Million Dollar Considerations (6)

by Joan Marques

Published on this site: February 8th, 2004

Approaching yet another week’s end, my team of management students and I gathered together in two vibrant sessions and brainstormed on the issues of planning and strategizing. Yes, in that order. For one cannot start developing a strategy without first having a plan. You need to first know what you want in order to formulate how you will get there. And, before all, you need to know where you are now.

“The simplest way to think of planning and strategizing,” I told my students, “is to think that you are at point A, and want to go to point B: That’s your plan. And once you have decided that you want to go from A to B, you will have to decide how you will go about that. That ‘how’ is your strategy.”

Among a number of interesting statements, my students selected the following
3 as the most crucial for success in planning and strategizing:

• Consider your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) in order to determine what your current position is. However, you should not develop your SWOT analysis just once, or sporadically. Rather, you should do it regularly. The philosophy behind the above assertion is simple: A SWOT analysis is a snapshot of your company or yourself at one moment in time.
  
  But we all know how fast things change: in the business world more than anywhere else. What applies now may be entirely inappropriate tomorrow. That ’s why it demonstrates responsibility if you take that snapshot at least a few times per year.
  
  
• Formulate your mission and vision with the purpose of determining your
  focus and developing your strategy. In order to plan and subsequently strategize, you have to know the current as well as the desired future picture. Your mission statement reflects what you stand for at the moment, what can be expected from you, and how you execute it. It is your point A.
  Your vision statement explains your long-term goal: what you want to become; where you want to go. That is your point B. You should keep your mission and vision statements short and sweet. And understandable. Without formulating these two concepts you will be on a road to nowhere.
  
  
• Be proactive and not reactive: planning and strategy development are good activities, but while formulating and executing them you should also try to “be the change you want to see in the world” as Gandhi once stated, and you should try to “put your fingerprints on your own [and everyone else’s] future” as Gary Hammel once asserted.
  
  Just consider this: Developing a strategy is usually done through forecasting. You paint a picture of the future and then you can either engage in trend analysis or contingency planning, as many authors on the topic of management recommend. But trend analysis is nothing more then building future plans by elaborating on past events. This is a linear approach and can become an obsolete concept as soon as a change manifests itself. Contingency planning, although more flexible, also indicates a reactive approach: it pertains to scenario planning, which is nothing else than waiting for circumstances to appear and determining your actions upon them. Something like: “If this happens, we’ll do that, and if that happens, we’ll do this.” Victimized thinking lies at the foundation of this approach.
  
  Not that it is bad, but it is not very revolutionary. Recommended tactic:
  Engage in forecasting, but keep doing everything in your power to become the new trend in the market: the unforeseen surprise that leaves all others behind.

All of the above mentioned activities are not necessarily organizational undertakings, but can very well be executed by you as a person. You are an organization of your own. It is important to know where you stand, what you can, what you should work on, what you can use and what you should be mindful about, where you want to be, and how you want to get there. And once you have determined that it becomes imperative to continue finding ways to be different, for only then will you make a lasting impression.

Joan Marques, Burbank, February 5, 2004

Joan Marques, holds an MBA, is a doctoral candidate in Organizational Leadership, and a university instructor in Business and Management in Burbank, California. You may visit her web site at www.joanmarques.com Joan's manual "Feel Good About Yourself," a six part series to get you over the bumps in life and onto success, can be purchased and downloaded at:
http://www.non-books.com/FeelGoodSeries.html.