12 Common Traits of Companies With Successful Corporate Planning

Strategic planning is the process of devising a plan of both offensive and defensive actions intended to maintain and build competitive advantage over the competition through strategic and organizational innovation.?Strategic planning is intended to provide both the direction (strategy) and the actions (execution) needed to achieve strategic goals. The combination of smart strategy and successful execution is the hallmark of a great planning process.

Yet, in recent years, data suggests that corporate executives have grown increasingly skeptical of traditional strategic planning exercises.? Why is this??What?s gone wrong with the strategic planning process?

Consider that many planning exercises are carried out in one of two ways: At a fevered pace to set objectives very quickly; or over a very long period of time that has constant interruptions, short meetings, and is primarily focused on current or ad hoc issues that the organization is facing.? Either way, management staff is usually focused on short term goals and issues with the most financially significant concerns taking the most attention.

Additionally, in traditional planning models, the people who will be most affected by the organization?s plans are often unaware of what the end goals are and have been given varying levels of information to carry out their goals. There is usually a team or set of teams that have been given the ?go ahead? to carry out the plans but they often fall prey to office politics, cliques, and business friendships that all impact the ultimate success of the plan and more importantly, the realization of the outcomes that the business is trying to achieve.

All of this adds up to an ineffective strategic planning process that leaves organizations and executives bewildered and wondering why their plans don?t deliver the intended results.

Meanwhile, organizations that have managed to create an effective strategic planning process are able to remain focused on delivering value to customers and gaining market share, while also moving toward defined corporate objectives. It is this ability to balance strategy and execution that gives advantage to today?s most successful organizations.

So what do successful organizations do differently in their planning process??Here are twelve common traits of organizations doing successful planning.

12 Common Traits:

1. They treat planning as an ongoing journey and not an annual process
2. They create strategic plans that actually define a strategy
3. They understand that plan execution happens at the day-by-day task level, so they instill plan governance to support, monitor and control
4. They reduce risk in the execution stage by eliminating variability and ambiguity in language, outcomes, and process during planning
5. They create plans with outcomes that provide a customer-centered perspective
6. They create plans that are aligned with and designed for their organization?s core competencies, culture and structure
7. Their planning process facilitates bidirectional (top-down & bottom-up) communication
8. They create plans that enforce accountability, providing a hard link between planning and execution
9. Their plans foster transparency and empower executives and staff with ?business truth? to allow them to serve the organization more fully and effectively
10. ?Their plans provide clarity and steps to achieve outcomes, communicated broadly throughout the organization
11. ?Their planning process attenuates the strategic layer of the plan with detailed operational plans tied to budgets, resources, timelines and accountable personnel
12. ?Their planning approach provides repeatable, predictable, measurable results.

Corporate planning in today?s rapidly-changing business environment and always-on social era requires a process that empowers organizations to achieve operational excellence on a day-to-day basis while also seeking innovation and planning for the future. Does your corporate planning process consistently deliver the outcomes you expect or has strategic planning been devalued (literally or figuratively) within your organization due to its declining efficacy? If your corporate planning process has lost its luster, consider what may be wrong and take actions to correct it.

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Source: http://blog.vistage.com/business-strategy-and-management/12-common-traits-of-companies-with-successful-corporate-planning/

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