Bringing Your Strategic Plan to Life


Book Description

Most strategic plans are never implemented. Yet we must be strategic about how we spend our time and financial resources given the pressure to deliver more services with fewer resources. Pick up a highlighter, get comfortable, and select the actions that will make your plan a reality. Bringing Your Strategic Plan to Life: A Guide for Nonprofits and Public Agencies is full of practical tips, forms, and best practices that will move your organization beyond the paper plan and into implementation. Paris divides the action into five stages: creating, evaluating, communicating, implementing, and budgeting. Ways to align the plan throughout the organization are described in detail, and a self-evaluation of your organization’s planning process is included.




Strategy That Works


Book Description

How to close the gap between strategy and execution Two-thirds of executives say their organizations don’t have the capabilities to support their strategy. In Strategy That Works, Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi explain why. They identify conventional business practices that unintentionally create a gap between strategy and execution. And they show how some of the best companies in the world consistently leap ahead of their competitors. Based on new research, the authors reveal five practices for connecting strategy and execution used by highly successful enterprises such as IKEA, Natura, Danaher, Haier, and Lego. These companies: • Commit to what they do best instead of chasing multiple opportunities • Build their own unique winning capabilities instead of copying others • Put their culture to work instead of struggling to change it • Invest where it matters instead of going lean across the board • Shape the future instead of reacting to it Packed with tools you can use for building these five practices into your organization and supported by in-depth profiles of companies that are known for making their strategy work, this is your guide for reconnecting strategy to execution.




Strategic Project Management Made Simple


Book Description

When Fortune Magazine estimated that 70% of all strategies fail, it also noted that most of these strategies were basically sound, but could not be executed. The central premise of Strategic Project Management Made Simple is that most projects and strategies never get off the ground because of adhoc, haphazard, and obsolete methods used to turn their ideas into coherent and actionable plans. Strategic Project Management Made Simple is the first book to couple a step-by-step process with an interactive thinking tool that takes a strategic approach to designing projects and action initiatives. Strategic Project Management Made Simple builds a solid platform upon four critical questions that are vital for teams to intelligently answer in order to create their own strong, strategic foundation. These questions are: 1. What are we trying to accomplish and why? 2. How will we measure success? 3. What other conditions must exist? 4. How do we get there? This fresh approach begins with clearly understanding the what and why of a project - comprehending the bigger picture goals that are often given only lip service or cursory reviews. The second and third questions clarify success measures and identify the risky assumptions that can later cause pain if not spotted early. The how questions - what are the activities, budgets, and schedules - comes last in our four-question system. By contrast, most project approaches prematurely concentrate on the how without first adequately addressing the three other questions. These four questions guide readers into fleshing out a simple, yet sophisticated, mental workbench called "the Logical Framework" - a Systems Thinking paradigm that lays out one's own project strategy in an easily accessible, interactive 4x4 matrix. The inclusion of memorable features and concepts (four critical questions, LogFrame matrix, If-then thinking, and Implementation Equation) make this book unique.




Joan Garry's Guide to Nonprofit Leadership


Book Description

Nonprofit leadership is messy Nonprofits leaders are optimistic by nature. They believe with time, energy, smarts, strategy and sheer will, they can change the world. But as staff or board leader, you know nonprofits present unique challenges. Too many cooks, not enough money, an abundance of passion. It’s enough to make you feel overwhelmed and alone. The people you help need you to be successful. But there are so many obstacles: a micromanaging board that doesn’t understand its true role; insufficient fundraising and donors who make unreasonable demands; unclear and inconsistent messaging and marketing; a leader who’s a star in her sector but a difficult boss… And yet, many nonprofits do thrive. Joan Garry’s Guide to Nonprofit Leadership will show you how to do just that. Funny, honest, intensely actionable, and based on her decades of experience, this is the book Joan Garry wishes she had when she led GLAAD out of a financial crisis in 1997. Joan will teach you how to: Build a powerhouse board Create an impressive and sustainable fundraising program Become seen as a ‘workplace of choice’ Be a compelling public face of your nonprofit This book will renew your passion for your mission and organization, and help you make a bigger difference in the world.




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 for Public and Nonprofit Organizations


Book Description

How can leaders use strategic planning to strengthen their public and nonprofit organizations? In this fourth edition of his perennial bestseller Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations, Bryson provides the most updated version of his thoughtful strategic planning model and outlines the reasons public and nonprofit organizations must embrace strategic planning to improve their performance. Introduced in the first edition and refined over the past 18 years, the Strategy Change Cycle--a proven planning process used successfully by a large number of nonprofit and public organizations--is the framework used to guide the reader through the strategic planning process. Bryson offers detailed guidance on implementing the process, and specific tools and techniques to make the process work in any organization. In addition, he clarifies the organizational designs through which strategic thought and action will be encouraged and embraced throughout an entire organization. In addition to updated examples, new cases, and additional information on boundaries, distinctive competencies, Actor-Network theory, Bryson will creat an instructor's manual with sample syllabi, PowerPoint teaching slides, and additional cases.




Strategy for You


Book Description

Most people have spent their lives randomly bouncing around like bumper cars, never arriving at the life they want. If fact, new research shows that only 15 percent of adults have a plan for their life. But what if there was a way, a proven way, to experience more of what life has to offer?In "Strategy for You," world-renowned strategist Rich Horwath provides a proven plan for building the bridge to an exceptional life. Based on Horwath's ground-breaking work in the field of strategic thinking, the book helps readers apply the time-tested principles of business strategy to their lives. The author incorporates GOST (goals, objectives, strategies, tactics_, SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats), and other business tools into a five-step plan that enables readers toDISCOVER the purpose in their lives




Bring Your Vision to Life


Book Description

What are God-given your dreams and desires? What is your vision for the world? How do you want to make a difference? . . . Perhaps you have an inspiration to start a new humanitarian organization, or a new ministry? Or maybe you have an idea to start a new commercial enterprise? It's time to get your ideas off the ground! This book invites you on a twenty-five day journey that takes an idea, refines it, and makes it into a reality. Throughout the journey, you will come to understand the motivational and spiritual aspects of starting a new enterprise and bringing your vision to life.




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.