Wie können Sie Ihren strategischen Plan mit der Mission, den Werten und der Kultur Ihres Unternehmens in Einklang bringen?

This, at its absolutely core, is what should drive everything else. Your goals, priorities, and plans should ultimately ladder back to this and be easily remembered and articulated throughout the organization. It’s also an important way to ensure you’re plan is aligned and enables you to sharpen your focus, which also allows you to check yourself on things that don’t align and how that affects your mission, vision, and culture. Each decision ultimately sends a signal to your team on how seriously you uphold this so either stay true to it and be super clear and privileged on if/when it needs to evolve.

Most organizations have the hardest time identifying weaknesses? Why? People don't want to be seen as criticizing leaders while they're in the same room. Effective SWOT requires openness and honesty. If leaders don't allow that...well, you get what you get....

Remember that creating a strategy is about making choices. A SWOT analysis is not a strategic analysis but can be helpful to get an overview of the current state.

Don't waste time conducting swot analyses! Let me show you why Strengths: None Weaknesses - They simply state problems and are not solution oriented - they don't account for cognitive biases, and aren't even good enough to uncover hidden insights that a data driven analysis can get you -the categories are vague : a weakness can also be an opportunity, a threat can also be a weakness - Time and resources spent on this activity is high while no benefit is gained Opportunity: Stop wasting time conducting swot analyses Threats: There are far better tools that can help you with aligning your plans and strategies with your mission, culture and values. Swot is not one of them!

Identifying the weakness is where the real opportunity lies. It’s easy to say what we think we’re good at, but what are the gaps? What opportunities would identifying those gaps create? What’s the risk if we don’t address them?

You can align your plan with your organisation by effective communication And this can be achieved by communicating your values. You want to share how it will benefit and move the organisation forward.

Collaboration is key for strategizing and making good choices. I can highly recommend involving the finance team in qualifying and quantifying the strategic options to choose from.

This is absolutely key. Do you uphold what you stay you stand for and is it something that is clear and inspires the people that matter both internally and externally. How do you know? Involve them in shaping it and check with them on whether it is being upheld. Pulse checks internally and externally are a common way to do this and helps to see if there is alignment or disconnect between internal stakeholders and external stakeholders.

Cascading your strategy into the organization is critical and something many companies fail at. They see it as a one-time communication effort whereas it should be a continuous effort.

This can ultimately come in the form of tangible OKRs (Objectives and key results) whether the actual initiatives and goals are identified that ladder back to the mission vision and culture they are intended to create and uphold. These are like the walls or beams that hold up the proverbial house.

Always be checking in on this. Too many plans are laid and then collect dust until it’s too late to either celebrate, correct, abort, or evolve the course of action.

Be sure to document the assumptions for what would have to be true for your strategy to be successful. Those are what you need to track and not necessarily your financials.

When your assumptions turn out not to be true is when you want to evaluate your plan. It shouldn’t be forced into a set rhythm but happen whenever it’s needed.

Business strategy is not a vanilla roadmap to achieve business goals. It needs to be inimitable. The products and services of the most successful companies cannot be replicated. This is how value is created for customers, and for the shareholders. To achieve this feature, the first step for an organisation to deep dive into customer listening and analyse their feedback, opinions, and insights across all demographics. With their pain points as the foundation, and the organisation's mission statement as the framework, the strategic plan shall become aligned with the organisation's mission, culture and values.