Strategic Planning Progress

Thursday July 24, 2008

Just to bring you up-to-date, I’ve been traveling much of the past three weeks, sometimes with no Internet access so this has been a challenging July. Attended my oldest niece’s wedding in Colorado and spent time with the grandkids – I’m a very young grandmother – at the cottage. Do put Rocky Mountain National Park on your list of things to see before you die – you do have a list, don’t you? Even if just in your mind…

And, as I mentioned earlier, I participated in executive strategic planning for our company. Now that we’ve shared the plans with our staff in a continuing effort to make the company and our communication transparent, I can share our efforts with you.

It’s the second year for official strategic planning in an offsite setting and the planning went well. Our experience of it may ring bells with many of you. We started last year, and relooking at the notes this year, made me laugh. Pages and pages of notes and I’ll hazard a guess that I’m the only one or one of two or three who read all of them. We had focused so much on tactical issues that we lost some of the power of the company overview, strategically. This year, we prepared, in advance for a different strategic planning path.

To give us a break, we did address strategic issues but on a level where the company’s future success really requires that we empower the next level of managers more. So, how to empower managers dominated one afternoon’s discussion. Product decisions and decisions about what this year’s focus as a company will be were important, too. Finally, we talked a lot about the economy and its impact on the company and our employees. That and the SWOT analysis took a lot of time and energy.

Dining together and drinking lots of wine and talking on the historic inn’s patio until the wee hours of the morning strengthened the bond of the executive team. Trust is building whereby the senior leaders are entrusting their reporting managers to make more of the tactical decisions within the overall strategic framewok provided by the executive team. And me? I get to spend more time writing on the shores of Lake Michigan.

I’ll share more about planning and empowerment tomorrow.

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