Why Strategic Plans Fail

Careful strategic planning is paramount for organizations seeking to establish themselves in our dynamic economy. Still, even the best thought-out strategic plan will falter if employee buy-in is not supported and a thoroughly considered implementation process is not put into effect. This book casts light on these dark corners of entrepreneurship and share with you the kind of knowledge that can save you a lot of time and frustration. But most importantly, it can save you from failing in your venture. A thoroughly prepared strategic plan is vital for reaching objectives and goals; any business depends on careful planning to be successful. Regrettably though, many individuals, groups and organizations, fall short when it comes to executing their plans. The outcome can be wasted time, cash and various missed opportunities. If a strategic plan is to be successfully implemented, one must count for a number of interrelated factors. We will address the most crucial of these in the following chapters of this book. Creative awareness of the pitfalls of strategic planning will help to circumvent organizational failure.

Organizations often fail to reach their potential growth. The book identifies the hidden dilemmas and pitfalls of strategic planning. It creates awareness of the planning traps, so companies can create a breakout strategy. This is not another theoretical book. It is written for the Board, CEO and Executives who are responsible for creating the company's future.It is a hands-on book reflecting the practical insights of the author's own experiences conducting strategic planning. It includes process guidelines along with an organizational assessment tool to identify areas that an organization needs to work on to create strategic success. The book emphasizes participative planning, awareness building, reality checks, innovation, differentiation, tactical testing, execution, change management, perfomance planning and strategic controls. Above all the book will enable your firm to come to grips with its organizational capability, enabling it to identify new opportunities for a breakout strategy.

Organizations often fail to reach their potential growth. The book identifies the hidden dilemmas and pitfalls of strategic planning. It creates awareness of the planning traps, so companies can create a breakout strategy. This is not another theoretical book. It is written for the Board, CEO and Executives who are responsible for creating the company's future.It is a hands-on book reflecting the practical insights of the author's own experiences conducting strategic planning. It includes process guidelines along with an organizational assessment tool to identify areas that an organization needs to work on to create strategic success. The book emphasizes participative planning, awareness building, reality checks, innovation, differentiation, tactical testing, execution, change management, perfomance planning and strategic controls. Above all the book will enable your firm to come to grips with its organizational capability, enabling it to identify new opportunities for a breakout strategy.

Business.

Explains how companies must pinpoint business strategies to a few critically important choices, identifying common blunders while outlining simple exercises and questions that can guide day-to-day and long-term decisions.

It’s a fact of life: birds flock, fish school, people “tribe.” Malcolm Gladwell and other authors have written about how the fact that humans are genetically programmed to form “tribes” of 20-150 people has proven true throughout our species’ history. Every company in the word consists of an interconnected network of tribes (A tribe is defined as a group of between 20 and 150 people in which everyone knows everyone else, or at least knows of everyone else). In Tribal Leadership, Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright show corporate leaders how to first assess their company’s tribal culture and then raise their companies’ tribes to unprecedented heights of success. In a rigorous eight-year study of approximately 24,000 people in over two dozen corporations, Logan, King, and Fischer-Wright discovered a common theme: the success of a company depends on its tribes, the strength of its tribes is determined by the tribal culture, and a thriving corporate culture can be established by an effective tribal leader. Tribal Leadership will show leaders how to employ their companies’ tribes to maximize productivity and profit: the author’s research, backed up with interviews ranging from Brian France (CEO of NASCAR) to “Dilbert” creator Scott Adams, shows that over three quarters of the organizations they’ve studied have tribal cultures that are adequate at best.

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world. Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for—overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, he debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” He introduces nine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—that are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can easily be put to work on Monday morning, and uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 2007–08 financial crisis. Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt’s decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.

From the author: This 3rd edition is about organized common sense in the fire service. Section One provides support to fire departments that already have a strategic plan and just need to update and revise their existing plan. I have found over my 30 years of consulting with fire department’s that they want to accomplish their next iteration of their strategic plan as rapidly as possible. Section Two provides a detailed “How-to” guide to help a fire department create its first strategic plan. Section Two is divided into four parts: (1) Understanding the Department, (2) Understanding the Situation, (3) Understanding the Strategic Issues Facing the Department, and (4) Creating Organizational Change. A new chapter (Chapter 20) provides assistance to those departments having challenges with their strategic plan and obtaining the desired outcomes/results. It adds a new troubleshooting process for those departments having challenges to create an effective and successful strategic plan. The book is designed to be effective as a manual to develop an individual fire department’s strategic plan as well as a textbook for use in upper division college/university courses or as a text for post-graduate courses.