I was in a great session recently with mid-sized business owners, and as we were coming back from a break, one of the owners asked a very thoughtful question: “We have a good handle on operations, but we only do strategy sporadically and on demand. As our business gets more complex, how should I be planning to do this on a more consistent basis?”
In my line of work I get to interface with many firms across the waterfront of industry types. I have been immersed in cultures that seemingly barely recovered from one significant meeting only to move the leaders to the next. These sessions included technology planning and roadmapping, product planning and roadmapping, key account structure and strategy, strategic business unit plans, and the list goes on.
`As I thought about this leader’s question, I zeroed in on what would be the lowest overhead version for their lean firm. Taking her statement that “ops is good,” we can then focus on the times needed to step back and make sure they have an integrated approach.
I would suggest that three meetings would be about right:
- The first session of the year should be centered on the strategic application and development of talent
- The second session should focus on integrated medium-term strategic alignment
- The final session of the year should be targeted toward operational integration of finances, products and solutions
In the talent meeting we are looking for development and succession plans, compensation strategy and resilience assessments. This is not your typical HR-centric dialogue, rather it’s a full senior leadership team strategy on how we meet the dynamic challenges facing our future.
There are ways to align the talent more strategically to avoid trying to build tomorrow’s business with yesterday’s structure. For example, as AI and AR become more real, we need to shift our focus from traditional processes to leverage approaches. Talent and decision making are the battleground competences, and we need to evaluate ourselves on our ability to put leaders in position to form new business models as advantage becomes more transient.
The mid-year strategy center meeting needs to be the key point of looking over the lifecycle status of all core P&L’s and the candidates that will become the next generation businesses so that we can place them in careful alignment with the best information we can get on the market, customer and competitive information. This is where we need to discuss thoroughly the positions we are taking to evaluate adjacencies, take hedging positions on disruption and the like. There is a need to use a process to be sure that the full wisdom of the senior team is fully applied. The output of this session will inform the human and financial resourcing sessions to be held cyclically.
The operations integration session is the activation event for the annual plan, as well as those multi-year investments needed for new products and services. This is the time when the full team signs up for both the targeted growth, but also the strategic deliverables in technology or perhaps M&A work. When leaving this session, each executive needs to be crystal clear on their role and the key short and medium term goals for their team. This is also the meeting where key foundation investments are considered such as IT, Quality, Finance or other process investments.
On a rolling 36-month basis I would recommend a deep dive long-range planning session framed with the FCP process. This is designed to get the executive team to do the hard work of getting actionable views on the important pressures on the clients, markets and technologies – and to make sure that they are not blindsided by a substitution or disruptive event.
Those of you that would like to do some personal benchmarking in this area might find the archive of Baldrige winning firms applications here to be useful. They are nicely parsed by type of industry and sized firm and can give you some additional insights.
If you’d like to chat, please call me at 847-651-1014 or use this link to set up a 20-minute, (no-strings-attached) consult.
