Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Strategic Planning: Hoshin Kanri (Hoshin Planning) (153-slide PowerPoint presentation). [NOTE: Our Hoshin Kanri presentation has been trusted by an array of prestigious organizations, including industry leaders such as Apple, Boeing, Shell, Cummins, Johnson Controls, Telefónica, Discover, Stryker, Thales, Saint-Gobain, AGCO, [read more]
Strategic Priorities
Also, if you are interested in becoming an expert on Strategy Development, take a look at Flevy's Strategy Development Frameworks offering here. This is a curated collection of best practice frameworks based on the thought leadership of leading consulting firms, academics, and recognized subject matter experts. By learning and applying these concepts, you can you stay ahead of the curve. Full details here.
* * * *
Almost every organization strategizes in the hope that it will lead to successful outcomes set by the management. In several cases, strategies fail or are not as successful as they were hoped to be.
Strategy is innately complicated, explaining it necessitates intricacy, however executing it demands simplicity. Strategies should essentially be simple enough, for leaders at each echelon of the organization, to comprehend, communicate, and bear in mind so as to impact everyday activities.
Strategy, in essence, is about choices. Hardly any company prospers by making one big bet. Almost all successful strategies are founded on a bunch of choices.
Most companies try to condense their strategies into concise statements that are vague, do not tell the employees what to prioritize, or what choices to make in order to achieve set objectives.
Decoding strategy into a handful of “actions” that the company should take to implement it, in the medium-term, is a more effective way and is termed as setting “Strategic Priorities.”
Such actions should be measurable or be able to show progress concretely to the employees so their confidence in the actions builds up.
Numerous multifaceted organizations that vie across more than one industry, product lines, and customer segments bank on Strategic Priorities to move their strategy forward.
Almost all S&P 500 companies use Strategic Priorities to advance their strategies and greater than 2/3rd of them make their specific mid-term objectives public.
S&P 500 companies give various labels to their Strategic Priorities, vacillating between the commonplace to the interesting e.g., (Areas of Focus, Interconnected Ambitions).
A study conducted of 494 S&P 500 index companies, over a 4–5-year period, highlights the reasons for failure of Strategies through empirical research. The study points towards lack of clarity in the objectives set by companies as one of the major reasons for failure.
The study discovered that successful companies among the ones studied, set Strategic Priorities that were specific, actionable, and quantifiably displayed progress. The study synthesized the following 7 principles for setting Strategic Priorities:
- Curtail the total priorities to a few.
- Concentrate on intermediate term actions.
- Keep sights toward the future.
- Take the difficult decisions.
- Tackle significant weaknesses.
- Offer tangible direction.
- Bring the top leadership on one page.
Strategy unless translated into effective actionable items remains flowery language merely for show purposes.
Let us delve a little deeper into some detail of a few of the principles.
1. Curtail the Total Priorities to a Few
Engulfing employees with complete set of choices and linkages that form a company’s Strategy is counterproductive. Limiting the priorities to a handful sets the parameters for employees to work within and enables focus.
Communicating a handful of Strategic Priorities can focus attention, energies, and resources on matters that are of vital consequence. Confining the number of Strategic Priorities to 3 to 5 has numerous benefits.
2. Concentrate on Intermediate Term Actions
Strategic Priorities serve as a conduit between long-term desires—represented by a vision or mission statement—and yearly or quarterly goals.
Bringing about meaningful change or progress requires time. A good rule of thumb is to set 3 to 5 priorities that can be achieved in 3 to 5 years.
3. Keep Sights toward the Future
Strategy should show how a company will generate and encapsulate value in future rather than how it earned revenue in the past.
Employees innately prefer processes and behaviors that they are accustomed to and that yield expected results.
Strategic Prioritization ensures that forward-looking activities necessary for future vitality, that will collapse without continued effort, are given importance.
Interested in learning more about Strategic Priorities and its 7 principles? You can download an editable PowerPoint on Strategic Priorities here on the Flevy documents marketplace.
Do You Find Value in This Framework?
You can download in-depth presentations on this and hundreds of similar business frameworks from the FlevyPro Library. FlevyPro is trusted and utilized by 1000s of management consultants and corporate executives. Here’s what some have to say:
“My FlevyPro subscription provides me with the most popular frameworks and decks in demand in today’s market. They not only augment my existing consulting and coaching offerings and delivery, but also keep me abreast of the latest trends, inspire new products and service offerings for my practice, and educate me in a fraction of the time and money of other solutions. I strongly recommend FlevyPro to any consultant serious about success.”
– Bill Branson, Founder at Strategic Business Architects
“As a niche strategic consulting firm, Flevy and FlevyPro frameworks and documents are an on-going reference to help us structure our findings and recommendations to our clients as well as improve their clarity, strength, and visual power. For us, it is an invaluable resource to increase our impact and value.”
– David Coloma, Consulting Area Manager at Cynertia Consulting
“FlevyPro has been a brilliant resource for me, as an independent growth consultant, to access a vast knowledge bank of presentations to support my work with clients. In terms of RoI, the value I received from the very first presentation I downloaded paid for my subscription many times over! The quality of the decks available allows me to punch way above my weight – it’s like having the resources of a Big 4 consultancy at your fingertips at a microscopic fraction of the overhead.”
– Roderick Cameron, Founding Partner at SGFE Ltd
Want to Achieve Excellence in Strategy Development?
Gain the knowledge and develop the expertise to become an expert in Strategy Development. Our frameworks are based on the thought leadership of leading consulting firms, academics, and recognized subject matter experts. Click here for full details.
"Strategy without Tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without Strategy is the noise before defeat." - Sun Tzu
For effective Strategy Development and Strategic Planning, we must master both Strategy and Tactics. Our frameworks cover all phases of Strategy, from Strategy Design and Formulation to Strategy Deployment and Execution; as well as all levels of Strategy, from Corporate Strategy to Business Strategy to "Tactical" Strategy. Many of these methodologies are authored by global strategy consulting firms and have been successfully implemented at their Fortune 100 client organizations.
These frameworks include Porter's Five Forces, BCG Growth-Share Matrix, Greiner's Growth Model, Capabilities-driven Strategy (CDS), Business Model Innovation (BMI), Value Chain Analysis (VCA), Endgame Niche Strategies, Value Patterns, Integrated Strategy Model for Value Creation, Scenario Planning, to name a few.
Learn about our Strategy Development Best Practice Frameworks here.
Readers of This Article Are Interested in These Resources
|
144-slide PowerPoint presentation
|
|
48-slide PowerPoint presentation
| |||
About Mark Bridges
Mark Bridges is a Senior Director of Strategy at Flevy. Flevy is your go-to resource for best practices in business management, covering management topics from Strategic Planning to Operational Excellence to Digital Transformation (view full list here). Learn how the Fortune 100 and global consulting firms do it. Improve the growth and efficiency of your organization by leveraging Flevy's library of best practice methodologies and templates. Prior to Flevy, Mark worked as an Associate at McKinsey & Co. and holds an MBA from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. You can connect with Mark on LinkedIn here.Top 10 Recommended Documents on Strategy Development
» View more resources Strategy Development here.
» View the Top 100 Best Practices on Flevy.