Building a Strategic Plan for Your Life and Business


Book Description

Imagine what your life would be like if you could apply the same strategies that successful people used to get ahead. These are the folks who live in the grand houses that you see when you drive down certain streets. They drive nice cars and dine at the best restaurants. They live their lives like absolute superstars. Join business consultant John M. Hawkins, who learned long ago that the secret to success is building a strategic plan to get what you want. He provides a detailed road map so you can join the ranks of the most successful. You’ll learn how to build a smart, strategic plan; take risks (and when to take them); change the way you think about challenges; maintain your focus and stick to your plan. Follow in the footsteps of strategic thinkers and get exactly where you want to go. All you have to do is start thinking like a millionaire and say “yes” to success. It starts with Building a Strategic Plan for Your Life and Business.




StratPro(TM)


Book Description

StratPro(TM) encompasses everything you need to know for starting and implementing your organization's strategic planning, thereby achieving the desired results. StratPro(TM) is a unique, holistic approach for strategically leading an organization to greater success.




Joy of Strategy


Book Description

Your life is serious business, but who says you can't find joy along the way? As a person with unique gifts to offer, it is your responsibility to use your talents wisely and it is your right to enjoy yourself while doing so. Just as a successful business requires a mission and a plan, so does a fulfilling life. In The Joy of Strategy, Allison Rimm provides a structured, step-by-step program to create a business plan for your life. Through conventional business techniques and unconventional wisdom, The Joy of Strategy is the go-to guide for achieving satisfaction both in and out of work. Delivered with compassion and humor, The Joy of Strategy presents eight practical steps, useful tools such as the Joy Meter, and real success stories to help build and motivate your personal plan. With the perfect mix of soul and strategy, The Joy of Strategy will get you organized and on your way to a fulfilling life.




Strategic Planning Kit For Dummies


Book Description

Think and act strategically every time In today's business environment, strategic planning stresses the importance of making decisions that will ensure an organization's ability to successfully respond to changes in the environment and plan for sustainable viability. Providing practical, field-tested techniques and a complete 6-phase plan, Strategic Planning Kit For Dummies shows you how to make strategy a habit for all organizations, no matter the size, type, or resource constraints. Strategic Planning Kit For Dummies is for companies of all types and sizes looking to build and sustain a competitive edge, set up an ongoing process for market assessment and trend analysis, and develop a vision for future growth. This revised edition includes: new and updated content on planning for both the short and the long-term; crucial information on succession planning; help preparing for the unexpected using scenario planning and agile strategy; strategies for implementing change and integrating strategic plans successfully by involving all staff members; and more. The supplementary CD lays out a comprehensive, 6-phase, step-by-step program, complete with downloadable spreadsheets, charts, checklists, video links, and more Provides value for any business or entrepreneur looking to improve efficiency, focus, and competitive edge Includes practical, field-tested techniques Strategic Planning Kit For Dummies gives today's business owners and upper-level management the tools and information they need to think and act strategically in order to more effectively weather current economic storms while planning for future growth.




Playing to Win


Book Description

Explains how companies must pinpoint business strategies to a few critically important choices, identifying common blunders while outlining simple exercises and questions that can guide day-to-day and long-term decisions.




Strategic Planning For Dummies


Book Description

If you’re starting a new business or planning your business’s future, there are plenty of things you should take into account. Strategic Planning For Dummies covers everything you need to know to develop a plan for building and maintaining a competitive advantage — no matter what business you’re in. Written by Erica Olsen, founder and President of a business development firm that helps entrepreneurial-minded businesses plan for a successful future, this handy guide covers all the basics, including: How a strategic plan is different than a business plan Establishing a step-based planning process Planning for and encouraging growth Taking a long-view of your organization Evaluating past performance Defining and refining your mission, values, and vision Sizing up your current situation Examining your industry landscape Setting your strategic priorities Planning for unknown contingencies If you’re in business, you have to plan for everything — especially if you intend your business to grow. Whether you’re planning for a small business, large conglomerate, nonprofit, or even a government agency, this book has the planning specifics you need for your organization. Step-by-step, you’ll learn how to lay the foundations for a plan, understand how your plan will affect your business, form planning teams, discover what your strengths are, see where you are, and, finally, plan where you’re going. And there’s much more: Learn to analyze business trends that will determine your business’s future Set measurable, realistic goals that you can plan for and achieve Make strategic planning a habitual part of the organization Prioritize multiple strategies that you can implement simultaneously Set a defining vision for the organization that guides all your planning and strategy This friendly, simple guide puts the power of strategic planning in the palm of your hand. For small businesses that can’t afford to hire strategic planning consultants, it’s even more imperative. Careful, constant planning is the only way to handle an uncertain business future. With this book, you’ll have all the step-by-step guidance you need to ensure you’re ready for anything that comes.




The Balanced Scorecard


Book Description

The Balanced Scorecard translates a company's vision and strategy into a coherent set of performance measures. The four perspectives of the scorecard--financial measures, customer knowledge, internal business processes, and learning and growth--offer a balance between short-term and long-term objectives, between outcomes desired and performance drivers of those outcomes, and between hard objective measures and softer, more subjective measures. In the first part, Kaplan and Norton provide the theoretical foundations for the Balanced Scorecard; in the second part, they describe the steps organizations must take to build their own Scorecards; and, finally, they discuss how the Balanced Scorecard can be used as a driver of change.




Introduction to Strategic Management


Book Description

Strategy essentially involves competing to be unique. It is the key to achieving goals through proper planning, resourcing, implementation and evaluation of various strategy management tactics. The strategy is essentially the choices an organization makes, that defines what markets to be served and how to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. The strategy involves taking basic directional decisions for organizational purposes and missions. Though strategy was adopted from the military domain, strategy has over the time come to exert considerable influence in the corporate and business sphere. An essential prerequisite for a good strategy is that it can accommodate the changing reality of globalization and economic turbulence. The essential value disciplines serving as the basis for strategy are product leadership, operational excellence and customer intimacy.




Your Strategy Needs a Strategy


Book Description

You think you have a winning strategy. But do you? Executives are bombarded with bestselling ideas and best practices for achieving competitive advantage, but many of these ideas and practices contradict each other. Should you aim to be big or fast? Should you create a blue ocean, be adaptive, play to win—or forget about a sustainable competitive advantage altogether? In a business environment that is changing faster and becoming more uncertain and complex almost by the day, it’s never been more important—or more difficult—to choose the right approach to strategy. In this book, The Boston Consulting Group’s Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs, and Janmejaya Sinha offer a proven method to determine the strategy approach that is best for your company. They start by helping you assess your business environment—how unpredictable it is, how much power you have to change it, and how harsh it is—a critical component of getting strategy right. They show how existing strategy approaches sort into five categories—Be Big, Be Fast, Be First, Be the Orchestrator, or simply Be Viable—depending on the extent of predictability, malleability, and harshness. In-depth explanations of each of these approaches will provide critical insight to help you match your approach to strategy to your environment, determine when and how to execute each one, and avoid a potentially fatal mismatch. Addressing your most pressing strategic challenges, you’ll be able to answer questions such as: • What replaces planning when the annual cycle is obsolete? • When can we—and when should we—shape the game to our advantage? • How do we simultaneously implement different strategic approaches for different business units? • How do we manage the inherent contradictions in formulating and executing different strategies across multiple businesses and geographies? Until now, no book brings it all together and offers a practical tool for understanding which strategic approach to apply. Get started today.




Deep Dive


Book Description

Get competitive by learning to think strategically.The inability to set good strategy can sink a company¿and a leader¿s career. A recent Wall Street Journal study revealed that the most sought-after executive skill is strategic thinking, but only three out of ten managers have this skill set.Horwath explains the three keys to strategic thinking, breaks them down into simple, attainable skills, and gives you practical tools to apply them every day, providing managers with a clear path to mastery of the three disciplines: 1. Acumen¿generate critical insights through a step-by-step evaluation of your business and its environment2. Allocation¿focus your limited resources through strategic trade-offs 3. Action¿implement a system to guarantee effective execution of strategy at all levels of your organization Based on new research with senior executives from 150 companies and the author¿s experience as a thought-leading strategist, Deep Dive is the first book to focus on the most important level of strategy¿you. Armed with this knowledge and dozens of effective tools, you can become a truly strategic leader for your organization.--Rich Horwath is the president of the Strategic Thinking Institute, a former chief strategy officer, and professor of strategy at the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management. As a thought-leading strategist, he has worked with such giants as Adidas, Amgen, and Pfizer. He is the author of four books and more than fifty articles on strategic thinking and has been profiled in business publications around the world, including Investor¿s Business Daily.