Strategic Planning for Success: Aligning People, Performance, and Payoffs

Rating:
Summary: Working towards a future we can all share
Review: This is a practical guide that dares to take you far beyond the next quarterly results. A challenge to work towards a future that we can all share - and a supportive and detailed framework to help you and your organization thrive as you create it.

The book is a real compendium of Mega Planning. It goes well beyond previous texts and shows how many other issues become important when attempting a serious plan for the future. Suddenly we are confronted with a range of stakeholders, internal and external, some of whom we might rather not remember, and many of whom will be resistant to real change and would prefer a strategic plan that sleeps peacefully in the filing cabinet for five years. So this book talks a lot about Creating Change (as opposed to merely Managing Change), the roles required and the kinds of resistance that may be met. In the same vein it covers every aspect of strategic planning, from paradigms and leadership to mental models.

To mention just a few of the topics that caught my attention: the contrast and the interplay between systems and system thinking; the importance of feedback between all parties; the extended problem solving method; how to scan to find the payoffs in planning (and so make strategy more attractive); the ongoing balance between process (what you're doing) and the results you are aiming for (which can sometimes be undercut by the process you use).

There are some important extensions of models - Albrecht's Four Business Logics become six. There are quotes and classical definitions that are very useful, sometimes humourous.

Remembering that half the effort of Mega Planning is to build alliances with key players who are not used to thinking beyond their own success (usually immediate), included is a PowerPoint display and a neat Appendix on the new paradigms of teaching (should be in every place of learning). And, or course, the Code of Conduct is a challenge to all practitioners, just as this whole book is a challenge to all of us who want there to be life beyond the next quarter.

Ronald Forbes, PhD
Leaderskill Group Pty Ltd