Strategy Planning in the Real World

Strategy planning is the most consequential activity undertaken by the CEO and the senior leadership team of a company, given its potential to ability to deliver clarity on how a company will achieve sales growth and margins. Eight case studies of strategy process illustrate the need for improving it. Divergent needs and goals of senior executives, misalignment of CEO and senior executive expectations, unclear employee responsibilities, and lack of reliable measures of customer-value drivers rendered the strategy process inward-focused—and derailed it. In many cases, senior executives continued to rely on unproven and salient beliefs, lay the process hostage to the whims of senior leaders with lack of accountability, wrestled with internal politics, proliferation of initiatives, and bemoaned their company’s inability to link its strategy to sales growth. Many executives believe they fully understand strategy planning. Chapter 1 provides a quiz that calculates executives’ strategy planning quotient—a measure of their understanding of strategy planning—and challenges them to improve it.