A New Strategy or a Good Strategy?

Strategy Doesn’t Matter?    Part 2

We’ve all heard the endless stories:  business leaders lament the lack of profit, slow growth, slow economy, European troubles, need to streamline, become more efficient ….  Human Resources lament the lack of influence, no seat at the table, restricted budgets, being relegated to processes, report generation, lack of top leadership’s support to change things…. Business and HR both talk of the lack of qualified people, rate of turnover, bad hires, lack of engagement, lack of interest, poor work attitudes, efficiency or job performance, distracted workers and terrible work habits ….Unless you like these results and you and your company are willing to endure, a good new culture strategy is needed.

Good strategy formation requires you look at your organization from its managerial, employee and/or customer point of view!   Truly successful customer driven organizations have always had the customer/consumer, and their employee’s interaction with those customers, as the top influencers of organizational plans.  Compare this to - or versus – the lip service most companies give to customer service by viewing customers and employees as top down organizations do.  Only those truly comprehending the keys to successful strategy implementation have bothered to get to know their organizational capabilities, limitations, motivations, the feelings of its own people and their consumer/customer base as a basis for forming that successful strategy.

Most companies fail to investigate, study, collect data and assign a proper value to customer’s or consumer’s views, as well as their employee’s direct interaction with those customers.  Without this essential priority in formulating a great strategy, tremendous waste occurs, as described by John Stumpf.  This same waste is mentioned by Brenton Van Breda, in his, “STRATEGIC PLANNING:  A practical approach to developing strategic plans and achieving objectives” https://www.box.com/shared/git0raxd2h.  For those unfamiliar with, looking for a simple outline for, or a compressed version of, a strategy formulation process, I think you will find it very interesting.  For more detailed strategy formulation processes (104 pages) try these slideshare presentations from drawpack.com:

http://www.slideshare.net/anicalena/strategic-management-business-presentation-slides

Thanks John and Brenton

To those of us in retail following what bad strategy, plans and outcomes look like, two recent highly visible overarching strategy change examples have played out or are being played out for all to see:

Next: Two Failed $Billion+ Strategies - Talbots and JC Penney