting because plans often go off course. Good plans involve forecasting and dealing with unlikely, but severe, business setbacks. Effective execution strategies will also measure progress regularly.
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Phase 1: Company Vision
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Effective plans start at the end. Businesses should re-examine the company mission to see if it is achievable in a given time frame. Mission statements should be transformed into quantifiable forms. For example, if a technology company wants to “change the world with its innovations” it should quantify the “world” to a particular locale, like a neighborhood in Seattle and expand accordingly.
Phase 2: Goal Setting
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Great strategies need achievable objectives. Effective leaders unify these goals with an organizing idea outlined in the company mission statement to showcase what it does better than anyone else. Incentives and bonuses can be given when progress meets thresholds. Good plans seek out these behaviors and show strong company support.
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Phase 3: Crafting a Strategy
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Solid plans focus on what is most probable -- and not on everything possible. All businesses are limited in some way. Those limitations could be in areas such as capital resources, time and manpower. It is for this reason that businesses must be disciplined about choosing not to do something. Additionally, the strategy-making team should be represented by every single layer of the company's organizational chart to identify and tackle pervasive challenges and potential worst-case scenarios from multiple points of view.
Phases 4 & 5: Implementation and Monitoring
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All strategies are worthless without execution. Certain projects may require the entire workforce to take action with varying degrees of intensity. Insightful leaders should handpick the most qualified workers to execute the strategy, regardless of the project size. Regular evaluation processes must be in place during the execution phase to create constant progress feedback. This data can then be further analyzed to determine when and how to make course corrections.
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References
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