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• What is strategic planning? A 5-step gu ...

What is strategic planning? A 5-step guide

Strategic planning is a process through which business leaders map out their vision for their organization’s growth and how they’re going to get there. In this article, we'll guide you through the strategic planning process, including why it's important, the benefits and best practices, and five steps to get you from beginning to end.

Strategic planning is a process through which business leaders map out their vision for their organization’s growth and how they’re going to get there. The strategic planning process informs your organization’s decisions, growth, and goals.

Strategic planning helps you clearly define your company’s long-term objectives—and maps how your short-term goals and work will help you achieve them. This, in turn, gives you a clear sense of where your organization is going and allows you to ensure your teams are working on projects that make the most impact. Think of it this way—if your goals and objectives are your destination on a map, your strategic plan is your navigation system.

In this article, we walk you through the 5-step strategic planning process and show you how to get started developing your own strategic plan.

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What is strategic planning?

Strategic planning is a business process that helps you define and share the direction your company will take in the next three to five years. During the strategic planning process, stakeholders review and define the organization’s mission and goals, conduct competitive assessments, and identify company goals and objectives. The product of the planning cycle is a strategic plan, which is shared throughout the company.

What is a strategic plan?

A strategic plan is the end result of the strategic planning process. At its most basic, it’s a tool used to define your organization’s goals and what actions you’ll take to achieve them.

Typically, your strategic plan should include: 

Your company’s mission statement

Your organizational goals, including your long-term goals and short-term, yearly objectives

Any plan of action, tactics, or approaches you plan to take to meet those goals

What are the benefits of strategic planning?

Strategic planning can help with goal setting and decision-making by allowing you to map out how your company will move toward your organization’s vision and mission statements in the next three to five years. Let’s circle back to our map metaphor. If you think of your company trajectory as a line on a map, a strategic plan can help you better quantify how you’ll get from point A (where you are now) to point B (where you want to be in a few years).

When you create and share a clear strategic plan with your team, you can:

Build a strong organizational culture by clearly defining and aligning on your organization’s mission, vision, and goals.

Align everyone around a shared purpose and ensure all departments and teams are working toward a common objective.

Proactively set objectives to help you get where you want to go and achieve desired outcomes.

Promote a long-term vision for your company rather than focusing primarily on short-term gains.

Ensure resources are allocated around the most high-impact priorities.

Define long-term goals and set shorter-term goals to support them.

Assess your current situation and identify any opportunities—or threats—allowing your organization to mitigate potential risks.

Create a proactive business culture that enables your organization to respond more swiftly to emerging market changes and opportunities.

What are the 5 steps in strategic planning?

The strategic planning process involves a structured methodology that guides the organization from vision to implementation. The strategic planning process starts with assembling a small, dedicated team of key strategic planners—typically five to 10 members—who will form the strategic planning, or management, committee. This team is responsible for gathering crucial information, guiding the development of the plan, and overseeing strategy execution.

Once you’ve established your management committee, you can get to work on the planning process. 

Step 1: Assess your current business strategy and business environment

Before you can define where you’re going, you first need to define where you are. Understanding the external environment, including market trends and competitive landscape, is crucial in the initial assessment phase of strategic planning.

To do this, your management committee should collect a variety of information from additional stakeholders, like employees and customers. In particular, plan to gather:

Relevant industry and market data to inform any market opportunities, as well as any potential upcoming threats in the near future.

Customer insights to understand what your customers want from your company—like product improvements or additional services.

Employee feedback that needs to be addressed—whether about the product, business practices, or the day-to-day company culture.

Consider different types of strategic planning tools and analytical techniques to gather this information, such as:

A balanced scorecard to help you evaluate four major elements of a business: learning and growth, business processes, customer satisfaction, and financial performance.

A SWOT analysis to help you assess both current and future potential for the business (you’ll return to this analysis periodically during the strategic planning process). 

To fill out each letter in the SWOT acronym, your management committee will answer a series of questions:

What does your organization currently do well?

What separates you from your competitors?

What are your most valuable internal resources?

What tangible assets do you have?

What is your biggest strength? 

Weaknesses:

What does your organization do poorly?

What do you currently lack (whether that’s a product, resource, or process)?

What do your competitors do better than you?

What, if any, limitations are holding your organization back?

What processes or products need improvement? 

Opportunities:

What opportunities does your organization have?

How can you leverage your unique company strengths?

Are there any trends that you can take advantage of?

How can you capitalize on marketing or press opportunities?

Is there an emerging need for your product or service? 

What emerging competitors should you keep an eye on?

Are there any weaknesses that expose your organization to risk?

Have you or could you experience negative press that could reduce market share?

Is there a chance of changing customer attitudes towards your company? 

Step 2: Identify your company’s goals and objectives

To begin strategy development, take into account your current position, which is where you are now. Then, draw inspiration from your vision, mission, and current position to identify and define your goals—these are your final destination. 

To develop your strategy, you’re essentially pulling out your compass and asking, “Where are we going next?” “What’s the ideal future state of this company?” This can help you figure out which path you need to take to get there.

During this phase of the planning process, take inspiration from important company documents, such as:

Your mission statement, to understand how you can continue moving towards your organization’s core purpose.

Your vision statement, to clarify how your strategic plan fits into your long-term vision.

Your company values, to guide you towards what matters most towards your company.

Your competitive advantages, to understand what unique benefit you offer to the market.

Your long-term goals, to track where you want to be in five or 10 years.

Your financial forecast and projection, to understand where you expect your financials to be in the next three years, what your expected cash flow is, and what new opportunities you will likely be able to invest in.

Step 3: Develop your strategic plan and determine performance metrics

Now that you understand where you are and where you want to go, it’s time to put pen to paper. Take your current business position and strategy into account, as well as your organization’s goals and objectives, and build out a strategic plan for the next three to five years. Keep in mind that even though you’re creating a long-term plan, parts of your plan should be created or revisited as the quarters and years go on.

As you build your strategic plan, you should define:

Company priorities for the next three to five years, based on your SWOT analysis and strategy.

Yearly objectives for the first year. You don’t need to define your objectives for every year of the strategic plan. As the years go on, create new yearly objectives that connect back to your overall strategic goals . 

Related key results and KPIs. Some of these should be set by the management committee, and some should be set by specific teams that are closer to the work. Make sure your key results and KPIs are measurable and actionable. These KPIs will help you track progress and ensure you’re moving in the right direction.

Budget for the next year or few years. This should be based on your financial forecast as well as your direction. Do you need to spend aggressively to develop your product? Build your team? Make a dent with marketing? Clarify your most important initiatives and how you’ll budget for those.

A high-level project roadmap . A project roadmap is a tool in project management that helps you visualize the timeline of a complex initiative, but you can also create a very high-level project roadmap for your strategic plan. Outline what you expect to be working on in certain quarters or years to make the plan more actionable and understandable.

Step 4: Implement and share your plan

Now it’s time to put your plan into action. Strategy implementation involves clear communication across your entire organization to make sure everyone knows their responsibilities and how to measure the plan’s success. 

Make sure your team (especially senior leadership) has access to the strategic plan, so they can understand how their work contributes to company priorities and the overall strategy map. We recommend sharing your plan in the same tool you use to manage and track work, so you can more easily connect high-level objectives to daily work. If you don’t already, consider using a work management platform .  

A few tips to make sure your plan will be executed without a hitch: 

Communicate clearly to your entire organization throughout the implementation process, to ensure all team members understand the strategic plan and how to implement it effectively. 

Define what “success” looks like by mapping your strategic plan to key performance indicators.

Ensure that the actions outlined in the strategic plan are integrated into the daily operations of the organization, so that every team member's daily activities are aligned with the broader strategic objectives.

Utilize tools and software—like a work management platform—that can aid in implementing and tracking the progress of your plan.

Regularly monitor and share the progress of the strategic plan with the entire organization, to keep everyone informed and reinforce the importance of the plan.

Establish regular check-ins to monitor the progress of your strategic plan and make adjustments as needed. 

Step 5: Revise and restructure as needed

Once you’ve created and implemented your new strategic framework, the final step of the planning process is to monitor and manage your plan.

Remember, your strategic plan isn’t set in stone. You’ll need to revisit and update the plan if your company changes directions or makes new investments. As new market opportunities and threats come up, you’ll likely want to tweak your strategic plan. Make sure to review your plan regularly—meaning quarterly and annually—to ensure it’s still aligned with your organization’s vision and goals.

Keep in mind that your plan won’t last forever, even if you do update it frequently. A successful strategic plan evolves with your company’s long-term goals. When you’ve achieved most of your strategic goals, or if your strategy has evolved significantly since you first made your plan, it might be time to create a new one.

Build a smarter strategic plan with a work management platform

To turn your company strategy into a plan—and ultimately, impact—make sure you’re proactively connecting company objectives to daily work. When you can clarify this connection, you’re giving your team members the context they need to get their best work done. 

A work management platform plays a pivotal role in this process. It acts as a central hub for your strategic plan, ensuring that every task and project is directly tied to your broader company goals. This alignment is crucial for visibility and coordination, allowing team members to see how their individual efforts contribute to the company’s success. 

By leveraging such a platform, you not only streamline workflow and enhance team productivity but also align every action with your strategic objectives—allowing teams to drive greater impact and helping your company move toward goals more effectively. 

Strategic planning FAQs

Still have questions about strategic planning? We have answers.

Why do I need a strategic plan?

A strategic plan is one of many tools you can use to plan and hit your goals. It helps map out strategic objectives and growth metrics that will help your company be successful.

When should I create a strategic plan?

You should aim to create a strategic plan every three to five years, depending on your organization’s growth speed.

Since the point of a strategic plan is to map out your long-term goals and how you’ll get there, you should create a strategic plan when you’ve met most or all of them. You should also create a strategic plan any time you’re going to make a large pivot in your organization’s mission or enter new markets. 

What is a strategic planning template?

A strategic planning template is a tool organizations can use to map out their strategic plan and track progress. Typically, a strategic planning template houses all the components needed to build out a strategic plan, including your company’s vision and mission statements, information from any competitive analyses or SWOT assessments, and relevant KPIs.

What’s the difference between a strategic plan vs. business plan?

A business plan can help you document your strategy as you’re getting started so every team member is on the same page about your core business priorities and goals. This tool can help you document and share your strategy with key investors or stakeholders as you get your business up and running.

You should create a business plan when you’re: 

Just starting your business

Significantly restructuring your business

If your business is already established, you should create a strategic plan instead of a business plan. Even if you’re working at a relatively young company, your strategic plan can build on your business plan to help you move in the right direction. During the strategic planning process, you’ll draw from a lot of the fundamental business elements you built early on to establish your strategy for the next three to five years.

What’s the difference between a strategic plan vs. mission and vision statements?

Your strategic plan, mission statement, and vision statements are all closely connected. In fact, during the strategic planning process, you will take inspiration from your mission and vision statements in order to build out your strategic plan.

Simply put: 

A mission statement summarizes your company’s purpose.

A vision statement broadly explains how you’ll reach your company’s purpose.

A strategic plan pulls in inspiration from your mission and vision statements and outlines what actions you’re going to take to move in the right direction. 

For example, if your company produces pet safety equipment, here’s how your mission statement, vision statement, and strategic plan might shake out:

Mission statement: “To ensure the safety of the world’s animals.” 

Vision statement: “To create pet safety and tracking products that are effortless to use.” 

Your strategic plan would outline the steps you’re going to take in the next few years to bring your company closer to your mission and vision. For example, you develop a new pet tracking smart collar or improve the microchipping experience for pet owners. 

What’s the difference between a strategic plan vs. company objectives?

Company objectives are broad goals. You should set these on a yearly or quarterly basis (if your organization moves quickly). These objectives give your team a clear sense of what you intend to accomplish for a set period of time. 

Your strategic plan is more forward-thinking than your company goals, and it should cover more than one year of work. Think of it this way: your company objectives will move the needle towards your overall strategy—but your strategic plan should be bigger than company objectives because it spans multiple years.

What’s the difference between a strategic plan vs. a business case?

A business case is a document to help you pitch a significant investment or initiative for your company. When you create a business case, you’re outlining why this investment is a good idea, and how this large-scale project will positively impact the business. 

You might end up building business cases for things on your strategic plan’s roadmap—but your strategic plan should be bigger than that. This tool should encompass multiple years of your roadmap, across your entire company—not just one initiative.

What’s the difference between a strategic plan vs. a project plan?

A strategic plan is a company-wide, multi-year plan of what you want to accomplish in the next three to five years and how you plan to accomplish that. A project plan, on the other hand, outlines how you’re going to accomplish a specific project. This project could be one of many initiatives that contribute to a specific company objective which, in turn, is one of many objectives that contribute to your strategic plan. 

What’s the difference between strategic management vs. strategic planning?

A strategic plan is a tool to define where your organization wants to go and what actions you need to take to achieve those goals. Strategic planning is the process of creating a plan in order to hit your strategic objectives.

Strategic management includes the strategic planning process, but also goes beyond it. In addition to planning how you will achieve your big-picture goals, strategic management also helps you organize your resources and figure out the best action plans for success. 

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Essential Guide to the Strategic Planning Process

By Joe Weller | April 3, 2019 (updated March 26, 2024)

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In this article, you’ll learn the basics of the strategic planning process and how a strategic plan guides you to achieving your organizational goals. Plus, find expert insight on getting the most out of your strategic planning.

Included on this page, you'll discover the importance of strategic planning , the steps of the strategic planning process , and the basic sections to include in your strategic plan .

What Is Strategic Planning?

Strategic planning is an organizational activity that aims to achieve a group’s goals. The process helps define a company’s objectives and investigates both internal and external happenings that might influence the organizational path. Strategic planning also helps identify adjustments that you might need to make to reach your goal. Strategic planning became popular in the 1960s because it helped companies set priorities and goals, strengthen operations, and establish agreement among managers about outcomes and results.

Strategic planning can occur over multiple years, and the process can vary in length, as can the final plan itself. Ideally, strategic planning should result in a document, a presentation, or a report that sets out a blueprint for the company’s progress.

By setting priorities, companies help ensure employees are working toward common and defined goals. It also aids in defining the direction an enterprise is heading, efficiently using resources to achieve the organization’s goals and objectives. Based on the plan, managers can make decisions or allocate the resources necessary to pursue the strategy and minimize risks.

Strategic planning strengthens operations by getting input from people with differing opinions and building a consensus about the company’s direction. Along with focusing energy and resources, the strategic planning process allows people to develop a sense of ownership in the product they create.

“Strategic planning is not really one thing. It is really a set of concepts, procedures, tools, techniques, and practices that have to be adapted to specific contexts and purposes,” says Professor John M. Bryson, McKnight Presidential Professor of Planning and Public Affairs at the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota and author of Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations: A Guide to Strengthening and Sustaining Organizational Achievement . “Strategic planning is a prompt to foster strategic thinking, acting, and learning, and they all matter and they are all connected.”

What Strategic Planning Is Not

Strategic planning is not a to-do list for the short or long term — it is the basis of a business, its direction, and how it will get there.

“You have to think very strategically about strategic planning. It is more than just following steps,” Bryson explains. “You have to understand strategic planning is not some kind of magic solution to fixing issues. Don’t have unrealistic expectations.”

Strategic planning is also different from a business plan that focuses on a specific product, service, or program and short-term goals. Rather, strategic planning means looking at the big picture.

While they are related, it is important not to confuse strategic planning with strategic thinking, which is more about imagining and innovating in a way that helps a company. In contrast, strategic planning supports those thoughts and helps you figure out how to make them a reality.

Another part of strategic planning is tactical planning , which involves looking at short-term efforts to achieve longer-term goals.

Lastly, marketing plans are not the same as strategic plans. A marketing plan is more about introducing and delivering a service or product to the public instead of how to grow a business. For more about marketing plans and processes, read this article .

Strategic plans include information about finances, but they are different from financial planning , which involves different processes and people. Financial planning templates can help with that process.

Why Is Strategic Planning Important?

In today’s technological age, strategic plans provide businesses with a path forward. Strategic plans help companies thrive, not just survive — they provide a clear focus, which makes an organization more efficient and effective, thereby increasing productivity.

“You are not going to go very far if you don’t have a strategic plan. You need to be able to show where you are going,” says Stefan Hofmeyer, an experienced strategist and co-founder of Global PMI Partners . He lives in the startup-rich environment of northern California and says he often sees startups fail to get seed money because they do not have a strong plan for what they want to do and how they want to do it.

Getting team members on the same page (in both creating a strategic plan and executing the plan itself) can be beneficial for a company. Planners can find satisfaction in the process and unite around a common vision. In addition, you can build strong teams and bridge gaps between staff and management.

“You have to reach agreement about good ideas,” Bryson says. “A really good strategy has to meet a lot of criteria. It has to be technically workable, administratively feasible, politically acceptable, and legally, morally, and ethically defensible, and that is a pretty tough list.”

By discussing a company’s issues during the planning process, individuals can voice their opinions and provide information necessary to move the organization ahead — a form of problem solving as a group.

Strategic plans also provide a mechanism to measure success and progress toward goals, which keeps employees on the same page and helps them focus on the tasks at hand.

When Is the Time to Do Strategic Planning?

There is no perfect time to perform strategic planning. It depends entirely on the organization and the external environment that surrounds it. However, here are some suggestions about when to plan:

If your industry is changing rapidly

When an organization is launching

At the start of a new year or funding period

In preparation for a major new initiative

If regulations and laws in your industry are or will be changing

“It’s not like you do all of the thinking and planning, and then implement,” Bryson says. “A mistake people make is [believing] the thinking has to precede the acting and the learning.”

Even if you do not re-create the entire planning process often, it is important to periodically check your plan and make sure it is still working. If not, update it.

What Is the Strategic Planning Process?

Strategic planning is a process, and not an easy one. A key is to make sure you allow enough time to complete the process without rushing, but not take so much time that you lose momentum and focus. The process itself can be more important than the final document due to the information that comes out of the discussions with management, as well as lower-level workers.

“There is not one favorite or perfect planning process,” says Jim Stockmal, president of the Association for Strategic Planning (ASP). He explains that new techniques come out constantly, and consultants and experienced planners have their favorites. In an effort to standardize the practice and terms used in strategic planning, ASP has created two certification programs .

Level 1 is the Strategic Planning Professional (SPP) certification. It is designed for early- or mid-career planners who work in strategic planning. Level 2, the Strategic Management Professional (SMP) certification, is geared toward seasoned professionals or those who train others. Stockmal explains that ASP designed the certification programs to add structure to the otherwise amorphous profession.

The strategic planning process varies by the size of the organization and can be formal or informal, but there are constraints. For example, teams of all sizes and goals should build in many points along the way for feedback from key leaders — this helps the process stay on track.

Some elements of the process might have specific start and end points, while others are continuous. For example, there might not be one “aha” moment that suddenly makes things clear. Instead, a series of small moves could slowly shift the organization in the right direction.

“Don’t make it overly complex. Bring all of the stakeholders together for input and feedback,” Stockmal advises. “Always be doing a continuous environmental scan, and don’t be afraid to engage with stakeholders.”

Additionally, knowing your company culture is important. “You need to make it work for your organization,” he says.

There are many different ways to approach the strategic planning process. Below are three popular approaches:

Goals-Based Planning: This approach begins by looking at an organization’s mission and goals. From there, you work toward that mission, implement strategies necessary to achieve those goals, and assign roles and deadlines for reaching certain milestones.

Issues-Based Planning: In this approach, start by looking at issues the company is facing, then decide how to address them and what actions to take.

Organic Planning: This approach is more fluid and begins with defining mission and values, then outlining plans to achieve that vision while sticking to the values.

“The approach to strategic planning needs to be contingent upon the organization, its history, what it’s capable of doing, etc.,” Bryson explains. “There’s such a mistake to think there’s one approach.”

For more information on strategic planning, read about how to write a strategic plan and the different types of models you can use.

Who Participates in the Strategic Planning Process?

For work as crucial as strategic planning, it is necessary to get the right team together and include them from the beginning of the process. Try to include as many stakeholders as you can.

Below are suggestions on who to include:

Senior leadership

Strategic planners

Strategists

People who will be responsible for implementing the plan

People to identify gaps in the plan

Members of the board of directors

“There can be magic to strategic planning, but it’s not in any specific framework or anybody’s 10-step process,” Bryson explains. “The magic is getting key people together, getting them to focus on what’s important, and [getting] them to do something about it. That’s where the magic is.”

Hofmeyer recommends finding people within an organization who are not necessarily current leaders, but may be in the future. “Sometimes they just become obvious. Usually they show themselves to you, you don’t need to look for them. They’re motivated to participate,” he says. These future leaders are the ones who speak up at meetings or on other occasions, who put themselves out there even though it is not part of their job description.

At the beginning of the process, establish guidelines about who will be involved and what will be expected of them. Everyone involved must be willing to cooperate and collaborate. If there is a question about whether or not to include anyone, it is usually better to bring on extra people than to leave someone out, only to discover later they should have been a part of the process all along. Not everyone will be involved the entire time; people will come and go during different phases.

Often, an outside facilitator or consultant can be an asset to a strategic planning committee. It is sometimes difficult for managers and other employees to sit back and discuss what they need to accomplish as a company and how they need to do it without considering other factors. As objective observers, outside help can often offer insight that may escape insiders.

Hofmeyer says sometimes bosses have blinders on that keep them from seeing what is happening around them, which allows them to ignore potential conflicts. “People often have their own agendas of where they want to go, and if they are not aligned, it is difficult to build a strategic plan. An outsider perspective can really take you out of your bubble and tell you things you don’t necessarily want to hear [but should]. We get into a rhythm, and it’s really hard to step out of that, so bringing in outside people can help bring in new views and aspects of your business.”

An outside consultant can also help naysayers take the process more seriously because they know the company is investing money in the efforts, Hofmeyer adds.

No matter who is involved in the planning process, make sure at least one person serves as an administrator and documents all planning committee actions.

What Is in a Strategic Plan?

A strategic plan communicates goals and what it takes to achieve them. The plan sometimes begins with a high-level view, then becomes more specific. Since strategic plans are more guidebooks than rulebooks, they don’t have to be bureaucratic and rigid. There is no perfect plan; however, it needs to be realistic.

There are many sections in a strategic plan, and the length of the final document or presentation will vary. The names people use for the sections differ, but the general ideas behind them are similar: Simply make sure you and your team agree on the terms you will use and what each means.

One-Page Strategic Planning Template

“I’m a big fan of getting a strategy onto one sheet of paper. It’s a strategic plan in a nutshell, and it provides a clear line of sight,” Stockmal advises.

You can use the template below to consolidate all your strategic ideas into a succinct, one-page strategic plan. Doing so provides you with a high-level overview of your strategic initiatives that you can place on your website, distribute to stakeholders, and refer to internally. More extensive details about implementation, capacity, and other concerns can go into an expanded document.

Download One-Page Strategic Planning Template Excel | Word | Smartsheet

The most important part of the strategic plan is the executive summary, which contains the highlights of the plan. Although it appears at the beginning of the plan, it should be written last, after you have done all your research.

Of writing the executive summary, Stockmal says, “I find it much easier to extract and cut and edit than to do it first.”

For help with creating executive summaries, see these templates .

Other parts of a strategic plan can include the following:

Description: A description of the company or organization.

Vision Statement: A bold or inspirational statement about where you want your company to be in the future.

Mission Statement: In this section, describe what you do today, your audience, and your approach as you work toward your vision.

Core Values: In this section, list the beliefs and behaviors that will enable you to achieve your mission and, eventually, your vision.

Goals: Provide a few statements of how you will achieve your vision over the long term.

Objectives: Each long-term goal should have a few one-year objectives that advance the plan. Make objectives SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, and time-based) to get the most out of them.

Budget and Operating Plans: Highlight resources you will need and how you will implement them.

Monitoring and Evaluation: In this section, describe how you will check your progress and determine when you achieve your goals.

One of the first steps in creating a strategic plan is to perform both an internal and external analysis of the company’s environment. Internally, look at your company’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as the personal values of those who will implement your plan (managers, executives, board members). Externally, examine threats and opportunities within the industry and any broad societal expectations that might exist.

You can perform a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis to sum up where you are currently and what you should focus on to help you achieve your future goals. Strengths shows you what you do well, weaknesses point out obstacles that could keep you from achieving your objectives, opportunities highlight where you can grow, and threats pinpoint external factors that could be obstacles in your way.

You can find more information about performing a SWOT analysis and free templates in this article . Another analysis technique, STEEPLE (social, technological, economic, environmental, political, legal, and ethical), often accompanies a SWOT analysis.

Basics of Strategic Planning

How you navigate the strategic planning process will vary. Several tools and techniques are available, and your choice depends on your company’s leadership, culture, environment, and size, as well as the expertise of the planners.

All include similar sections in the final plan, but the ways of driving those results differ. Some tools are goals-based, while others are issues- or scenario-based. Some rely on a more organic or rigid process.

Hofmeyer summarizes what goes into strategic planning:

Understand the stakeholders and involve them from the beginning.

Agree on a vision.

Hold successful meetings and sessions.

Summarize and present the plan to stakeholders.

Identify and check metrics.

Make periodic adjustments.

Items That Go into Strategic Planning

Strategic planning contains inputs, activities, outputs, and outcomes. Inputs and activities are elements that are internal to the company, while outputs and outcomes are external.

Remember, there are many different names for the sections of strategic plans. The key is to agree what terms you will use and define them for everyone involved.

Inputs are important because it is impossible to know where you are going until you know what is around you where you are now.

Companies need to gather data from a variety of sources to get a clear look at the competitive environment and the opportunities and risks within that environment. You can think of it like a competitive intelligence program.

Data should come from the following sources:

Interviews with executives

A review of documents about the competition or market that are publicly available

Primary research by visiting or observing competitors

Studies of your industry

The values of key stakeholders

This information often goes into writing an organization’s vision and mission statements.

Activities are the meetings and other communications that need to happen during the strategic planning process to help everyone understand the competition that surrounds the organization.

It is important both to understand the competitive environment and your company’s response to it. This is where everyone looks at and responds to the data gathered from the inputs.

The strategic planning process produces outputs. Outputs can be as basic as the strategic planning document itself. The documentation and communications that describe your organization’s strategy, as well as financial statements and budgets, can also be outputs.

The implementation of the strategic plan produces outcomes (distinct from outputs). The outcomes determine the success or failure of the strategic plan by measuring how close they are to the goals and vision you outline in your plan.

It is important to understand there will be unplanned and unintended outcomes, too. How you learn from and adapt to these changes influence the success of the strategic plan.

During the planning process, decide how you will measure both the successes and failures of different parts of the strategic plan.

Sharing, Evaluating, and Monitoring the Progress of a Strategic Plan

After companies go through a lengthy strategic planning process, it is important that the plan does not sit and collect dust. Share, evaluate, and monitor the plan to assess how you are doing and make any necessary updates.

“[Some] leaders think that once they have their strategy, it’s up to someone else to execute it. That’s a mistake I see,” Stockmal says.

The process begins with distributing and communicating the plan. Decide who will get a copy of the plan and how those people will tell others about it. Will you have a meeting to kick off the implementation? How will you specify who will do what and when? Clearly communicate the roles people will have.

“Before you communicate the plan [to everyone], you need to have the commitment of stakeholders,” Hofmeyer recommends. Have the stakeholders be a part of announcing the plan to everyone — this keeps them accountable because workers will associate them with the strategy. “That applies pressure to the stakeholders to actually do the work.”

Once the team begins implementation, it’s necessary to have benchmarks to help measure your successes against the plan’s objectives. Sometimes, having smaller action plans within the larger plan can help keep the work on track.

During the planning process, you should have decided how you will measure success. Now, figure out how and when you will document progress. Keep an eye out for gaps between the vision and its implementation — a big gap could be a sign that you are deviating from the plan.

Tools are available to assist with tracking performance of strategic plans, including several types of software. “For some organizations, a spreadsheet is enough, but you are going to manually enter the data, so someone needs to be responsible for that,” Stockmal recommends.

Remember: strategic plans are not written in stone. Some deviation will be necessary, and when it happens, it’s important to understand why it occurred and how the change might impact the company's vision and goals.

Deviation from the plan does not mean failure, reminds Hofmeyer. Instead, understanding what transpired is the key. “Things happen, [and] you should always be on the lookout for that. I’m a firm believer in continuous improvement,” he says. Explain to stakeholders why a change is taking place. “There’s always a sense of re-evaluation, but do it methodically.”

Build in a schedule to review and amend the plan as necessary; this can help keep companies on track.

What Is Strategic Management?

Strategic planning is part of strategic management, and it involves the activities that make the strategic plan a reality. Essentially, strategic management is getting from the starting point to the goal effectively and efficiently using the ongoing activities and processes that a company takes on in order to keep in line with its mission, vision, and strategic plan.

“[Strategic management] closes the gap between the plan and executing the strategy,” Stockmal of ASP says. Strategic management is part of a larger planning process that includes budgeting, forecasting, capital allocation, and more.

There is no right or wrong way to do strategic management — only guidelines. The basic phases are preparing for strategic planning, creating the strategic plan, and implementing that plan.

No matter how you manage your plan, it’s key to allow the strategic plan to evolve and grow as necessary, due to both the internal and external factors.

“We get caught up in all of the day-to-day issues,” Stockmal explains, adding that people do not often leave enough time for implementing the plan and making progress. That’s what strategic management implores: doing things that are in the plan and not letting the plan sit on a shelf.

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How to Set Strategic Planning Goals

• 29 Oct 2020

In an ever-changing business world, it’s imperative to have strategic goals and a plan to guide organizational efforts. Yet, crafting strategic goals can be a daunting task. How do you decide which goals are vital to your company? Which ones are actionable and measurable? Which goals to prioritize?

To help you answer these questions, here’s a breakdown of what strategic planning is, what characterizes strategic goals, and how to select organizational goals to pursue.

Access your free e-book today.

What Is Strategic Planning?

Strategic planning is the ongoing organizational process of using available knowledge to document a business's intended direction. This process is used to prioritize efforts, effectively allocate resources, align shareholders and employees, and ensure organizational goals are backed by data and sound reasoning.

Research in the Harvard Business Review cautions against getting locked into your strategic plan and forgetting that strategy involves inherent risk and discomfort. A good strategic plan evolves and shifts as opportunities and threats arise.

“Most people think of strategy as an event, but that’s not the way the world works,” says Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen in the online course Disruptive Strategy . “When we run into unanticipated opportunities and threats, we have to respond. Sometimes we respond successfully; sometimes we don’t. But most strategies develop through this process. More often than not, the strategy that leads to success emerges through a process that’s at work 24/7 in almost every industry."

Related: 5 Tips for Formulating a Successful Strategy

4 Characteristics of Strategic Goals

To craft a strategic plan for your organization, you first need to determine the goals you’re trying to reach. Strategic goals are an organization’s measurable objectives that are indicative of its long-term vision.

Here are four characteristics of strategic goals to keep in mind when setting them for your organization.

1. Purpose-Driven

The starting point for crafting strategic goals is asking yourself what your company’s purpose and values are . What are you striving for, and why is it important to set these objectives? Let the answers to these questions guide the development of your organization’s strategic goals.

“You don’t have to leave your values at the door when you come to work,” says HBS Professor Rebecca Henderson in the online course Sustainable Business Strategy .

Henderson, whose work focuses on reimagining capitalism for a just and sustainable world, also explains that leading with purpose can drive business performance.

“Adopting a purpose will not hurt your performance if you do it authentically and well,” Henderson says in a lecture streamed via Facebook Live . “If you’re able to link your purpose to the strategic vision of the company in a way that really gets people aligned and facing in the right direction, then you have the possibility of outperforming your competitors.”

Related: 5 Examples of Successful Sustainability Initiatives

2. Long-Term and Forward-Focused

While strategic goals are the long-term objectives of your organization, operational goals are the daily milestones that need to be reached to achieve them. When setting strategic goals, think of your company’s values and long-term vision, and ensure you’re not confusing strategic and operational goals.

For instance, your organization’s goal could be to create a new marketing strategy; however, this is an operational goal in service of a long-term vision. The strategic goal, in this case, could be breaking into a new market segment, to which the creation of a new marketing strategy would contribute.

Keep a forward-focused vision to ensure you’re setting challenging objectives that can have a lasting impact on your organization.

3. Actionable

Strong strategic goals are not only long-term and forward-focused—they’re actionable. If there aren’t operational goals that your team can complete to reach the strategic goal, your organization is better off spending time and resources elsewhere.

When formulating strategic goals, think about the operational goals that fall under them. Do they make up an action plan your team can take to achieve your organization’s objective? If so, the goal could be a worthwhile endeavor for your business.

4. Measurable

When crafting strategic goals, it’s important to define how progress and success will be measured.

According to the online course Strategy Execution , an effective tool you can use to create measurable goals is a balanced scorecard —a tool to help you track and measure non-financial variables.

“The balanced scorecard combines the traditional financial perspective with additional perspectives that focus on customers, internal business processes, and learning and development,” says HBS Professor Robert Simons in the online course Strategy Execution . “These additional perspectives help businesses measure all the activities essential to creating value.”

The four perspectives are:

• Internal business processes
• Learning and growth

The most important element of a balanced scorecard is its alignment with your business strategy.

“Ask yourself,” Simons says, “‘If I picked up a scorecard and examined the measures on it, could I infer what the business's strategy was? If you've designed measures well, the answer should be yes.”

Related: A Manager’s Guide to Successful Strategy Implementation

Strategic Goal Examples

Whatever your business goals and objectives , they must have all four of the characteristics listed above.

For instance, the goal “become a household name” is valid but vague. Consider the intended timeframe to reach this goal and how you’ll operationally define “a household name.” The method of obtaining data must also be taken into account.

An appropriate revision to the original goal could be: “Increase brand recognition by 80 percent among surveyed Americans by 2030.” By setting a more specific goal, you can better equip your organization to reach it and ensure that employees and shareholders have a clear definition of success and how it will be measured.

If your organization is focused on becoming more sustainable and eco-conscious, you may need to assess your strategic goals. For example, you may have a goal of becoming a carbon neutral company, but without defining a realistic timeline and baseline for this initiative, the probability of failure is much higher.

A stronger goal might be: “Implement a comprehensive carbon neutrality strategy by 2030.” From there, you can determine the operational goals that will make this strategic goal possible.

No matter what goal you choose to pursue, it’s important to avoid those that lack clarity, detail, specific targets or timeframes, or clear parameters for success. Without these specific elements in place, you’ll have a difficult time making your goals actionable and measurable.

Prioritizing Strategic Goals

Once you’ve identified several strategic goals, determine which are worth pursuing. This can be a lengthy process, especially if other decision-makers have differing priorities and opinions.

To set the stage, ensure everyone is aware of the purpose behind each strategic goal. This calls back to Henderson’s point that employees’ alignment on purpose can set your organization up to outperform its competitors.

Calculate Anticipated ROI

Next, calculate the estimated return on investment (ROI) of the operational goals tied to each strategic objective. For example, if the strategic goal is “reach carbon-neutral status by 2030,” you need to break that down into actionable sub-tasks—such as “determine how much CO2 our company produces each year” and “craft a marketing and public relations strategy”—and calculate the expected cost and return for each.

The ROI formula is typically written as:

ROI = (Net Profit / Cost of Investment) x 100

In project management, the formula uses slightly different terms:

ROI = [(Financial Value - Project Cost) / Project Cost] x 100

An estimate can be a valuable piece of information when deciding which goals to pursue. Although not all strategic goals need to yield a high return on investment, it’s in your best interest to calculate each objective's anticipated ROI so you can compare them.

Consider Current Events

Finally, when deciding which strategic goal to prioritize, the importance of the present moment can’t be overlooked. What’s happening in the world that could impact the timeliness of each goal?

For example, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the ever-intensifying climate change crisis have impacted many organizations’ strategic goals in 2020. Often, the goals that are timely and pressing are those that earn priority.

Learn to Plan Strategic Goals

As you set and prioritize strategic goals, remember that your strategy should always be evolving. As circumstances and challenges shift, so must your organizational strategy.

If you lead with purpose, a measurable and actionable vision, and an awareness of current events, you can set strategic goals worth striving for.

Do you want to learn more about strategic planning? Explore our online strategy courses and download our free flowchart to determine which is right for you and your goals.

This post was updated on November 16, 2023. It was originally published on October 29, 2020.

About the Author

The Strategic Planning Process in 4 Steps

To guide you through the strategic planning process, we created this 4 step process you can use with your team. we’ll cover the basic definition of strategic planning, what core elements you should include, and actionable steps to build your strategic plan..

Free Strategic Planning Guide

What is Strategic Planning?

Strategic Planning is when a process where organizations define a bold vision and create a plan with objectives and goals to reach that future. A great strategic plan defines where your organization is going, how you’ll win, who must do what, and how you’ll review and adapt your strategy development.

A strategic plan or a business strategic plan should include the following:

• Your organization’s vision organization’s vision of the future.
• A clearly Articulated mission and values statement.
• A current state assessment that evaluates your competitive environment, new opportunities, and new threats.
• What strategic challenges you face.
• A growth strategy and outlined market share.
• Long-term strategic goals.
• An annual plan with SMART goals or OKRs to support your strategic goals.
• Clear measures, key performance indicators, and data analytics to measure progress.
• A clear strategic planning cycle, including how you’ll review, refresh, and recast your plan every quarter.

Overview of the Strategic Planning Process:

The strategic management process involves taking your organization on a journey from point A (where you are today) to point B (your vision of the future).

Part of that journey is the strategy built during strategic planning, and part of it is execution during the strategic management process. A good strategic plan dictates “how” you travel the selected road.

Effective execution ensures you are reviewing, refreshing, and recalibrating your strategy to reach your destination. The planning process should take no longer than 90 days. But, move at a pace that works best for you and your team and leverage this as a resource.

To kick this process off, we recommend 1-2 weeks (1-hour meeting with the Owner/CEO, Strategy Director, and Facilitator (if necessary) to discuss the information collected and direction for continued planning.)

Questions to Ask:

• Who is on your Planning Team? What senior leadership members and key stakeholders are included? Checkout these links you need help finding a strategic planning consultant , someone to facilitate strategic planning , or expert AI strategy consulting .
• Who will be the business process owner (Strategy Director) of planning in your organization?
• Fast forward 12 months from now, what do you want to see differently in your organization as a result of your strategic plan and implementation?
• Planning team members are informed of their roles and responsibilities.
• A strategic planning schedule is established.
• Existing planning information and secondary data collected.

Action Grid:

Step 1: Determine Organizational Readiness

Set up your plan for success – questions to ask:

• Are the conditions and criteria for successful planning in place at the current time? Can certain pitfalls be avoided?
• Is this the appropriate time for your organization to initiate a planning process? Yes or no? If no, where do you go from here?

Step 2: Develop Your Team & Schedule

Who is going to be on your planning team? You need to choose someone to oversee the strategy implementation (Chief Strategy Officer or Strategy Director) and strategic management of your plan? You need some of the key individuals and decision makers for this team. It should be a small group of approximately 12-15 people.

OnStrategy is the leader in strategic planning and performance management. Our cloud-based software and hands-on services closes the gap between strategy and execution. Learn more about OnStrategy here .

Step 3: Collect Current Data

All strategic plans are developed using the following information:

• The last strategic plan, even if it is not current
• Mission statement, vision statement, values statement
• Past or current Business plan
• Financial records for the last few years
• Marketing plan
• Other information, such as last year’s SWOT, sales figures and projections

Step 4: Review Collected Data

Review the data collected in the last action with your strategy director and facilitator.

• What trends do you see?
• Are there areas of obvious weakness or strengths?
• Have you been following a plan or have you just been going along with the market?

Conclusion: A successful strategic plan must be adaptable to changing conditions. Organizations benefit from having a flexible plan that can evolve, as assumptions and goals may need adjustments. Preparing to adapt or restart the planning process is crucial, so we recommend updating actions quarterly and refreshing your plan annually.

Strategic Planning Phase 1: Determine Your Strategic Position

Want more? Dive into the “ Evaluate Your Strategic Position ” How-To Guide.

Action Grid

Step 1: identify strategic issues.

Strategic issues are critical unknowns driving you to embark on a robust strategic planning process. These issues can be problems, opportunities, market shifts, or anything else that keeps you awake at night and begging for a solution or decision. The best strategic plans address your strategic issues head-on.

• How will we grow, stabilize, or retrench in order to sustain our organization into the future?
• How will we diversify our revenue to reduce our dependence on a major customer?
• What must we do to improve our cost structure and stay competitive?
• How and where must we innovate our products and services?

Step 2: Conduct an Environmental Scan

Conducting an environmental scan will help you understand your operating environment. An environmental scan is called a PEST analysis, an acronym for Political, Economic, Social, and Technological trends. Sometimes, it is helpful to include Ecological and Legal trends as well. All of these trends play a part in determining the overall business environment.

Step 3: Conduct a Competitive Analysis

The reason to do a competitive analysis is to assess the opportunities and threats that may occur from those organizations competing for the same business you are. You need to understand what your competitors are or aren’t offering your potential customers. Here are a few other key ways a competitive analysis fits into strategic planning:

• To help you assess whether your competitive advantage is really an advantage.
• To understand what your competitors’ current and future strategies are so you can plan accordingly.
• To provide information that will help you evaluate your strategic decisions against what your competitors may or may not be doing.

Learn more on how to conduct a competitive analysis here .

Step 4: Identify Opportunities and Threats

Opportunities are situations that exist but must be acted on if the business is to benefit from them.

What do you want to capitalize on?

• What new needs of customers could you meet?
• What are the economic trends that benefit you?
• What are the emerging political and social opportunities?
• What niches have your competitors missed?

Threats refer to external conditions or barriers preventing a company from reaching its objectives.

What do you need to mitigate? What external driving force do you need to anticipate?

Questions to Answer:

• What are the negative economic trends?
• What are the negative political and social trends?
• Where are competitors about to bite you?
• Where are you vulnerable?

Step 5: Identify Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths refer to what your company does well.

What do you want to build on?

• What do you do well (in sales, marketing, operations, management)?
• What are your core competencies?
• What differentiates you from your competitors?
• Why do your customers buy from you?

Weaknesses refer to any limitations a company faces in developing or implementing a strategy.

What do you need to shore up?

• Where do you lack resources?
• What can you do better?
• Where are you losing money?
• In what areas do your competitors have an edge?

Step 6: Customer Segments

Customer segmentation defines the different groups of people or organizations a company aims to reach or serve.

• What needs or wants define your ideal customer?
• What characteristics describe your typical customer?
• Can you sort your customers into different profiles using their needs, wants and characteristics?
• Can you reach this segment through clear communication channels?

Step 7: Develop Your SWOT

A SWOT analysis is a quick way of examining your organization by looking at the internal strengths and weaknesses in relation to the external opportunities and threats. Creating a SWOT analysis lets you see all the important factors affecting your organization together in one place.

It’s easy to read, easy to communicate, and easy to create. Take the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats you developed earlier, review, prioritize, and combine like terms. The SWOT analysis helps you ask and answer the following questions: “How do you….”

• Build on your strengths
• Shore up your weaknesses
• Capitalize on your opportunities
• Manage your threats

Strategic Planning Process Phase 2: Developing Strategy

Want More? Deep Dive Into the “Developing Your Strategy” How-To Guide.

Step 1: Develop Your Mission Statement

The mission statement describes an organization’s purpose or reason for existing.

What is our purpose? Why do we exist? What do we do?

• What are your organization’s goals? What does your organization intend to accomplish?
• Why do you work here? Why is it special to work here?
• What would happen if we were not here?

Outcome: A short, concise, concrete statement that clearly defines the scope of the organization.

Step 2: discover your values.

Your values statement clarifies what your organization stands for, believes in and the behaviors you expect to see as a result. Check our the post on great what are core values and examples of core values .

How will we behave?

• What are the key non-negotiables that are critical to the company’s success?
• What guiding principles are core to how we operate in this organization?
• What behaviors do you expect to see?
• If the circumstances changed and penalized us for holding this core value, would we still keep it?

Outcome: Short list of 5-7 core values.

Step 3: casting your vision statement.

A Vision Statement defines your desired future state and directs where we are going as an organization.

Where are we going?

• What will our organization look like 5–10 years from now?
• What does success look like?
• What are we aspiring to achieve?
• What mountain are you climbing and why?

Outcome: A picture of the future.

Step 4: identify your competitive advantages.

A competitive advantage is a characteristic of an organization that allows it to meet its customer’s need(s) better than its competition can. It’s important to consider your competitive advantages when creating your competitive strategy.

What are we best at?

• What are your unique strengths?
• What are you best at in your market?
• Do your customers still value what is being delivered? Ask them.
• How do your value propositions stack up in the marketplace?

Outcome: A list of 2 or 3 items that honestly express the organization’s foundation for winning.

Step 5: crafting your organization-wide strategies.

Your competitive strategy is the general methods you intend to use to reach your vision. Regardless of the level, a strategy answers the question “how.”

How will we succeed?

• Broad: market scope; a relatively wide market emphasis.
• Narrow: limited to only one or few segments in the market
• Does your competitive position focus on lowest total cost or product/service differentiation or both?

Outcome: Establish the general, umbrella methods you intend to use to reach your vision.

Phase 3: Strategic Plan Development

Want More? Deep Dive Into the “Build Your Plan” How-To Guide.

Strategic Planning Process Step 1: Use Your SWOT to Set Priorities

If your team wants to take the next step in the SWOT analysis, apply the TOWS Strategic Alternatives Matrix to your strategy map to help you think about the options you could pursue. To do this, match external opportunities and threats with your internal strengths and weaknesses, as illustrated in the matrix below:

TOWS Strategic Alternatives Matrix

Evaluate the options you’ve generated, and identify the ones that give the greatest benefit, and that best achieve the mission and vision of your organization. Add these to the other strategic options that you’re considering.

Step 2: Define Long-Term Strategic Objectives

Long-Term Strategic Objectives are long-term, broad, continuous statements that holistically address all areas of your organization. What must we focus on to achieve our vision? Check out examples of strategic objectives here. What are the “big rocks”?

Questions to ask:

• What are our shareholders or stakeholders expectations for our financial performance or social outcomes?
• To reach our outcomes, what value must we provide to our customers? What is our value proposition?
• To provide value, what process must we excel at to deliver our products and services?
• To drive our processes, what skills, capabilities and organizational structure must we have?

Outcome: Framework for your plan – no more than 6. You can use the balanced scorecard framework, OKRs, or whatever methodology works best for you. Just don’t exceed 6 long-term objectives.

Step 3: Setting Organization-Wide Goals and Measures

Once you have formulated your strategic objectives, you should translate them into goals and measures that can be communicated to your strategic planning team (team of business leaders and/or team members).

You want to set goals that convert the strategic objectives into specific performance targets. Effective strategic goals clearly state what, when, how, and who, and they are specifically measurable. They should address what you must do in the short term (think 1-3 years) to achieve your strategic objectives.

Organization-wide goals are annual statements that are SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, responsible, and time-bound. These are outcome statements expressing a result to achieve the desired outcomes expected in the organization.

What is most important right now to reach our long-term objectives?

Outcome: clear outcomes for the current year..

Step 4: Select KPIs

Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are the key measures that will have the most impact in moving your organization forward. We recommend you guide your organization with measures that matter. See examples of KPIs here.

How will we measure our success?

Outcome: 5-7 measures that help you keep the pulse on your performance. When selecting your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), ask, “What are the key performance measures we need to track to monitor if we are achieving our goals?” These KPIs include the key goals you want to measure that will have the most impact on moving your organization forward.

Step 5: Cascade Your Strategies to Operations

To move from big ideas to action, creating action items and to-dos for short-term goals is crucial. This involves translating strategy from the organizational level to individuals. Functional area managers and contributors play a role in developing short-term goals to support the organization.

Before taking action, decide whether to create plans directly derived from the strategic plan or sync existing operational, business, or account plans with organizational goals. Avoid the pitfall of managing multiple sets of goals and actions, as this shifts from strategic planning to annual planning.

Questions to Ask

• How are we going to get there at a functional level?
• Who must do what by when to accomplish and drive the organizational goals?
• What strategic questions still remain and need to be solved?

Department/functional goals, actions, measures and targets for the next 12-24 months

Step 6: Cascading Goals to Departments and Team Members

Now in your Departments / Teams, you need to create goals to support the organization-wide goals. These goals should still be SMART and are generally (short-term) something to be done in the next 12-18 months. Finally, you should develop an action plan for each goal.

Keep the acronym SMART in mind again when setting action items, and make sure they include start and end dates and have someone assigned their responsibility. Since these action items support your previously established goals, it may be helpful to consider action items your immediate plans on the way to achieving your (short-term) goals. In other words, identify all the actions that need to occur in the next 90 days and continue this same process every 90 days until the goal is achieved.

Examples of Cascading Goals:

Phase 4: Executing Strategy and Managing Performance

Want more? Dive Into the “Managing Performance” How-To Guide.

Step 1: Strategic Plan Implementation Schedule

Implementation is the process that turns strategies and plans into actions in order to accomplish strategic objectives and goals.

How will we use the plan as a management tool?

• Communication Schedule: How and when will you roll-out your plan to your staff? How frequently will you send out updates?
• Process Leader: Who is your strategy director?
• Structure: What are the dates for your strategy reviews (we recommend at least quarterly)?
• System & Reports: What are you expecting each staff member to come prepared with to those strategy review sessions?

Outcome: Syncing your plan into the “rhythm of your business.”

Once your resources are in place, you can set your implementation schedule. Use the following steps as your base implementation plan:

• Establish your performance management and reward system.
• Set up monthly and quarterly strategy meetings with established reporting procedures.
• Set up annual strategic review dates including new assessments and a large group meeting for an annual plan review.

Now you’re ready to start plan roll-out. Below are sample implementation schedules, which double for a full strategic management process timeline.

Step 2: Tracking Goals & Actions

Monthly strategy meetings don’t need to take a lot of time – 30 to 60 minutes should suffice. But it is important that key team members report on their progress toward the goals they are responsible for – including reporting on metrics in the scorecard they have been assigned.

By using the measurements already established, it’s easy to make course corrections if necessary. You should also commit to reviewing your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) during these regular meetings. Need help comparing strategic planning software ? Check out our guide.

Effective Strategic Planning: Your Bi-Annual Checklist

Never lose sight of the fact that strategic plans are guidelines, not rules. Every six months or so, you should evaluate your strategy execution and strategic plan implementation by asking these key questions:

• Will your goals be achieved within the time frame of the plan? If not, why?
• Should the deadlines be modified? (Before you modify deadlines, figure out why you’re behind schedule.)
• Are your goals and action items still realistic?
• Should the organization’s focus be changed to put more emphasis on achieving your goals?
• Should your goals be changed? (Be careful about making these changes – know why efforts aren’t achieving the goals before changing the goals.)
• What can be gathered from an adaptation to improve future planning activities?

Why Track Your Goals?

• Ownership: Having a stake and responsibility in the plan makes you feel part of it and leads you to drive your goals forward.
• Culture: Successful plans tie tracking and updating goals into organizational culture.
• Implementation: If you don’t review and update your strategic goals, they are just good intentions
• Accountability: Accountability and high visibility help drive change. This means that each measure, objective, data source and initiative must have an owner.
• Empowerment: Changing goals from In Progress to Complete just feels good!

Step 3: Review & Adapt

Guidelines for your strategy review.

The most important part of this meeting is a 70/30 review. 30% is about reviewing performance, and 70% should be spent on making decisions to move the company’s strategy forward in the next quarter.

The best strategic planners spend about 60-90 minutes in the sessions. Holding meetings helps focus your goals on accomplishing top priorities and accelerating the organization’s growth. Although the meeting structure is relatively simple, it does require a high degree of discipline.

Strategy Review Session Questions:

Strategic planning frequently asked questions, read our frequently asked questions about strategic planning to learn how to build a great strategic plan..

Strategic planning is when organizations define a bold vision and create a plan with objectives and goals to reach that future. A great strategic plan defines where your organization is going, how you’ll win, who must do what, and how you’ll review and adapt your strategy..

Your strategic plan needs to include an assessment of your current state, a SWOT analysis, mission, vision, values, competitive advantages, growth strategy, growth enablers, a 3-year roadmap, and annual plan with strategic goals, OKRs, and KPIs.

A strategic planning process should take no longer than 90 days to complete from start to finish! Any longer could fatigue your organization and team.

There are four overarching phases to the strategic planning process that include: determining position, developing your strategy, building your plan, and managing performance. Each phase plays a unique but distinctly crucial role in the strategic planning process.

Prior to starting your strategic plan, you must go through this pre-planning process to determine your organization’s readiness by following these steps:

Ask yourself these questions: Are the conditions and criteria for successful planning in place now? Can we foresee any pitfalls that we can avoid? Is there an appropriate time for our organization to initiate this process?

Develop your team and schedule. Who will oversee the implementation as Chief Strategy Officer or Director? Do we have at least 12-15 other key individuals on our team?

Research and Collect Current Data. Find the following resources that your organization may have used in the past to assist you with your new plan: last strategic plan, mission, vision, and values statement, business plan, financial records, marketing plan, SWOT, sales figures, or projections.

Finally, review the data with your strategy director and facilitator and ask these questions: What trends do we see? Any obvious strengths or weaknesses? Have we been following a plan or just going along with the market?

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How to improve strategic planning

In conference rooms everywhere, corporate planners are in the midst of the annual strategic-planning process. For the better part of a year, they collect financial and operational data, make forecasts, and prepare lengthy presentations with the CEO and other senior managers about the future direction of the business. But at the end of this expensive and time-consuming process, many participants say they are frustrated by its lack of impact on either their own actions or the strategic direction of the company.

This sense of disappointment was captured in a recent McKinsey Quarterly survey of nearly 800 executives: just 45 percent of the respondents said they were satisfied with the strategic-planning process. 1 1. “ Improving strategic planning: A McKinsey Survey ,” The McKinsey Quarterly , Web exclusive, September 2006. The survey, conducted in late July and early August 2006, received 796 responses from a panel of executives from around the world. All panelists have mostly financial or strategic responsibilities and work in a wide range of industries for organizations with revenues of at least $500 million. Moreover, only 23 percent indicated that major strategic decisions were made within its confines. Given these results, managers might well be tempted to jettison the planning process altogether.

But for those working in the overwhelming majority of corporations, the annual planning process plays an essential role. In addition to formulating at least some elements of a company’s strategy, the process results in a budget, which establishes the resource allocation map for the coming 12 to 18 months; sets financial and operating targets, often used to determine compensation metrics and to provide guidance for financial markets; and aligns the management team on its strategic priorities. The operative question for chief executives is how to make the planning process more effective—not whether it is the sole mechanism used to design strategy. CEOs know that strategy is often formulated through ad hoc meetings or brand reviews, or as a result of decisions about mergers and acquisitions.

Our research shows that formal strategic-planning processes play an important role in improving overall satisfaction with strategy development. That role can be seen in the responses of the 79 percent of managers who claimed that the formal planning process played a significant role in developing strategies and were satisfied with the approach of their companies, compared with only 21 percent of the respondents who felt that the process did not play a significant role. Looked at another way, 51 percent of the respondents whose companies had no formal process were dissatisfied with their approach to the development of strategy, against only 20 percent of those at companies with a formal process.

So what can managers do to improve the process? There are many ways to conduct strategic planning, but determining the ideal method goes beyond the scope of this article. Instead we offer, from our research, five emergent ideas that executives can employ immediately to make existing processes run better. The changes we discuss here (such as a focus on important strategic issues or a connection to core-management processes) are the elements most linked with the satisfaction of employees and their perceptions of the significance of the process. These steps cannot guarantee that the right strategic decisions will be made or that strategy will be better executed, but by enhancing the planning process—and thus increasing satisfaction with the development of strategy—they will improve the odds for success.

Start with the issues

Ask CEOs what they think strategic planning should involve and they will talk about anticipating big challenges and spotting important trends. At many companies, however, this noble purpose has taken a backseat to rigid, data-driven processes dominated by the production of budgets and financial forecasts. If the calendar-based process is to play a more valuable role in a company’s overall strategy efforts, it must complement budgeting with a focus on strategic issues. In our experience, the first liberating change managers can make to improve the quality of the planning process is to begin it by deliberately and thoughtfully identifying and discussing the strategic issues that will have the greatest impact on future business performance.

Granted, an approach based on issues will not necessarily yield better strategic results. The music business, for instance, has discussed the threat posed by digital-file sharing for years without finding an effective way of dealing with the problem. But as a first step, identifying the key issues will ensure that management does not waste time and energy on less important topics.

We found a variety of practical ways in which companies can impose a fresh strategic perspective. For instance, the CEO of one large health care company asks the leaders of each business unit to imagine how a set of specific economic, social, and business trends will affect their businesses, as well as ways to capture the opportunities—or counter the threats—that these trends pose. Only after such an analysis and discussion do the leaders settle into the more typical planning exercises of financial forecasting and identifying strategic initiatives.

One consumer goods organization takes a more directed approach. The CEO, supported by the corporate-strategy function, compiles a list of three to six priorities for the coming year. Distributed to the managers responsible for functions, geographies, and brands, the list then becomes the basis for an offsite strategy-alignment meeting, where managers debate the implications of the priorities for their particular organizations. The corporate-strategy function summarizes the results, adds appropriate corporate targets, and shares them with the organization in the form of a strategy memo, which serves as the basis for more detailed strategic planning at the division and business-unit levels.

A packaged-goods company offers an even more tailored example. Every December the corporate senior-management team produces a list of ten strategic questions tailored to each of the three business units. The leaders of these businesses have six months to explore and debate the questions internally and to come up with answers. In June each unit convenes with the senior-management team in a one-day meeting to discuss proposed actions and reach decisions.

Some companies prefer to use a bottom-up rather than top-down process. We recently worked with a sales company to design a strategic-planning process that begins with in-depth interviews (involving all of the senior managers and selected corporate and business executives) to generate a list of the most important strategic issues facing the company. The senior-management team prioritizes the list and assigns managers to explore each issue and report back in four to six weeks. Such an approach can be especially valuable in companies where internal consensus building is an imperative.

Bring together the right people

An issues-based approach won’t do much good unless the most relevant people are involved in the debate. We found that survey respondents who were satisfied with the strategic-planning process rated it highly on dimensions such as including the most knowledgeable and influential participants, stimulating and challenging the participants’ thinking, and having honest, open discussions about difficult issues. In contrast, 27 percent of the dissatisfied respondents reported that their company’s strategic planning had not a single one of these virtues. Such results suggest that too many companies focus on the data-gathering and packaging elements of strategic planning and neglect the crucial interactive components.

Strategic conversations will have little impact if they involve only strategic planners from both the business unit and the corporate levels. One of our core beliefs is that those who carry out strategy should also develop it. The key strategy conversation should take place among corporate decision makers, business unit leaders, and people with expertise essential to the discussion. In addition to leading the corporate review, the CEO, aided by members of the executive team, should as a rule lead the strategy review for business units as well. The head of a business unit, supported by four to six people, should direct the discussion from its side of the table (see sidebar, "Things to ask in any business unit review").

Things to ask in any business unit review

Are major trends and changes in your business unit’s environment affecting your strategic plan? Specifically, what potential developments in customer demand, technology, or the regulatory environment could have enough impact on the industry to change the entire plan?

How and why is this plan different from last year’s?

What were your forecasts for market growth, sales, and profitability last year, two years ago, and three years ago? How right or wrong were they? What did the business unit learn from those experiences?

What would it take to double your business unit’s growth rate and profits? Where will growth come from: expansion or gains in market share?

If your business unit plans to take market share from competitors, how will it do so, and how will they respond? Are you counting on a strategic advantage or superior execution?

What are your business unit’s distinctive competitive strengths, and how does the plan build on them?

How different is the strategy from those of competitors, and why? Is that a good or a bad thing?

Beyond the immediate planning cycle, what are the key issues, risks, and opportunities that we should discuss today?

What would a private-equity owner do with this business?

How will the business unit monitor the execution of this strategy?

One pharmaceutical company invites business unit leaders to take part in the strategy reviews of their peers in other units. This approach can help build a better understanding of the entire company and, especially, of the issues that span business units. The risk is that such interactions might constrain the honesty and vigor of the dialogue and put executives at the focus of the discussion on the defensive.

Corporate senior-management teams can dedicate only a few hours or at most a few days to a business unit under review. So team members should spend this time in challenging yet collaborative discussions with business unit leaders rather than trying to absorb many facts during the review itself. To provide some context for the discussion, best-practice companies disseminate important operational and financial information to the corporate review team well in advance of such sessions. This reading material should also tee up the most important issues facing the business and outline the proposed strategy, ensuring that the review team is prepared with well-thought-out questions. In our experience, the right 10 pages provide ample fuel to fire a vigorous discussion, but more than 25 pages will likely douse the level of energy or engagement in the room.

Adapt planning cycles to the needs of each business

Managers are justifiably concerned about the resources and time required to implement an issues-based strategic-planning approach. One easy—yet rarely adopted—solution is to free business units from the need to conduct this rigorous process every single year. In all but the most volatile, high-velocity industries, it is hard to imagine that a major strategic redirection will be necessary every planning cycle. In fact, forcing businesses to undertake this exercise annually is distracting and may even be detrimental. Managers need to focus on executing the last plan’s major initiatives, many of which can take 18 to 36 months to implement fully.

Some companies alternate the business units that undergo the complete strategic-planning process (as opposed to abbreviated annual updates of the existing plan). One media company, for example, requires individual business units to undertake strategic planning only every two or three years. This cadence enables the corporate senior-management team and its strategy group to devote more energy to the business units that are “at bat.” More important, it frees the corporate-strategy group to work directly with the senior team on critical issues that affect the entire company—issues such as developing an integrated digitization strategy and addressing unforeseen changes in the fast-moving digital-media landscape.

Other companies use trigger mechanisms to decide which business units will undergo a full strategic-planning exercise in a given year. One industrial company assigns each business unit a color-coded grade—green, yellow, or red—based on the unit’s success in executing the existing strategic plan. “Code red,” for example, would slate a business unit for a strategy review. Although many of the metrics that determine the grade are financial, some may be operational to provide a more complete assessment of the unit’s performance.

Freeing business units from participating in the strategic-planning process every year raises a caveat, however. When important changes in the external environment occur, senior managers must be able to engage with business units that are not under review and make major strategic decisions on an ad hoc basis. For instance, a major merger in any industry would prompt competitors in it to revisit their strategies. Indeed, one advantage of a tailored planning cycle is that it builds slack into the strategic-review system, enabling management to address unforeseen but pressing strategic issues as they arise.

Implement a strategic-performance-management system

In the end, many companies fail to execute the chosen strategy. More than a quarter of our survey respondents said that their companies had plans but no execution path. Forty-five percent reported that planning processes failed to track the execution of strategic initiatives. All this suggests that putting in place a system to measure and monitor their progress can greatly enhance the impact of the planning process.

Most companies believe that their existing control systems and performance-management processes (including budgets and operating reviews) are the sole way to monitor progress on strategy. As a result, managers attempt to translate the decisions made during the planning process into budget targets or other financial goals. Although this practice is sensible and necessary, it is not enough. We estimate that a significant portion of the strategic decisions we recommend to companies can’t be tracked solely through financial targets. A company undertaking a major strategic initiative to enhance its innovation and product-development capabilities, for example, should measure a variety of input metrics, such as the quality of available talent and the number of ideas and projects at each stage in development, in addition to pure output metrics such as revenues from new-product sales. One information technology company, for instance, carefully tracks the number and skill levels of people posted to important strategic projects.

Strategic-performance-management systems, which should assign accountability for initiatives and make their progress more transparent, can take many forms. One industrial corporation tracks major strategic initiatives that will have the greatest impact, across a portfolio of a dozen businesses, on its financial and strategic goals. Transparency is achieved through regular reviews and the use of financial as well as nonfinancial metrics. The corporate-strategy team assumes responsibility for reviews (chaired by the CEO and involving the relevant business-unit leaders) that use an array of milestones and metrics to assess the top ten initiatives. One to expand operations in China and India, for example, would entail regular reviews of interim metrics such as the quality and number of local employees recruited and the pace at which alliances are formed with channel partners or suppliers. Each business unit, in turn, is accountable for adopting the same performance-management approach for its own, lower-tier top-ten list of initiatives.

When designed well, strategic-performance-management systems can give an early warning of problems with strategic initiatives, whereas financial targets alone at best provide lagging indicators. An effective system enables management to step in and correct, redirect, or even abandon an initiative that is failing to perform as expected. The strategy of a pharmaceutical company that embarked on a major expansion of its sales force to drive revenue growth, for example, presupposed that rapid growth in the number of sales representatives would lead to a corresponding increase in revenues. The company also recognized, however, that expansion was in turn contingent on several factors, including the ability to recruit and train the right people. It therefore put in place a regular review of the key strategic metrics against its actual performance to alert managers to any emerging problems.

Integrate human-resources systems into the strategic plan

Simply monitoring the execution of strategic initiatives is not sufficient: their successful implementation also depends on how managers are evaluated and compensated. Yet only 36 percent of the executives we surveyed said that their companies’ strategic-planning processes were integrated with HR processes. One way to create a more valuable strategic-planning process would be to tie the evaluation and compensation of managers to the progress of new initiatives.

Although the development of strategy is ostensibly a long-term endeavor, companies traditionally emphasize short-term, purely financial targets—such as annual revenue growth or improved margins—as the sole metrics to gauge the performance of managers and employees. This approach is gradually changing. Deferred-compensation models for boards, CEOs, and some senior managers are now widely used. What’s more, several companies have added longer-term performance targets to complement the short-term ones. A major pharmaceutical company, for example, recently revamped its managerial-compensation structure to include a basket of short-term financial and operating targets as well as longer-term, innovation-based growth targets.

Although these changes help persuade managers to adopt both short- and long-term approaches to the development of strategy, they don’t address the need to link evaluation and compensation to specific strategic initiatives. One way of doing so is to craft a mix of performance targets that more appropriately reflect a company’s strategy. For example, one North American services business that launched strategic initiatives to improve its customer retention and increase sales also adjusted the evaluation and compensation targets for its managers. Rather than measuring senior managers only by revenue and margin targets, as it had done before, it tied 20 percent of their compensation to achieving its retention and cross-selling goals. By introducing metrics for these specific initiatives and linking their success closely to bonus packages, the company motivated managers to make the strategy succeed.

An advantage of this approach is that it motivates managers to flag any problems early in the implementation of a strategic initiative (which determines the size of bonuses) so that the company can solve them. Otherwise, managers all too often sweep the debris of a failing strategy under the operating rug until the spring-cleaning ritual of next year’s annual planning process.

Some business leaders have found ways to give strategic planning a more valuable role in the formulation as well as the execution of strategy. Companies that emulate their methods might find satisfaction instead of frustration at the end of the annual process.

Renée Dye is a consultant in McKinsey’s Atlanta office, and Olivier Sibony is a director in the Paris office.

This article was first published in the Autumn 2007 issue of McKinsey on Finance . Visit McKinsey’s corporate finance site to view the full issue.

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Strategic Planning Process: Why Is Strategic Planning Important for Organizations in 2024?

What to read next:

Playing chess without a strong opening is a guaranteed way to disadvantage yourself. Just like in chess, organizations without an adequate strategic planning process are unlikely to thrive and adapt long-term. 

The strategic planning process is essential for aligning your organization on key priorities, goals, and initiatives, making it crucial for organizational success.   

This article will empower you to craft and perfect your strategic planning process by exploring the following:  

• What is strategic planning
• Why strategic planning is important for your business  
• The seven steps of the strategic planning process   

Strategic planning frameworks

• Best practices supporting the strategic planning process  

By the end of this article, you’ll have the knowledge needed to perfect the key elements of strategic planning. Ready? Let’s begin.  

What is strategic planning?

Strategic planning charts your business's course toward success. Using your organization’s vision, mission statement , and values — with internal and external information — each step of the strategic planning process helps you craft long-term objectives and attain your goals with strategic management.  

The key elements of strategic planning includes a SWOT analysis, goal setting , stakeholder involvement, plus developing actionable strategies, approaches, and tactics aligned with primary objectives.  

In short, the strategic planning process bridges the gap between your organization’s current and desired state, providing a clear and actionable framework that answers:   Where are you now?   Where do you want to be?   How will you get there?

7 key elements of strategic planning 

The following strategic planning components work together to create cohesive strategic plans for your business goals. Let’s take a close look at each of these:  

• Vision : What your organization wants to achieve in the future, the long-term goal  
• Mission : The driving force behind why your company exists, who it serves, and how it creates value  
• Values : Fundamental beliefs guiding your company’s decision-making process  
• Goals : Measurable objectives in alignment with your business mission, vision, and values  
• Strategy : A long-term strategy map for achieving your objectives based on both internal and external factors  
• Approach : How you execute strategy and achieve objectives using actions and initiatives   
• Tactics : Granular short-term actions, programs, and activities  

Why is the strategic planning process important?

Just as a chess player needs a gameplan to reach checkmate, a company needs a solid strategic plan to achieve its goals.   

Without a strategic plan, your business will waste precious time, energy, and resources on endeavors that won’t get your company closer to where it needs to be.   

Your ideal plan should cover all key strategic planning areas, while allowing you to stay present by measuring success and course-correcting or redefining the strategic direction when necessary. Ultimately, enabling your company to stay future-proof through the creation of an always-on strategy that reflects your company's mission and vision.   

An always-on strategy involves continuous environmental scanning even after the strategic plan has been devised, ensuring readiness to adapt in response to quick, drastic changes in the environment.

Let’s dive deeper into the steps of the strategic planning process.  

What are the 7 stages of the strategic planning process?

You understand the overall value of implementing a strategic planning process — now let’s put it in practice. Here's our 7-step approach to strategic planning that ensures everyone is on the same page:  

• Clarify your vision, mission, and values  
• Conduct an environmental scan  
• Define strategic priorities  
• Develop goals and metrics  
• Derive a strategic plan  
• Write and communicate your strategic plan  
• Implement, monitor, and revise   

1. Clarify your vision, mission, and values 

The first step of the strategic planning process is understanding your organization’s core elements: vision, mission, and values. Clarifying these will align your strategic plan with your company’s definition of success. Once established, these are the foundation for the rest of the strategic planning process.   

Questions to ask:

• What do we aspire to achieve in the long term?
• What is our purpose or ultimate goal?
• What do we do to fulfill our vision?
• What key activities or services do we provide?
• What are our organization's ethics?
• What qualities or behaviors do we expect from employees?

Read more: What is Mission vs. Vision  

2. Conduct an environmental scan

Once everyone on the same page about vision, mission, and values, it's time to scan your internal and external environment. This involves a long-term SWOT analysis, evaluating your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.  

Internal factors 

Internal strengths and weaknesses help you understand where your organization excels and what it could improve. Strengths and weaknesses awareness helps make more informed decisions with your capabilities and resource allocation in mind.  

External factors

Externally, opportunities and threats in the market help you understand the power of your industry’s customers, suppliers, and competitors. Additionally, consider how broader forces like technology, culture, politics, and regulation may impact your organization.   

• What are our organization's key strengths or competitive advantages?
• What areas or functions within our organization need improvement?
• What emerging trends or opportunities can we leverage?
• How do changes in technology, regulations, or consumer behavior impact us?

3. Define strategic priorities

Prioritization puts the “strategic” in strategic planning process. Your organization’s mission, vision, values, and environmental scan serve as a lens to identify top priorities. Limiting priorities ensures your organization intentionally allocates resources.  

These categories can help you rank your strategic priorities:  

• Critical : Urgent tasks whose failure to complete will have severe consequences — financial losses, reputation damage, or legal consequences  
• Important : Significant tasks which support organizational achievements and require timely completion  
• Desirable : Valuable tasks not essential in the short-term, but can contribute to long-term success and growth  
• How do these priorities align with our mission, vision, and values?
• Which tasks need to be completed quickly to ensure effective progress towards our desired outcomes?
• What resources and capabilities do we need to pursue these priorities effectively?

4. Develop goals and metrics

Next, you establish goals and metrics to reflect your strategic priorities. Purpose-driven, long-term, actionable strategic planning goals should flow down through the organization, with lower-level goals contributing to higher-level ones.  

One approach that can help you set and measure your aligned goals is objectives and key results (OKRs). OKRs consist of objectives, qualitative statements of what you want to achieve, and key results, 3-5 supporting metrics that track progress toward your objective.  

OKRs ensure alignment at every level of the organization, with tracking and accountability built into the framework to keep everyone engaged. With ambitious, intentional goals, OKRs can help you drive the strategic plan forward.  

• What metrics can we use to track progress toward each objective?
• How can we ensure that lower-level goals and metrics support and contribute to higher-level ones?
• How will we track and measure progress towards key results?
• How will we ensure accountability?

Get an in-depth look at OKRs with our Ultimate OKR Playbook

5. Derive a strategic plan

The next step of the strategic planning process gets down to the nitty-gritty “how” — developing a clear, practical strategic plan for bridging the gap between now and the future.   

To do this, you’ll need to brainstorm short- and long-term approaches to achieving the goals you’ve set, answering a couple of key questions along the way. You must evaluate ideas based on factors like:  

• Feasibility : How realistic and achievable is it?  
• Impact : How conducive is it to goal attainment?  
• Cost : Can we fund this approach, and is it worth the investment?  
• Alignment : Does it support our mission, vision, and values?  

From your approaches, you can devise a detailed action plan, which covers things like:  

• Timelines : When will we take each step, and what are the deadlines?  
• Milestones : What key achievements will ensure consistent progress?  
• Resource requirements : What’s needed to achieve each step?  
• Responsibilities : Who's accountable in each step?  
• Risks and challenges : What can affect our ability to execute our plan? How will we address these?  

With a detailed action plan like this, you can move from abstract goals to concrete steps, bringing you closer to achieving your strategic objectives.  

6. Write and communicate your strategic plan

Writing and communicating your strategic plan involves everyone, ensuring each team is on the same page. Here’s a clear, concise structure you can use to cover the most important strategic planning components:  

• Executive summary : Highlights and priorities in your strategic overview   
• Introduction : Background on your strategic plan  
• Connection : How your strategic plan aligns with your organization’s mission, vision, and values  
• Environmental scan : An overview of your SWOT analysis findings  
• Strategic priorities and goals : Informed short and long-term organizational goals  
• Strategic approach : An overview of your tactical plan   
• Resource needs : How you'll deploy technology, funding, and employees  
• Risk and challenges : How you’ll mitigate the unknowns if and when they arise  
• Implementation plan : A step-by-step resource deployment plan for achieving your strategy  
• Monitoring and evaluation : How you’ll keep your plan heading in the right direction  
• Conclusion : A summary of the strategic plan and everything it entails  
• What information or context do stakeholders need to understand the strategic plan?
• How can we emphasize the connection between the strategic plan and the overall purpose and direction of the organization?
• What initiatives or strategies will we implement to drive progress?
• How will we mitigate or address risks?
• What are the specific steps and actions we need to take to implement the strategic plan?
• Any additional information or next steps we need to communicate?

7. Implement, monitor, and revise performance 

Finally, it’s time to implement your strategic plan, making sure it's up to date, creating a persistent, always-on strategy that doesn't lag behind. As you get the ball rolling, keep a close eye on your timelines, milestones, and performance targets, and whether these align with your internal and external environment.   

Internally, indicators like completions, issues, and delays provide visibility into your process. If any bottlenecks, inefficiencies, or misalignment arises, take corrective action promptly — adjust the plan, reallocate resources, or provide additional training to employees.  

Externally, you should monitor changes such as customer preferences, competitive pressures, economic shifts , and regulatory changes. These impact the success of your strategic action plan and may require tweaks along the way.   

Remember, implementing a strategic plan isn’t a one-time task — continual evaluation is essential for an always-on strategy. It involves extending beyond planning stages and contextualizing the strategy in real-time, allowing for swift adaptations to changing circumstances to ensure your plan remains relevant.

• Are there any bottlenecks, inefficiencies, or misalignments we need to address?
• Are we monitoring and analyzing external factors?
• Are we prepared to make necessary tweaks or adaptations along the way?
• Are we agile enough to promptly correct deviations from our strategic plan while maintaining an "always-on" strategy for continual adjustments?

You can use several frameworks to guide you through the strategic planning process. Some of the most influential ones include:

• Balanced scorecard (BSC) : Takes an overarching approach to strategic planning, covering financial, customer, internal processes, and learning and growth, aligning short-term operational tasks with long-term strategic goals.
• SWOT analysis : Highlights your business's internal strengths and weaknesses alongside external opportunities and threats to enable informed decisions about your strategic direction.
• OKRs : Structures goals as a set of measurable objectives and key results. They cascade down from top-level organizational objectives to lower-level team goals, ensuring alignment across the entire organization. Get an in-depth look at OKRs here . 
• Scenario planning : Involves envisioning and planning for various possible future scenarios, allowing you to prepare for a range of potential outcomes. It's particularly useful in volatile environments rife with uncertainties.
• Porter's five forces : Evaluates the competitive forces within your industry — rivalry among existing competitors, bargaining power of buyers and suppliers, threat of new entrants, and threat of substitutes — to shape strategies that position the organization for success.

Common problems with strategic planning and how to overcome them

While strategic planning provides a roadmap for business success, it's not immune to challenges. Recognizing and addressing these is crucial for effective strategy implementation. Let's explore common issues encountered in strategic planning and strategies to overcome them.

Static nature

Traditional strategic planning models often follow a linear, annual, and inflexible process that doesn't accommodate quick changes in the business landscape. Strategies formulated this way may quickly become outdated in today's fast-paced environment.

To overcome the rigidity of traditional strategic planning, your organization should integrate continuous environmental scanning processes. This includes monitoring market changes, competitor actions, and technological advancements, ensuring real-time insights inform strategic decision-making. Additionally, adopting agile methodologies allows for iterative planning, breaking down strategies into smaller, manageable components reviewed and adjusted regularly, ensuring adaptability in today's fast-paced landscape.

Disconnect between strategic plan and execution

There's often a significant gap between the strategic objectives and their actual implementation, leading to misalignment, confusion, and inefficiency within the organization.

To bridge the gap, ensure accountability, alignment, and feedback-driven processes across the business. Linking team roles and responsibilities to lower-level objectives can fosters alignment and accountability, whereas aligning these with overarching strategic objectives ensure coherence in execution. To ensure goals are optimized on an ongoing basis, implement a feedback mechanism that continuously evaluates progress against goals, enabling regular adjustments based on market feedback and internal insights.

Lack of real-time insights

Traditional planning models rely on historical data and periodic reviews, which might not capture real-time changes or emerging trends accurately. This can result in misaligned strategies unsuitable for the current business landscape.

Leverage advanced analytics tools and AI-driven technologies. Invest in technologies that offer real-time tracking and reporting of key performance indicators, with dashboards and monitoring systems that provide up-to-date insights. These allow you to gather, process, and interpret real-time data for proactive decision-making that aligns with the current business landscape. 

Failure to close the feedback loop

The absence of a feedback loop between strategy formulation, execution, and evaluation can impact learning and improvement. Companies might therefore struggle to refine their strategies based on real-time performance insights.

Establish a structured feedback loop encompassing strategy formulation, execution, and evaluation stages. Encourage employees to actively contribute insights on strategy execution, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and adaptation.

Best practices during the strategic planning process

Navigating strategic planning goes beyond overcoming challenges. A successful strategic plan requires you to embrace a set of guiding best practices, helping you navigate the development and implementation of your strategic planning process.   

1. Keep the planning process flexible

With ever-changing business environments, a one-and-done approach to strategic planning is insufficient. Your strategic plan needs to be adaptable to ensure its relevancy and its ability to weather the effects of changing circumstances.  

2. Pull together a diverse group of stakeholders

By including voices from across the organization, you can account for varying thoughts, perspectives, and experiences at each step of the strategic planning process, ensuring cross-functional alignment .  

3. Document the process

Continuous documentation of the strategic management process is crucial in capturing and communicating the key elements of strategic planning. This keeps everyone on the same page and your strategic plan up-to-date and relevant.  

4. Make data-driven decisions

Root your decisions in evidence and facts rather than assumptions or opinions. This cultivates accurate insights, improves prioritization, and reduces biased (flawed) decisions.  

5. Align your company culture with the strategic plan 

Your strategic plan can only be successful if everyone is on board with it — company culture supports what you’re trying to achieve. Behaviors, rules, and attitudes optimize the execution of your strategic plan.  

6. Leverage AI 

Using AI in strategic planning supports the development of an always-on strategy — amplifying strategic agility, conducting comprehensive environmental scans, and expediting planning phases. It can streamline operations, facilitate data-driven decision-making, and provide transparent insights into progress to drive accountability, engagement, and alignment with the strategic plan.

The strategic planning process in a nutshell

Careful strategy mapping is crucial for any organization looking to achieve its long-term goals while staying true to its mission, vision, and values. The seven steps in the strategic planning process outlined in this article provide a solid framework your organization can follow — from clarifying your organization’s purpose and developing a strategic plan, to implementing, monitoring, and revising performance. These steps will help your company meet goal measurements and create an always-on strategy that's rooted in the present. 

It’s important to remember that strategic planning is not a one-time event. To stay effective and relevant, you must continuously monitor and adapt your strategy in response to changing circumstances. This ongoing process of improvement keeps your organization competitive and demonstrates your commitment to achieving your goals.  

Quantive empowers modern organizations to turn their ambitions into reality through strategic agility. It's where strategy, teams, and data come together to drive effective decision-making, streamline execution, and maximize performance.  

As your company navigates today’s competitive landscape, you need an Always-On Strategy to continuously bridge the gap between current and desired business outcomes. Quantive brings together the technology, expertise, and passion to transform your strategy from a static plan to a feedback-driven engine for growth.  

Whether you’re a visionary start-up, a mid-market business looking to conquer, or a large enterprise facing disruption, Quantive keeps you ahead — every step of the way. For more information, visit www.quantive.com . 

Additional resources

Strategy execution in 4 steps: keys to successful strategy, how top companies are closing the strategy execution gap, 7 best practices for strategy execution, why your business needs strategy execution software, subscribe for our newsletter.

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Strategic Planning in Business

Table of Contents

What is business strategic planning, the strategic planning process in 3 steps, what is a business strategic plan, key components of a business strategic plan, business strategic plan example, strategic plan vs. business plan.

Strategic planning is key for success in business. By planning strategically for the future, a business can achieve its goals. It’s easier said than done, but the more you know about strategic planning, the better chance you have at succeeding.

Business strategic planning is the process of creating a business strategy and an accompanying business strategic plan to implement a company’s vision and achieve its goals over time. The main goal of strategic planning is to take a company from its current state to its desired state through a series of business actions.

The business strategic planning process usually consists of defining business goals, doing a SWOT analysis to assess the company’s business environment and developing a business strategy. The leadership team is in charge of business strategic planning, as it has a very important impact on the overall direction of a company.

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Strategic Planning is one of the three levels of organizational planning, which is the process that allows organizations to define its objectives for the future and make action plans to guide the efforts of each of its departments, employees and management levels .

The other two levels of organizational planning are tactical and operational planning. Let’s see how these three types of organizational planning differ from each other.

Strategic Planning vs. Tactical Planning

While a strategic plan is created by the top management team and defines the high-level strategic goals of an entire organization, a tactical plan has a narrower scope. A tactical plan is created by the middle management level of a business and describes the specific goals, initiatives, challenges and resources for each department and how its efforts contribute to the completion of the larger strategic plan of the business.

Strategic Planning vs. Operational Planning

An operational plan allows you to establish guidelines, procedures and best practices for the daily operations of your business. The main objective of operational planning is to ensure that your business operations contribute to the accomplishment of the strategic objectives defined in the strategic plan.

Strategic planning is very important, but it doesn’t need to be overly complex. Let’s simplify this process by breaking it down into three simple steps.

1. Set Business Goals

A business goal is simply an accomplishment that a company wants to achieve in the short, medium or long term. Business goals can take many forms such as increasing sales, revenue, customer satisfaction levels and brand positioning, among many other things.

2. Conduct a SWOT Analysis

The goal of a business strategy is to leverage the strengths of a business and minimize the impact of its weaknesses. Those two things are internal factors. The strengths of a company can become competitive advantages that can lead to business growth. There are many types of business strengths and weaknesses such as scale, speed, or R&D, just to name a few.

Threats and opportunities refer to external factors such as competitors or an untapped market. A successful business strategy considers all of these factors to define how a product or service will be created, marketed and sold, and a SWOT analysis is a great starting point.

3. Develop a Business Strategy & Strategic Plan

Once you’ve completed your SWOT analysis, you can create a business strategy that’s designed to help position your company in the market. Your business strategy guides how you produce, market and sell your product or service based on internal and external analysis.

Then, you’ll need a strategic plan to explain how you plan to execute that business strategy. To oversee the execution of a business strategic plan, managers need to manage time, costs and tasks. ProjectManager is a project planning tool that allows managers to plan, schedule and manage their team’s work. Plan your work with professional tools such as Gantt charts, kanban boards, task lists and calendars. Then track your progress in real time to stick to your strategic plan. Get started for free.

A business strategic plan is an implementation plan that’s meant to turn a business strategy into action items that can be executed over time. Business strategic plans are usually executed over the course of 3-5 years.

How to Develop a Strategic Plan

To develop a strategic plan, you should ask yourself the following three questions.

• Where Is the Business Now? Gather as much information on your business as possible including internal operations and what drives its profitability. Compare the business to competitors and note the similarities and differences in detail. This isn’t a day-to-day operational study, but a broader look at the business in context to itself and its environment. But don’t go crazy; stay realistic in terms of your business goals. Be detached and critical in your analysis.
• Where Do You Want to Go? Now it’s time to decide what your top-level objectives are for the future. Start with a vision statement , objectives, values, techniques and goals. Look forward to five years or more to forecast where you want the business to be at that time. This means figuring out what the focus of the business will be in the future. Will that focus differ from what it is now, and what competitive advantages do have you in the marketplace? This is where you build the foundation and initiate changes.
• How Can You Get There? Once you know where you are and where you want to go, it’s time to plan. What are the changes to the structure, financing, etc., necessary for the business to get there? Decide on the best way to implement those changes, the timeframe with deadlines and how to finance it. Remember, this is looking at the business at large, so consider major endeavors such as diversification, existing growth, acquisition and other functional matters. A gap analysis can be a big help here.

Once you’ve answered the above questions and have a way to achieve the long-term goals laid out in the strategic plan, the next step is making sure you have the right person to manage all of its moving parts. They must be analytical, a creative thinker and able to grasp operational detail.

That doesn’t mean the strategic plan is led by one person. It’s best to not do it alone; seek other opinions. The people in your organization, from bottom to top, are all great resources to offer perspectives from their standpoints. Don’t forget to take in the advice of stakeholders, including customers, clients, advisors and consultants.

To create a strong strategic plan, one must first have a strong understanding of the business that is to expand. How does the business work? Where does the business stand in relation to competitors in the marketplace? A strategic plan is built on the bones of the following foundational elements:

• Mission Statement: The mission statement describes what your company does.
• Vision Statement: The vision statement explains where your company expects to be in the future.
• Core Values: Guiding principles that shape your company’s organizational culture.
• Business Objectives: Consider using the SMART goal-setting technique . This simply means setting up specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound objectives that your company wants to achieve.
• SWOT Analysis: External and internal factors that make up your company’s business competitive environment.
• Action Plan: A plan outlining steps that will be taken to achieve the business objectives of your organization.
• Financials: A section that shows the financial performance expectations, the budget and the resources that will be required to implement the action plan.
• Performance Measurements: Performance indicators that will be used to measure the effectiveness of the action plan.

Never forget to check your strategic plan against reality. In addition to being achievable, it must be practical for your business environment, resources and marketplace.

Now let’s look at a simple business strategic plan example. This is a strategic plan for a small construction company.

1. Mission, Vision & Core Values

• Mission Statement: To build residential spaces that provide wellbeing for our clients.
• Vision Statement: To offer the best construction experience for our clients and expand our brand throughout the globe.
• Core Values: Sustainable innovation and respect for the environment.

2. Business Objectives

• Business Objective 1: Grow operating margin from 15% to 20% over the next year.
• Business Objective 2: Reduce operating costs by 5% over the next quarter
• Business Objective 3: Increase the number of new contracts generated by 10% over the next year

3. SWOT Analysis

• Strengths: Available financing, brand visibility and know-how.
• Weaknesses: Lack of PPE, human capital and expertise in construction areas such as plumbing, electrical work and masonry, which requires subcontractors.
• Opportunities: Lack of environmentally-friendly construction companies in the market.
• Threats: Larger construction companies compete for contracts in the area.

4. Action Plan

• Business Objective 1: To grow operating margin, new employees with plumbing, electrical work and masonry experience will be hired to cut down subcontractor costs. This must be done by the end of the first quarter.
• Business Objective 2: To reduce operating costs, the company will acquire property, plant and equipment. By doing this, the company will no longer rent equipment from third parties, which will reduce operating costs significantly in the medium and long term.
• Business Objective 3: To increase the number of new contracts generated, the leadership team will invest more in the PR, marketing and advertising departments. The company will also invest in key positions for the construction bidding process such as contract estimators.
• Financials: This section will explain in detail what are the costs associated with the work items in the action plan as well as the expected financial benefits for the company.

Our free strategic plan template helps leadership teams gather important information about their business strategy, which makes it the perfect tool to start shaping a strategic plan for your business or project.

More Free Strategic Planning Templates

Here are some free strategic planning templates for Word and Excel that will help you with key aspects of the strategic planning process. Use them individually or add them to your strategic plan template for Word so you don’t miss any detail about your organizational strategy.

Strategic Roadmap Template

This strategic roadmap template allows you to map the activities, strategic projects and initiatives that each business department will execute to accomplish the objectives defined in the strategic plan of an organization.

Strategic Map Template

This strategic map template it’s a strategic planning tool that allows you to visualize all the strategic objectives of your organization and understand how they’re interrelated.

Balanced Scorecard Template

A balanced scorecard is a chart that allows you to set strategic objectives that will benefit your business in one of four key areas, its finances, internal processes, customer satisfaction and organizational learning.

Vision Statement Template

The vision statement is one of the most important aspects of the organizational strategy of a business. It’s a short but powerful statement that describes the overall direction of a company and what it intends to achieve in the future. This free vision statement template will help you focus on what matters most and define the vision of your business.

A strategic plan is a type of business plan, but there are distinctions between the two. Whereas a strategic plan is for implementing and managing the strategic direction of a business, a business plan is more often the document that starts a business.

A business plan is used primarily to get funding for the venture or direct the operation, and the two plans target different timeframes in business history. A strategic plan is used to investigate a future period, usually between three-to-five years. A business plan is more routinely a year out.

A Different Intent

A strategic plan offers a business focus, direction and action to help the business grow from the point it presently resides to a greater market share in the future. A business plan, on the other hand, is more focused on offering a structure to capture and implement ideas that initially define a business.

With a strategic plan, existing resources are prioritized to increase revenue and return on investment. The business plan is different in that it’s seeking funding for a venture that doesn’t yet exist. Where a strategic plan is building a sustainable competitive advantage in the future, a business plan is designed to take advantage of a current business opportunity.

So, a strategic plan is communicating direction to teams and stakeholders in order to achieve future goals. A business plan isn’t talking to staff, which is likely nonexistent or minimal at this point. It’s speaking to banks and other financial supporters.

Related Strategic Planning Content

• Strategic Project Management: Planning Strategic Projects
• Strategic Planning Models: An Introduction to 5 Popular Models
• A Quick Guide to Strategic Initiatives
• How to Create a Strategic Roadmap for Your Organization
• Project Alignment: Aligning Your Project to Business Strategy

Strategic planning, like any planning, requires keeping a lot of balls in the air. That means having the right tool to plan, monitor and report on all the various tasks and resources. ProjectManager is online project management software that gives you control over every aspect of creating and implementing a strategic plan. Try it today with this free 30-day trial.

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Strategic Management

(15 reviews)

Kennedy B. Reed, Virginia Tech

Copyright Year: 2020

ISBN 13: 9781949373950

Publisher: Virginia Tech Publishing

Language: English

Formats Available

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Learn more about reviews.

Reviewed by Jiwon Suh, Assistant Professor, University of Texas at Arlington on 3/7/24

This book covers core topics that should be included in a strategic management textbook. I particularly like that the book has a chapter devoted to corporate governance, ethics, and social responsibility. I hope to see that vertical and horizontal... read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 4 see less

This book covers core topics that should be included in a strategic management textbook. I particularly like that the book has a chapter devoted to corporate governance, ethics, and social responsibility. I hope to see that vertical and horizontal alignment within an organization is highlighted at the beginning of the book. I see it in Chapter 10.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

This book contains core and major models, concepts, frameworks, and theories that should be included in a strategic management textbook. Especially, this book also explains a balanced scorecard and its linkage with organizational mission and vision.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

The main content is highly relevant. The concepts and frames that are included in the book are not fast-changing. This book uses a variety of examples to explain concepts to help students understand. These examples are a good mixture of timing (old and relatively new) and I believe such examples should be aged well to evaluate.

Clarity rating: 5

This book was well-written. This book uses clear language so that students including undergraduates can easily follow.

Consistency rating: 5

This book is consistent with all the structures and contents that are expected in the strategic management textbooks.

Modularity rating: 5

The topics in this book are well divided into 11 chapters so that faculty members can easily develop a semester-long course. On page 2, the authors also provide 6 modules on how these chapters can be used in a shorter course.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

The way of chapter sequencing is easy to follow: understanding strategic management -> external analysis -> internal analysis -> strategy development -> implementation. Every chapter provides ‘Learning Objectives,’ ‘Key Takeaway,’ and ‘Exercises’ from which students can effectively learn about the topics in the chapters. Also, figures, pictures, videos, and other sources are very helpful.

Interface rating: 4

External sources were hyperlinked with the original sources. This book also provides enough space between paragraphs and the next sections. This helps readers. It would be very helpful if the book included an Index at the end of the book.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

I didn’t find any grammatical errors.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

This book uses examples from different cultural backgrounds, such as an example of ancient China and wars on Russian soil on pages 18-20 and an example of Starbucks in Korea on page 33.

I'd like to use this book for my Strategic HR management course in the public and nonprofit sectors. Although this book doesn't 100% fit my course, I can use this book to explain and provide core/major concepts of strategic management.

Reviewed by Sergiy Dmytriyev, Assistant Professor of Management, James Madison University on 9/10/23

The textbook covers all key topics in the strategic management such as overall strategy, business- and corporate-level strategies, the analysis of external and internal environments, international strategy, organizational design, innovation, etc.... read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less

The textbook covers all key topics in the strategic management such as overall strategy, business- and corporate-level strategies, the analysis of external and internal environments, international strategy, organizational design, innovation, etc. Each sections ends with the reference list of the cited sources, and the Glossary of key terms is provided at the end of the book.

The book is well-written which makes it an easy read.

The content is up-to-date, with plenty of contemporary business situations and examples. At the same time, these examples are of general nature and can be used in a classroom for many years ahead, without become obsolete. Having said that, the textbook also has a number of historical examples which is a must to have in order to learn from strategic successes and failures.

The text is written in a more informal way than in some other strategic management textbook. This makes this textbook better perceived by undergraduate students, who are rather more excited by its interesting and accessible prose.

Consistency rating: 4

The textbook utilized common terminology and frameworks used in the strategic management field, and is consistent throughout the whole text. The only thing, sometimes I could have a feeling that there were many interesting narratives and examples, but some of them might not be well connected among themselves, which could make the reading slightly less coherent, though it wasn't a big deal.

Indeed, the text is readily divisible into smaller reading section since many of them start and end in a similar fashion making them standalone pieces. I didn't find many self-references which serves the modality purpose well.

The book is well organized in terms of the sequence of introduced topics and the transitions between them.

Interface rating: 5

The textbook offers an easy-to-follow navigation structure such as a numeration for each section/subsection as well as consistent headings' styles and the use of colors and graphical designs.

I didn't find any grammatical errors or typos in the text which speaks to its high quality.

Cultural Relevance rating: 3

The textbook is full of various examples from different countries which helps keep the reader's mind open to insights from different cultural environments. Yet, I wish there would be more examples with female and minority managers - I realize that today those groups are still underrepresented in leadership roles, but the author could have considered purposefully selecting those stories/backgrounds which may appeal to and inspire different audiences.

Most sections in the textbook end with discussion questions (often provoking ones) which can help with kicking off interactive discussion in class. The key information is summarized in the form of tables or graphs that make it easy to review the summarized learnings. There are also many videos throughout the book which can help break the monotony of reading with interesting visual experiences.

To sum it up, the textbook offers a typical content for a strategic management textbook (in terms of key strategic topics, terminology, theories and frameworks, etc.), yet it does it in a more appealing way compared to some more "formal" available textbooks in the market. In addition to offering discussion questions and exercises at the end of each section, the textbook also utilizes a more accessible prose for undergraduate students, as well as provides many illustrative or summary tables and graphs, as well as short business stories and videos done in an interesting way.

I really like the textbook and this year I started using it in my Strategic Management course.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Gale, Professor Emeritus of Strategic Management, Loyola Marymount University on 4/10/23

[Note: I used the book in my Strategic Management class in Spring 2023 semester. I have, in the past, used the open textbook, Mastering Strategic Management on which this one is based as well as a commercial version of the text which was picked up... read more

[Note: I used the book in my Strategic Management class in Spring 2023 semester. I have, in the past, used the open textbook, Mastering Strategic Management on which this one is based as well as a commercial version of the text which was picked up by a pubisher.] The coverage in the book is pretty standard for Strategic Management texts. It's a little light on implementation/execution particularly on reward systems, strategic leadership and a bit on culture. Like most of the texts, it really doesn't cover the online world. Because it was done in 2020 and used some of the materials some of the materials need newer examples--and to reflect lessons of the pandemic and de-globalization (in Chap. 9) There is a glossary but no index.

The coverage of the book is accurate in the concepts handled.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 4

All strategic management textbooks suffer from obsolescence--it is the nature of the subject matter and the need for ongoing revision of relevant examples. The concepts change more slowly. Use of the book requires instructors to fill that in to make the material relevant. The prior book (from 2020) was not updated for years which made it hard to use. Hopefully this one will be.

The book was extremely well-written and edited. This is remarkable since there was a team who worked on it at VPI. Kudos for doing a good job.

It is consistent. The framework used is very standard in strategic management texts.

The book is well done with coherent chapters and headings and subheading breaking up the text. I was able to use some of the materials out of order.

Strategic management textbooks lend themselves to a logical organization based on the analytic process common to the topic. This book is consistent with that. I did find that references and credits, which are listed in the chapter sections, are a bit distracting and would be better, in my opinion, at the end of the chapters. Likewise, I would prefer that the Exercises be at the chapter end as well. Learning Objectives at the beginning of each chapter are useful as well as the Takeaways in the sections.

My students and I used the PDF version of the book which is pretty standard with only limited jumps for Table of Contents. .

I didn't find any grammatical errors.

Cultural Relevance rating: 4

I did not see anything culturally insensitive or offensive in the book. There is, as is typical in the texts in the field, not a lot of cultural variety. There are no Black or Hispanic business in the examples.

The book did what I wanted it to in the course. I thought that Chapter 7 on Innovation is a bit of a hodge-podge of topics and doesn't flow all that well. The Powerpoint slides that the author made available are very uneven and I wasn't able to really use them--though I didn't really need to since I have taught the course for so long. They are not the equivalent of what commercial publishers provide with their texts. I did not use the text bank that is also available.

Overall, a good quality textbook that is usable with the caveats I raised earlier.

Reviewed by Stephen Horner, Associate Professor, Allen Community College on 6/9/21

Chapter one is a good an example of the type of comprehensiveness that I like. The text addresses most of the major models and concepts within the strategy domain. It also includes examples of strategy and strategic management from antiquity and... read more

Chapter one is a good an example of the type of comprehensiveness that I like. The text addresses most of the major models and concepts within the strategy domain. It also includes examples of strategy and strategic management from antiquity and classic military history encompassing ancient, modern, and postmodern eras. In addition, the critique of strategic management is refreshing to see in an introductory textbook chapter.

I find no glaring inaccuracies.

The cross disciplinary relevance of the text is demonstrated by allusion in chapter one to strategy throughout history. The text also has relevance in terms of relating the topic to contemporary issues.

This text is written at a basic level easily accessible to the common reader and especially suited to today's college senior.

The text uses the A-F-I framework consistently throughout.

The chapter topics are organized following the traditional analysis-formulation-implementation (A-F-I) framework allowing the course to be easily divided into modules. In addition, the authors have developed their own modular framework overlaying the A-F-I model.

The text uses the traditional analysis-formulation-implementation framework while taking a critical asssessment of the use of that framework.

The layout and flow of the text are satisfactory. In addition, I appreciate the smaller chunks in each chapter supplemented by references cited only in those specific chunks.

The writing demonstrates no systematic grammatical difficulties. The use of the Engish language is proper and acceptable.

The authors recognize changing sociocultural values and demonstrate sensitivity of the theory and practice of strategic management to such changes.

I found the text to be quite readable. It spawned in me new ideas for ways of reaching my students.

Reviewed by Yuan Li, Assistant Professor, James Madison University on 5/29/20

The text covers all major topics discussed in a standard strategic management textbook. Some topics that could be included or discussed more in detail are strategic leadership, innovation management, and corporate entrepreneurship. The pdf version... read more

The text covers all major topics discussed in a standard strategic management textbook. Some topics that could be included or discussed more in detail are strategic leadership, innovation management, and corporate entrepreneurship. The pdf version of the text does not include an index or glossary, which can be an enhancement to the book.

The content is accurate, error-free, and unbiased. However, there are a few typos in the book. Some of the labels are incorrect. For example, Level 3 of Table 10.4 is labeled incorrectly.

The content is up-to-date. For the most part, the examples are classic and do not need to be updated frequently. However, some of the examples, especially those related to movies are dated. Nevertheless, necessary updates can be easily implemented.

One of my favorite things about this text is its clarity. The text is written in a language that is accessible to all undergraduate students, including freshmen. Jargon and technical terms are explained in layman’s terms using real-world examples.

The text is internally consistent in terms of terminology and framework.

The chapters of the text are self-contained and can be individually assigned to students or used as additional readings to supplement a different text.

The structure of the text is clear and follows the structure of a standard strategic management textbook. The only difference is that international strategies are discussed before corporate-level strategies. Many of the tables and the text repeat each other. I think some of the tables can be eliminated.

There are no significant interface issues in the text. There are no hyperlinks in the pdf version of the book. All navigation is done through the search and find function of the pdf reader. The text in the examples and vignettes is too small and hard to read, at least for the pdf version I have. Overall, I would describe it as a no-frills text.

The text contains no grammatical errors.

The text is not culturally offensive in any way. The examples include both American and non-American firms mostly competing in the US market.

This is a great book for an introductory level strategic management class. Students do not have to be a management major to understand the book. Instructors can easily supplement the book with examples that are relevant to the background and major of their students. I find the book an interesting and enjoyable read. The authors did a great job in making strategic management interesting to students.

Reviewed by David Flanagan, Professor of Management, Western Michigan University on 12/12/19

This book covers all the major topics needed in a strategic management course plus a few other useful topics. read more

This book covers all the major topics needed in a strategic management course plus a few other useful topics.

First rate book. Easy to read with no errors (conceptually or grammatically).

All the conceptual information is up to date. I do have students do assignments where they research more recent examples.

Students comment that it is straight forward and easy to read. Key concepts are defined.

The text flows well from start to finish.

The chapters break up the material well as do sections within chapters.

good structure

easy to interface with

Well edited and credibly written

I detected nothing that could be insensitive

The authors are outstanding in their field. Can't find more credible sources.

Reviewed by Jason Kiley, Assistant Professor, Oklahoma State University on 5/21/18

Overall, the book has very good coverage of the topics typically included in a strategy textbook. To be more specific, I reviewed the book against a commercial book that I have used in the past. I looked at 43 topics that is a union of the content... read more

Overall, the book has very good coverage of the topics typically included in a strategy textbook. To be more specific, I reviewed the book against a commercial book that I have used in the past. I looked at 43 topics that is a union of the content I would use across the two books. The commercial book covered 41 topics, and Mastering Strategic Management ("MSM") covered 39. Of the discrepancies, three topics in the commercial book and one topic in MSM were topics that were probably timely when written but are less relevant now. Excluding those, each book had one topic that I would have liked to have seen in the other.

Across a number of topics, the exposition that fit my expectations about the material covered, explanations of the material, and examples that fit the material. Strategy covers a number of models that have been around for some time, and the authors seemed to do a good job of thinking about which models are reasonable to describe as they were conceived and which ones should be adjusted a bit to better reflect the underlying mechanisms or modern circumstances.

One small exception (shared in most strategy books) is the description of the BCG matrix using market share (as originally conceived). That notion is very sensitive to specification of markets, and I've seen more helpful formulations that describe it a little more generally as having dimensions that reflect using and generating cash.

The main content is fine and highly relevant. However, there are some examples which have not aged well. This is not so much the fault of the authors, as the business-relevant content is fine, but an example using Jared from Subway reads very differently in light of subsequent revelations. That is perhaps the most glaring, but there are a few others that have not aged well (e.g., the AppleTV has become reasonably successful in subsequent iterations). That said, this book is well within the norms of example relevance over time.

The book is written directly and clearly. In terms of style, it is more approachable than some alternatives, in part because I never got the sense that the authors were lowering the information density to produce more text.

Terminology and approach are generally consistent. Strategy is at the intersection of other disciplines, so there is often a change of perspective, but that comes with the content. That said, the authors have combined those well into a logical, consistent narrative.

For the most part, this book would be easy to use out of order or as selections. The chapters have numbered subdivisions that are logically coherent, and, in my view, it would be clear to students to assign selections. My initial read suggests that the brief motivating examples to begin chapters and the conclusions of chapters would be helpful to include even if the middle sections are selected from or reordered.

Overall, the organization and flow are consistent and logical, and it generally mirrors that of most strategy books. In a couple of places, the ordering is a bit different (e.g., international strategy before corporate-level strategy), but the broader logic may actually be more linear that way.

I used the epub 3 version of the book. The table elements tended to be built with markup instead of images, so they rendered nicely on a high-resolution display. Cross references were often done with links, and many text boxes were also done with markup, so the book takes advantage of the technology it uses for distribution. Given the prevalence of mobile devices among students, this is a strong positive for this book compared to others.

The writing is clear, error-free, and straightforward, including the consistent use of active voice.

Though the book (like many strategy and business textbooks) has a somewhat US-centric presentation, there are plenty of examples that include diversity along a number of dimensions where that kind of diversity is not the topic of the example. That broad level of inclusiveness is a positive for the book.

Overall, I found the book to be consistently high in quality, coverage, and consistency with other books in this area. Using it as an alternative or replacement for other books should be straightforward. The anonymous authors have done the field and our students a real service in writing this book.

Reviewed by Jiyun Wu, Associate Professor , Rhode Island College on 5/21/18

The book covers key areas of strategic management, much like other strategic management textbooks. read more

The book covers key areas of strategic management, much like other strategic management textbooks.

The content is accurate, though there are a few typos.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 3

The examples are a few years old and need to be updated.

The book is very lucidly written. I think it is one of the best written textbooks.

The book is internally consistent in terms of terminology and framework.

The text is easy to follow.

The topics are organized well and easy to follow.

I didn't encounter any problem with navigation.

I did not detect any grammar errors, although I did find a few typos.

The book is culturally relevant.

Please update the examples and correct the few typos in the text.

Reviewed by Edward Ward, Professor, Saint Cloud State University on 2/1/18

Relative to the other textbooks I have used in my strategic management course, this textbook is comprehensive. Topics include analyzing the environment, leading strategically, selection of business level strategies, ethics, organization design,... read more

Relative to the other textbooks I have used in my strategic management course, this textbook is comprehensive. Topics include analyzing the environment, leading strategically, selection of business level strategies, ethics, organization design, and more. However, it does not have a separate chapter about small business strategy.

This book is accurate as evidenced by the frequent references from both research journals and practitioners' publications. There is little in the way of the author's opinions, rather facts are emphasized.

The relevance of the book is excellent in that historical examples are often used, which by definition will not need to be updated. The examples of recent strategy uses (e.g. a goal by Coca-Cola on page 40 is for 2012) are in need of only slight modifications.

This is the paramount strength of the book. When the vocabulary (i.e. jargon) of strategic management is used, facile explanations and examples are used to clarify the term. An example is Figure 2.5, which explains financial performance measures for students who did not major in finance or accounting.

What is admirable as to the book's consistency is it's sequence of chapters, such as starting with "Mastering Strategy" as chapter one, through "Selecting Business Level Strategies" in the middle of the text, and concluding with corporate governance and ethics. There is also consistency in terms of the key takeaways and exercises throughout the book.

This is another strength of the book. For example, in clarifying "Entrepreneurial Orientation" sections such as "Autonomy", "Competitive Aggressiveness", and "Innovativeness" are presented in small sections that in total describe the term. This is done consistently in the book, such as in chapter eight the terms vertical integration, backward vertical integration, and forward vertical integration.

The topics are presented in a deductive order, starting with a superordinate term such as "Strategies for Getting Smaller", followed by retrenchment and restructuring. By describing a construct by its dimensions, the construct is more readily understood by students.

I don't think there are any such problems.

There are not any grammatical errors. I do think the reading level is for undergraduates rather than MBA students.

The photographs and examples are varied in terms of surface characteristics.

It is superior to my present textbook in terms of being written in a conversational style, which is complemented by useful tables such as 8.7 on page 293. These tables and other graphics will assist students with a visual learning style. The only negative that comes to mind is if this textbook is to be used for a MBA course, outside readings will need to be assigned.

Reviewed by Jorge Zazueta, Adjunct Professor, American University on 2/1/18

The book covers all the standard topics in Strategic Management in a well-structured and cohesive manner. The table of contents provides detail on contents and the interactive PDF version is an excellent way to navigate the text. Electronic... read more

The book covers all the standard topics in Strategic Management in a well-structured and cohesive manner. The table of contents provides detail on contents and the interactive PDF version is an excellent way to navigate the text. Electronic versions are searchable, obviating the need for an index.

I didn't find any inaccuracies or biases in the text (although I ran into a few minor typos). Each concept follows a critical discussion inviting the reader to reflect on the topic, rather than being dogmatic.

The topics covered are well established Strategic Management ideas with direct application in actual business practice, making the content both relevant and time enduring.

Clarity rating: 4

The book is clearly written and enjoyable. It provides straight commentary on the ideas discussed and is very easy to read. A minor drawback is that it lacks memorable design around many of the classic frameworks. For example, when discussing the diamond model in chapter 7, its elements are defined in the form of a table--rather than in a diamond shape.

The narrative is consistent throughout both in depth and style.

While the content follows a logical path, chapters are concise and mostly stand-alone, making it easy to use individual chapters or to tailor content for a class.

The topics follow a standard order of ideas in a consistent and logical flow, while maintaining modularity.

The interactive PDF version is clean and easy to use. A comprehensive table of contents is always available without being intrusive and the book is fully searchable. Making it convenient for student research or review. A keyword search results in a list of references to different chapters in the book, with a short summary of the content discussed.

Grammatical Errors rating: 4

Other than a few minor spelling typos. I found no errors.

The nature of the book is mostly transparent to cultural issues. Examples are business focused and do reflect a wide world view.

It is a great introductory text to Strategic Management. It covers all the standard material in a concise, easily accessible way. I would have enjoyed a bit more quantitative material, such as basic formulas from economics or discussions about how to quantify market competitiveness for example. Perhaps, that´s the material for a second book….

Reviewed by Bill Rossman, Instructor, Penn State University on 2/1/18

The book covers the major topics expected to be covered in a strategic management textbook. read more

The book covers the major topics expected to be covered in a strategic management textbook.

The material covered in the textbook is accurate and error-free.

Th material is up-to-date, however, some of the examples in the book could quickly become outdated. For example, there is an example referencing a 2001 movie which students may not understand. The book could easily be updated to keep examples up-to-date.

The book is clearly written without unnecessary jargon. Definitions for key terms could be emphasized to help students identify key terms and concepts. Additionally a glossary would be beneficial for students to quickly reverence the definition of key terms.

The book is consistent with other texts on the topic of strategic management.

The book is modular and chapters could be reorganized without issue. Instructors could assign chapters or subsections as they see fit without loss of educational value.

The book flowed well, the only change I would make is to move the corporate-level strategies to follow the business-level strategies. The instructor could easily make this change when assigning chapters in the textbook.

I did not encounter any issues with the interface of the textbook. The location of charts and images were appropriate and supported the material.

The book was free of grammatical errors.

The text was not insensitive or offensive.

Supporting material such as glossary, online assignments or self check exercises could be included. Overall, the book is well thought out and easily adaptable for instructors to use.

Reviewed by Sam Cappel, Professor, Southeastern Louisiana University on 6/20/17

I found the book to be comprehensive, covering in detail important parts of strategic management. read more

I found the book to be comprehensive, covering in detail important parts of strategic management.

I found the book to be accurate and well referenced. Examples were used which were most instrumental in helping students to understand important concepts.

The text is written and/or arranged in such a way that necessary updates will be relatively easy and straightforward to implement. Many of the examples used are classic or very timely. It would require little work to update concepts and examples.

The book is written without unnecessary jargon. Terms commonly used in the study of Strategy are fully explained.

The framework of the book allows for easy transitions from one topic to another. Throughout the book there is consistency in the straight forward approach to topics. There is a consistent attempt within this book to explain complex concepts in such a way as to allow undergraduate students to master them easily.

Modularity rating: 4

The text is well divided into a logical sequence of intuitively developed reading sections. Sections within the book serve to reduce confusion which can occur when learning a subject area with the diversity and complexity of Business Strategy

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 4

I like the flow of the text but prefer a flow which started by simply following the strategic management process step by step.

I had no issues with the interface of the textbook. Navigation was simple and charts were well placed and clear.

I found no grammatical errors i the text.

Culturally the book was sensitive in dealing with issues such as ethics and the role of diversity in the workplace.

With the current push for on-line offerings I feel that it is now imperative that offerings include test banks, power-points, on-line readings, films and perhaps simulation tools that can be used on-line. I love the book for in-class use but feels that it does not offer enough support to be viable for extensive on-line offerings,

Reviewed by Cynthia Steutermann, Multi-Term Lecturer, University of Kansas on 8/21/16

This book does a somewhat good job of covering many aspects of strategic analysis. For instance, the discussions relative to cost leadership, differentiation, and focused strategies were good. However, I found this book to be lacking in critical... read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 3 see less

This book does a somewhat good job of covering many aspects of strategic analysis. For instance, the discussions relative to cost leadership, differentiation, and focused strategies were good. However, I found this book to be lacking in critical discussion areas, such as the importance of evaluating a firm's internal financial assets. While it mentioned current ratio, debt to equity ratio, and net income .. it does not show how to calculate those ratios. And, there are many, many more financial ratios that should be covered in great detail to effectively analyze an organization's internal financial capabilities. This was an area I would consider to be seriously lacking in content.

Other critical areas missing from this textbook were the discussion of entrepreneurial strategy and competitive dynamics, as well as managing innovation and corporate entrepreneurship. Likewise, this textbook did not include any strategic management cases which greatly supports a student's ability to apply concepts to a multi-page case of an organization they may be familiar with.

Also, while there was included on the website a table of contents, no such table of contents exists in the .pdf version that students would actually use. In general, this book is not written at the level of sophistication and comprehensiveness I would expect to use for college students, particularly since a strategic analysis course is often taught as a capstone course (undergraduate senior level of student). In my opinion, this textbook is written more at the senior in high school or college freshman level.

Content Accuracy rating: 4

The book's accuracy is adequate, although there are many areas of strategic analysis which I would consider to be missing in this textbook.

The one area of relevance and longevity I found to be questionable was the various references to "At the Movies". Some of the movies are quite dated and students may not have even heard of them. Or, if they have heard of the movie, they may not have seen it. While the intent seems to be a creative way to illustrate basic concepts, the use of movies is not (in my opinion) the most relevant way to accomplish this, at least to the extent that this is repeated throughout the textbook.

The book is written clearly, although not at the college reading level I would expect it to be written at.

Consistency rating: 3

The text is inconsistent since it references certain figures that actually do not exist. For instance, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) matrix is referenced to be in figure 8.7. There is no BCG matrix figure, nor any figure 8.7. In fact, there are very few figures in the book. There are some pictures (unidentified mostly) but no figures that illustrate important concepts.

The book's modularity is done well. Within each chapter there are several smaller reading sections.

The book's organization/structure flow is generally good. I believe the organization and flow would be better if corporate-level strategies followed business-level strategy, and then the chapter about international markets would follow after that. This textbook, instead, has business-level strategy, international markets, then corporate-level strategy.

The images are generally not distorted, although on page 172 the Arby's graphic and text are out of proportion. Page 177 includes some type of graphic that is only shades of grey. I don't know what that is intended to represent.

The text contains no grammatical errors that I observed.

The text is not culturally insensitive or offensive in any way that I observed.

Reviewed by Daniel Forbes, Associate Professor, U. of Minnesota on 6/10/15

The book covers most of the chapters commonly found in a strategy textbook, and the content within each chapter is also similar in terms of the key topics & models addressed. One exception is strategic entrepreneurship, which is not covered as... read more

The book covers most of the chapters commonly found in a strategy textbook, and the content within each chapter is also similar in terms of the key topics & models addressed. One exception is strategic entrepreneurship, which is not covered as a separate chapter as is often the case but is instead partially covered under "Entrepreneurial orientation" within Chapter 2, "Leading strategically". Another exception is that there is only one chapter on corporate strategy, whereas many books have a second chapter on strategy alternatives (M&A, etc.). However, some of this content has been folded into the corporate strategy chapter. The PDF I reviewed did not contain a glossary or index.

The book provides an accurate introduction to contemporary strategic management. The authors' perspective is consistent with mainstream scholarly views in the field.

Most strategy textbooks tend to gravitate towards concepts and models that have a relatively long "shelf life," and this one is no exception. The book contains current examples and timely content. The book also does a good job presenting strategy in ways that undergraduate students, in particular, will find relevant. It does this through an emphasis on familiar, everyday brands (Facebook, Redbox) and through cultural references, such as its "Strategy at the movies" segments, which link concepts in the book to recent popular films.

The book is written in clear and accessible prose, and it carries a sense of humor. At times I would have liked to see clearer definitions that were easier to find in the text (e.g., highlighted or placed in sidebars). For example, the concept of "cost leadership" is introduced with good examples, but a concise definition seems lacking. Having clear definitions on key concepts is helpful to students studying for exams and for faculty who want to check concepts for consistency across materials without re-reading entire sections.

The book is internally consistent. It provides a framework for understanding strategy that is coherent and, at the same time, generally consistent with other major texts.

The text seems modular, and reorganizing the material is unlikely to pose a problem. It would be easy to rearrange the materials within a strategy course - provided, of course, that foundational concepts (e.g., "capabilities") have been established early on, as would be required in working with any major strategy text.

The book's flow is logical and it adheres to a structure that is common in strategy texts. One slightly unusual sequencing is the presentation of international strategy before corporate strategy (the reverse is more common), but these two chapters remain adjacent and there is a reasonable case for doing this. Given the overall modularity of the book, moreover, instructors can rearrange chapters as they see fit without much difficulty.

The interface reflects the thoughtful and creative selection of accompanying visual materials, especially photos and illustrations. There are fewer charts and tables than in the average strategy text. Some instructors and MBA students might find the text easier to navigate with fewer visual interruptions overall and perhaps more data or charts included in addition to the pictures. Overall, I think this interface that would be well received by undergraduate students, in particular.

The book's grammar is fine.

The book does not appear to be culturally insensitive. Examples are drawn primarily from the U.S., as is common in many major strategy texts, but there are also many examples drawn from outside the U.S.

Overall, I think this book is a very solid and worthwhile contribution to the set of available strategy textbooks. A particular strength of the book is its accessible writing style and its selection of "user-friendly" illustrations and examples. I think the book would be especially well-suited to first-time students of strategy who seek a general introduction. I also like that the book avoids delivering long, arbitrary lists of items in presenting material (e.g., "the nine reasons firms do acquisitions"), which is a common weakness of strategy textbooks. Instead, this book is generally succinct and reasonably comprehensive. At the same time, instructors & students seeking a more advanced treatment of strategy may find coverage of some topics to be relatively light. For example, limitations of the 5 Forces model are only briefly addressed and issues of industry evolution do not seem to be addressed.

Reviewed by David Try Ph.D., Instructor , Northwest Community College on 10/9/13

I found this text to be well-written and high quality, with up-to-date material, examples and case studies. In my experience, both as an instructor and retired practitioner, this textbook covers all basic concepts and topics at an appropriate... read more

I found this text to be well-written and high quality, with up-to-date material, examples and case studies. In my experience, both as an instructor and retired practitioner, this textbook covers all basic concepts and topics at an appropriate depth for an Introduction to Business Strategy/Policy course. The backend - index, glossary, on-screen reader and search engine - were accurate and faultless.

Diagrams, tables and case studies were up-to-date, professional quality and accurate. I found the text well supported by the supplemental teaching resources (quizzes, PowerPoint's, teaching notes, etc.) As with any USA based textbook, and to be fair hardly unique to this one, the content is USA-centric. Examples and in-text case studies do tend to examine issues through the lens of USA companies, and occasionally USA laws/regulations. Within this caveat, all material was well-edited, error-free, unbiased and including appropriate supplemental instructor material.

As with most introductory courses, the basic components of Business Strategy tend not to change rapidly. New tools, techniques, occasionally fads, as well as the inevitable rebranding (i.e. Management by Objectives [MBO] becomes Outcome Based Key Performance Indicators) are adopted by Business relatively slowly. The textbook covers certain recent advances in strategic and policy, as appropriate for a textbook at an introductory level. Looking forward, advances to this textbook would tend to focus on maintaining current and timeliness of in-text examples, update trends and data, and incorporate emergent strategies which could emerge in response to changing economic, business or global events, such as a global recession.

The textbook to be quite readable and engaging, and makes good use of current business examples. Terms and business jargon are properly defined, both within the text and by using small ‘call-out' (?) boxes on the side of pages and through the use of examples.

The concepts and ideas in the textbook are presented in a clear and logical order. Terminology is used consistently. As well, I found the ‘readability' of the textbook to be internally consistent – with no sense that different authors/editors had writte

The material is covered in 12 chapters, with 2 to 4 sections each, making it easy to assign weekly readings and cover the content within one semester. Chapters are fairly consistent in length and complexity. Instructors have the option to re-organize the course / subject order prior to students downloading the textbook should they wish. The text is not overly self-referential.

The flow or order of idea/concept presentation is consistent to most Strategy texts, and appropriate for an introductory textbook. Within Chapter layout is consistent; each chapter begins with "Learning Outcomes" and concludes with "Key Takeaways" and exercises, which can be assigned as homework.

Neither I, nor any of my students, experienced any interface issues at all. The underlying technology appeared faultless. The navigation process is logical and all images and text were clear and high quality, even on smaller e-reading devices. As well, color use is consistent, assisting in overall navigation. Interestingly, as the first e-textbook for NWCC Business, my students appreciated the ability to perform in-text searches and hyper-link to external electronic references (in text URLs), as well as textbook's cost of course!

I found zero (0) grammatical errors, or ‘broken' URL links. Well edited

This text is not culturally or sexually insensitive, or offensive. Overall, examples are based on business culture with limited applicability on cultural relevance. One chapter focuses on Ethics and Social Responsibility and examines these issues from a strategic perspective, with examples. However, the focus is principally from a business perspective, as compared to social, legal or moral perspectives. As the text is fairly USA-centric, Canadian students may feel that Canadian and possibly Asian business strategies should receive greater emphasis.

Overall, I was very impressed with the quality and professionalism of the text. A ‘newbie' to e-textbooks, I was surprised by the usefulness of additional features available with electronic textbooks (searching, imbedded URLs, etc.). As noted above, the textbook content is somewhat USA-centric. Examples and in-text case studies tend to focus on USA companies, and occasionally USA laws/regulations. However, given the highly integrated nature of Canadian and USA business environments, there is some value in this. And, it was certainly not difficult to incorporate Canadian examples into the Lectures. This review originated in the BC Open Textbook Collection and is licensed under CC BY-ND.

Table of Contents

• I. Chapter 1: Mastering Strategy: Art and Science
• II. Chapter 2: Assessing Organizational Performance
• III. Chapter 3: Evaluating the External Environment
• IV. Chapter 4: Evaluating the Internal Environment
• V. Chapter 5: Synthesis of Strategic Issues and Analysis
• VI. Chapter 6: Selecting Business-Level Strategies
• VII. Chapter 7: Innovation Strategies
• VIII. Chapter 8: Selecting Corporate-Level Strategies
• IX. Chapter 9: Competing in International Markets
• X. Chapter 10: Executing Strategy through Organizational Design
• XI. Chapter 11: Leading an Ethical Organization: Corporate Governance, Corporate Ethics, and Social Responsibility

Ancillary Material

• Virginia Tech Publishing

About the Book

STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT  offers an introduction to the key topics and themes of strategic management. The authors draw on examples of familiar companies and personalities to illustrate the different strategies used by today’s firms—and how they go about implementing those strategies. Students will learn how to conduct a case analysis, measure organizational performance, and conduct external and internal analyses. In short, they will understand how organizations operate at the strategic level to be successful.

An older version of Mastering Strategic Management  (2015) by University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing can be found here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/strategicmanagement/

About the Contributors

Reed B. Kennedy, Associate Professor of Practice, Pamplin College of Business, Virginia Tech

Reed B. Kennedy is an Associate Professor of Management Practice in the Management Department, where he teaches management courses. He began his career as a naval officer before entering his primary career in healthcare administration, where he served in senior executive roles in various hospitals for over 20 years. He then worked as a business consultant for the Small Business Development Center for the New River Valley at Radford University. His education includes a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy, a Masters of Healthcare Administration from Medical College of Virginia / Virginia Commonwealth University, a Masters in Public Health and a Graduate Certificate in Global Planning and International Development from Virginia Tech. Reed served as the chief textbook reviser on this project. He worked with the contributor and editorial teams from project start to completion.

Contribute to this Page

• Resources / Blog

What Is Strategic Business Insight & Why Does It Matter?

Strategic business insight is about deeply understanding your market, customers, and industry trends so you can make intelligent, proactive business decisions. It combines data analysis, intuition, and a big-picture view of your business landscape. With this insight, organizations can spot challenges and opportunities early, innovate, and stay ahead of the competition.

Throughout this blog post, we will explore the concept of strategic business insight, explaining its key components, benefits, and strategies for developing and harnessing it within your organization. Whether you're a seasoned executive or an aspiring business leader, understanding the power of strategic business insight is essential for navigating the complexities of the modern business landscape and driving your organization toward a thriving future.

On this page:

Defining Strategic Business Insight

Importance of strategic insight in business, the role of strategic business insight in decision making, adapting to market changes, tools and technologies, cultivating a culture of insight-driven decision making.

• 10 Steps for Gathering Strategic Business Insights

Real-World Wins: Strategic Business Insight at Work

Strategic business insight refers to the comprehensive understanding and foresight gained from analyzing internal and external factors that influence your organization's operations and decision-making processes. It encompasses the ability to interpret data, trends, market dynamics, and emerging technologies to formulate effective strategies and drive informed decision-making.

In essence, strategic business insight empowers your organization to anticipate market shifts, identify opportunities, mitigate risks, and align resources strategically. It goes beyond traditional business intelligence by providing data-driven insights and synthesizing information into actionable strategies that propel the organization forward.

All organizations face unprecedented challenges and opportunities. Globalization, technological advancements, changing consumer preferences, and regulatory shifts contribute to the complexity of decision-making. In such a dynamic environment, strategic business insight serves as a compass, guiding your leaders through uncertainty and enabling them to make informed choices that support long-term success.

Informed decision-making lies at the core of every successful organization, and strategic business insight is the linchpin in this process. With data-driven insights and foresight, your organization can navigate complexities, seize opportunities, and mitigate risks effectively.

Leveraging Data for Informed Decisions

Strategic business insight enables your organization to harness the power of data in decision-making . Your leaders can derive meaningful insights from vast amounts of information through advanced analytics, predictive modeling, and data visualization tools. Whether it's understanding consumer behavior, optimizing supply chain operations, or predicting market trends, data-driven decision-making is essential for staying ahead of the curve.

Moreover, strategic business insight facilitates a holistic view of the business landscape, integrating internal data with external market intelligence. This comprehensive perspective enables your leaders to make well-informed decisions that align with organizational goals and objectives.

Agility and adaptability are critical for survival, and strategic business insight enables your organization to anticipate market changes and pivot their strategies accordingly. Whether it's responding to shifts in consumer preferences, emerging technologies, or regulatory requirements, your organization, equipped with strategic insight, can navigate change with confidence.

Furthermore, strategic business insight facilitates scenario planning and risk management. Your organization can develop contingency plans and mitigate the impact of unforeseen events by analyzing potential scenarios and their implications. This proactive approach to decision-making enhances your organizational resilience and enables organizations to thrive in uncertain times.

Example: Blockbuster vs. Netflix

In the early 2000s, Blockbuster dominated the video rental industry, with thousands of stores worldwide. However, the market landscape shifted rapidly with the emergence of online streaming services and changing consumer preferences.

Strategic Business Insight

Netflix, a relatively small player at the time, recognized the potential of digital streaming and the changing needs of consumers. They understood that the traditional model of renting physical DVDs from stores was becoming outdated. Leveraging strategic business insight, Netflix anticipated market changes and pivoted its strategy accordingly.

Response to Market Changes

Netflix shifted its focus from DVD rentals to online streaming, offering subscribers access to a vast library of movies and TV shows through their website. This move allowed Netflix to adapt to shifting consumer preferences for on-demand, digital content consumption.

Scenario Planning and Risk Management

Netflix also recognized the risks associated with this transition, including potential resistance from consumers accustomed to physical rentals and challenges from established competitors like Blockbuster. However, through scenario planning and risk management, Netflix developed contingency plans to mitigate these risks.

As a result, Netflix emerged as a leader in the streaming industry, while Blockbuster failed to adapt and eventually filed for bankruptcy. Netflix's agility and adaptability enabled it to thrive.

Adoption of advanced analytics tools and technologies is crucial to implementing strategic business insight. Your organizations can access various sophisticated tools to facilitate data analysis and insight generation.

Business Intelligence Platforms

Business intelligence (BI) platforms such as Tableau and Microsoft Power BI can provide your organization with powerful tools for visualizing and analyzing data. These platforms allow your employees to create interactive dashboards, reports, and data visualizations, enabling stakeholders to gain actionable insights. With features like data blending, predictive analytics, and natural language processing, BI platforms can empower your organization to unlock valuable insights from its data and drive informed decision-making.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) Algorithms

AI and ML algorithms can  revolutionize how your organization analyzes and derives insights from data. These technologies analyze large volumes of data quickly and efficiently, uncovering hidden patterns, trends, and correlations that may not be apparent to human analysts. AI-powered tools such as predictive analytics models, recommendation engines, and anomaly detection algorithms can enable your organization to anticipate future trends, identify opportunities, and mitigate risks effectively.

Data Mining and Text Analytics Tools

Data mining and text analytics tools such as RapidMiner, KNIME, and IBM Watson Analytics gives your organization the power to extract valuable insights from unstructured data sources such as text documents, emails, and social media feeds. These tools use advanced algorithms to analyze text data, identify sentiment, extract key phrases, and uncover insights that can inform decision-making and help your organization better understand customer feedback, market trends, and competitive intelligence.

Big Data Platforms

Big data platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure provide organizations with scalable infrastructure for storing, processing, and analyzing large volumes of data. These platforms can empower your organization to leverage data from diverse sources, such as IoT devices, social media platforms, and sensor networks, unlocking valuable insights that drive innovation and competitive advantage. With features like distributed computing, parallel processing, and real-time analytics, big data platforms will empower your organization to harness the full potential of their data and derive actionable insights in real time.

Adopting advanced analytics tools and technologies is essential for your organization to implement strategic business insight effectively. By leveraging BI platforms, AI and ML algorithms, data mining and text analytics tools, and big data platforms, your organization can derive actionable insights from complex data sets, identify patterns and trends, and confidently make informed decisions.

Beyond technology, cultivating a culture of insight-driven decision-making is essential for harnessing strategic business insight effectively. It also fosters a collaborative environment where data is valued, and insights are shared across departments and levels of your organization. Leaders play a pivotal role in championing the importance of data-driven decision-making and empowering employees to leverage data in their day-to-day activities.

Additionally, investing in employee training and development ensures that your employees have the necessary skills and expertise to analyze data effectively and derive actionable insights. When your organization promotes a culture of continuous learning and improvement, it can unlock the full potential of strategic business insight and drive sustainable growth and innovation.

1 0 Steps for Gathering Strategic Business Insights

Implementing strategic business insight requires a multifaceted approach encompassing people, processes, and technology. From fostering a culture of data-driven decision-making to leveraging cutting-edge analytics tools, your organization must invest in the necessary resources to unlock the full potential of strategic insight.

Taking a systematic approach to gain strategic insights are important steps that help your organization uncover valuable information from data and better understand the market. So, let's dive in.

1. Define Objectives: Clearly articulate the goals and objectives of your organization or project. Understanding what you aim to achieve will guide the insights you need to gather.

2. Identify Key Stakeholders: Determine the stakeholders involved in the decision-making process. These may include executives, department heads, customers, suppliers, and industry experts.

3. Define Key Metrics: Determine the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics relevant to your objectives. These metrics will serve as benchmarks for measuring progress and success.

4. Collect Data: Gather data from internal and external sources relevant to your business or industry. Internal sources may include sales data, financial reports, and customer and employee feedback. External sources may include market research reports, industry publications, competitor analyses, and social media insights.

5. Analyze Data: Analyze the collected data to identify patterns, trends, and insights relevant to your objectives. Use data analysis tools and techniques such as statistical analysis, data visualization, and predictive modeling to uncover actionable insights.

6. Engage Stakeholders: Collaborate with key stakeholders to review and validate the insights generated from the data analysis. Seek stakeholder feedback and input to ensure the insights align with your organizational goals and objectives.

7. Document Findings: Document the strategic business insights uncovered through the data analysis. Communicate findings, recommendations, and implications to stakeholders in a concise and actionable format.

8. Translate Insights into Action: Translate the strategic business insights into actionable strategies and initiatives. Develop a roadmap for implementation, outlining the steps, resources, and timelines required to execute the strategies effectively.

9. Monitor and Measure Progress: Continuously monitor and measure the progress of your initiatives against the defined KPIs and metrics. Track performance over time and adjust strategies to optimize results and achieve your objectives.

10. Iterate and Refine: Continuously iterate and refine your data collection and analysis process based on feedback and changing business needs. Stay agile and responsive to new information and insights as they emerge.

Following these steps, you can gather strategic business insights that inform decision-making and drive sustainable growth for your organization.

From massive corporations to innovative startups, many organizations have harnessed the power of strategic insight to turbocharge their growth and success. Delving into real-life examples can make the abstract tangible, so let's look at a story where strategic business insight turned the tide for an well-known organization.

 Airbnb

Background: Airbnb, a disruptor in the hospitality industry, faced the challenge of scaling its platform and expanding its user base while maintaining quality standards and ensuring a positive guest experience. With rapid growth and increasing competition, they needed to innovate and differentiate their service to stay ahead.

Strategic Business Insight Approach: Airbnb employed strategic business insight to understand hosts' and guests' needs and preferences through data analysis and user feedback. They analyzed booking patterns, user reviews, and market trends to identify product enhancement and service innovation opportunities.

Airbnb optimized its search and recommendation algorithms to match guests with personalized accommodation options based on their preferences and past booking behavior. They also introduced features like Instant Book and Superhost status to incentivize hosts and improve the overall guest experience.

Outcome: Airbnb's strategic business insight approach enabled it to achieve rapid growth and market expansion while maintaining high-quality standards and user satisfaction. They disrupted the traditional hospitality industry, becoming the largest online lodging and accommodation marketplace.

Strategic business insight is not just a buzzword; it's the cornerstone of modern business success. The case studies illustrate that organizations that embrace strategic insight are better equipped to navigate uncertainties, capitalize on opportunities, and drive sustainable growth. Organizations can anticipate market trends, optimize operations, and enhance customer experiences.

As we look to the future, the importance of strategic business insight will only continue to grow, shaping the trajectory of organizations across industries. Embracing a culture of innovation and continuous learning will be essential for organizations to stay ahead of the curve and thrive in an ever-evolving business landscape.

Ready to embark on your journey to strategic business insight? Dive deeper into data analytics and decision-making with comprehensive courses offered by New Horizons. Explore our range of data & analytics classes and equip yourself with the skills needed to unlock the full potential of strategic insights. Start your learning journey today and chart a course toward business success!

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Enterprise risk management can help business leaders make strategic decisions

The ever-changing business landscape brings both opportunities and challenges. The level of risk that businesses face from industry dynamics, economic uncertainty, swings in interest rates, changes to government policy, or any number of other factors may feel elevated after the past few years. Navigating these challenges can feel overwhelming for even well-equipped business leaders.

Fortunately, enterprise risk management (ERM) can help leaders more effectively prepare for and mitigate risks while also positioning for new opportunities. ERM is not about stopping or slowing down progress. It is centered around understanding threats to a corporation’s strategy, then working with stakeholders to understand and overcome impediments to the company’s goals.

In fact, a primary risk that must be managed is opportunity risk — the risk of inaction. Many companies may choose to continue to use old technologies or processes because of their familiarity without considering the risk of their inaction. For example, failing to adopt a new and improved customer relationship management system could result in higher customer attrition. While there may be a cost to investing in technology and training, the cost of lost business can be far greater.

The role of enterprise risk management across people, processes and systems

ERM takes a holistic view of a business and helps to manage risks that are shared across verticals or workstreams. In many cases, these risks may be beyond normal, day-to-day operations and thus may be missed by individuals with visibility of only one part of a business. As a result, ERM can help companies more accurately understand and overcome risks to their strategic goals.

There are three key parts of effective ERM that reinforce one another: people, processes and systems. ERM is about having the right people to complete a job and operate within processes that ultimately feed into a system. Managing risks is an ongoing process that should be applied across all levels of an organization. It requires communication and collaboration to ensure employees aligned about how to manage potential risks. Combined, having the right people, processes and systems can help businesses manage and mitigate risks, while also enhancing their ability to take advantage of opportunities.

In order to develop an ERM system, it’s important to pay attention to three key areas. First, organizations need proactive processes to manage change. For example, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, business leaders who were able to actively search for opportunities created by federal aid programs were more likely to successfully adapt to rapidly changing conditions.

Second, strong ERM requires a culture of transparency and buy-in from all employees. Cultivating buy-in from employees can help business leaders proactively detect and understand threats to their strategic goals. Without the communication and knowledge surrounding a challenge, businesses cannot adapt.

Third, there needs to be an appetite to see strategies and goals to completion. Organizations that fail to complete strategic initiatives will struggle to evaluate their previous successes and failures, which can weaken their positioning moving forward. Beyond each of these items, a strong culture must be developed to enhance these behaviors across the business.

Enterprise risk management in practice

Job openings and quits 1.

The last few years have emphasized the need for effective ERM. For example, hiring qualified workers has become increasingly competitive as the economy has rebounded from the pandemic and continued to grow steadily. Companies with good people and processes in place have likely been in a stronger position to weather these challenges. This is because investing in education and a strong culture can reduce employee attrition, while having a clear organizational structure and outlined roles and responsibilities can help keep a business running when attrition does occur.

More broadly, organizations can learn several lessons from how they and other businesses reacted to the pandemic. First, risks are unavoidable. The pandemic was unpredictable and no business leader could have adequately prepared for its effect on our economy. However, planning and preparation helped to mitigate many of the risks that came to the forefront. The correct people, processes and systems allowed many businesses to successfully transfer their operations from in-person to online at breakneck speed, or to adjust production schedules while implementing safety measures.

The cost of inaction during this period was also high. Failing to adapt to the changing business environment after the economy reopened would have left many businesses unprepared to take advantage of the strong economic rebound.

The same is true as businesses adapted to rapidly changing financial conditions. For example, a firm with strong risk management and a willingness to take appropriate risks may have capitalized on low interest rates following the pandemic and stronger-than-expected demand to improve their business. In contrast, waiting for the economy to stabilize before implementing a strategy would have left businesses with fewer options.

Interest rates in perspective 2

The risks and challenges of recent years have also highlighted the importance of having active partners and advisors in order to best respond to unforeseen situations. Regular touch points and reviews with banking partners can position your business to handle unexpected challenges. After all, partners are best suited to support businesses when they are aware of business leaders’ strategic goals ahead of time, so that decisive action can be taken when conditions change.

Ultimately, evaluating and managing risks are key parts of developing a strategic plan. While risks are not always predictable, developing a strong culture based around ERM through people, processes and systems can help businesses successfully respond to both anticipated and unexpected challenges.

Source: Clearnomics, Bureau of Labor Statistics

Source: Clearnomics, Federal Reserve

About Justin Butler

As Executive Vice President and Chief Risk Officer, Justin is responsible for defining and implementing standards for risk identification, management, measurement, monitoring and reporting. Additionally, he is accountable for establishing the appropriate risk appetite for the enterprise as approved by the Board of Directors. Justin’s team provides independent oversight and guidance for managing existing and emerging risk, including the deployment of cloud-based utilities. His team leads efforts to build and sustain a strong culture in which all employees understand the importance of managing risk to serve our customers and communities. Prior ...

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Strategic Plan

Our strategic priorities and initiatives.

Our North Star

The Harvard Business School (HBS) IT three-year strategic plan (FY24–FY26) is organized around HBS IT’s five strategic priorities, as well as the IT mission and vision, which together support the HBS mission to educate leaders who make a difference in the world. Underpinning our mission, vision, and priorities is a set of strategic initiatives that will help us ensure a cutting-edge digital and technology landscape.

The strategic plan was developed in close partnership with members of our community to ensure alignment with our school and departmental business aspirations. The plan addresses current IT challenges facing higher education while also embracing the unique needs of the HBS community.

Given the nature of technology, we expect the strategic plan to evolve over time as HBS’s needs change and as technology advances. We’re excited to share progress and developments on the plan with the HBS community.

Developing the Plan

Hear from Beth Clark, CIO, and Rachel Noiseux, Senior Director, Strategy, Planning and Governance on the Building of the IT Strategic Plan

Strategic Plan, FY24–FY26

Following broad engagement across the HBS community, we present HBS IT’s Strategic Plan for FY24 through FY26. The HBS IT Strategic Plan includes a mission, vision, and five strategic priorities that serve to directly support HBS’s mission. The five strategic priorities encompass 28 IT initiatives, and our values provide a foundation for this and all work that HBS IT undertakes on behalf of the HBS Community. View plan details through this report.

Our Mission & Purpose

IT partners with our community to craft, deliver, and support pioneering technology solutions that help educate leaders who make a difference in the world.

IT is a nimble, innovative, and strategic partner, helping to distinguish HBS as the world‘s leader in business education.

Strategic Priorities

1. excel in service delivery, 2. design sustainable technology architecture, 3. modernize foundational technology for digital transformation, 4. protect hbs information & technology assets, 5. enablers: build organizational health, strategic initiatives.

HBS IT has identified 28 initiatives related to the five HBS IT strategic priorities. HBS IT’s initiatives are where we execute the important tactical work necessary to achieve the goals set out in this plan. We have made great strides toward these strategic priorities over the last several years, but our work is not complete. Moving forward, these initiatives, combined with our day-to-day work, will contribute to our success in supporting the HBS community and achieving our mission and vision.

1.01: Faculty Consultation & Engagement Staffing

1.02: IT Project Execution

1.03: IT Rebrand & Public Site Launch

1.04: Problem Management

1.05: Service Delivery Improvement Plan

2.01: Baker Architecture Modernization Program

2.02: Cloud Program

2.03: Configuration Management Database (CMDB) Build for HBS IT

2.04: Data Architecture

2.05: Enterprise Architecture

2.06: Federated Identity & Access Management (IAM) Program

2.07: Define AI Landscape

3.01: Alumni Engagement Program

3.02: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) & Marketing Automation Program

3.03: Digital Case Writing (completed)

3.04: ExEd / HBSO – Alignment & Expansion of Core Business System

3.05: HBS Live Online Classrooms 2.0

3.06: Learning Experience Platform Integration with MBA & ExEd

3.07: Research Administration Program

3.08: Student Information & Experience Program (MBA & Doctoral)

3.09: Web Content Management System (CMS) Program

3.10: Research Computing Platform (formerly CloudJump)

4.01: Data Loss Prevention

4.02: Managed Security Service Program (completed)

4.03: Security Remediation

5. (Enablers) Build Organizational Health

5.01: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) ( completed )

5.02: IT Governance

5.03: IT Management & Leadership Capabilities

More about each initiative (login required)

41 Strategic Questions You Should Ask Your Team

“Do you know what our company’s strategy is?” 

<Blank stares>

If you’ve ever gotten this response from your team, you know how damaging it can be when your team doesn’t actually understand where you’re trying to go. 

It can lead to everyone trying to go in different directions, people not understanding why their work matters, and your team lacking motivation to hit your goals.

You’re in (not so) good company

It turns out, this is a very common problem. As we did research for today’s post, we found some devastating stats:

• According to research shared in the Harvard Business Review , “95% of employees don’t understand their company’s strategy.”
• And maybe that’s not surprising, because according to Organizational Synergies , “Only 27% of employees and 42% of managers have access to their company’s strategic plan.”
• Equally important, it seems even those with access are rarely looking at them as Bridges Business Consultancy reports in their 20 year study that, “Almost a quarter of organizations only review their strategy once a year. ”

All of this translates to a simple truth: Most companies and teams aren’t spending enough time on their strategy, and communicating it effectively to their teams.

That’s why today we’re focusing on how you can work on your strategy with your team. We’ll be covering everything you need to both see what your team thinks your strategy is, and how to involve your team in developing new strategies that help you win.

Table of Contents for Strategy Questions You Can Ask Your Team :

• Strategic Questions to Understand the Vision and Objectives of Your Organization
• Strategic Questions on Your Market and Competition
• Strategic Questions about the Challenges Your Organization is Facing
• Strategic Questions on How Your Team Collaborates and Works Together
• Strategic Questions about Your Customers

1) Strategic Questions to Understand the Vision and Objectives of Your Organization

Does your team know your strategy? If the data we just reviewed is any indication, most likely your team doesn’t.

That’s why you should take the time to talk about your team’s vision and objectives. When your team understands them, they’re more likely to focus on the right tasks, and be more motivated to do their work, because they know why their work matters.  

And a big part of ensuring your team understands a strategy is asking them about it. 

These questions encourage your team members to think about their contributions in a strategic context and understand how their daily tasks fit into your bigger picture.

You can try asking these in a group meeting, or for more precise results, try asking these in your 1 on 1s; then you’ll know who on your team does and does not understand the strategy most: 

• What do you think is our long-term vision or strategy at our company? 
• What questions or concerns do you have about our current strategy?
• Do you feel like our current objectives align with our strategy? Why or why not? 
• How do you think we’ll know if our team is contributing effectively to our strategy? What measures and signals should we use?
• How can we measure the success of our strategy? How do our milestones relate to making progress against our strategy?
• What are the potential roadblocks or challenges that could affect our progress, and how do you think we can address them?
• How can we incorporate what we know about market trends and customer needs to improve our strategy? Do you think our current strategy does this well? 
• What additional resources or support do you think we need to help contribute to making our current strategy succeed?

Remember that these questions may get you surprising answers. It’s not until you ask that you find out what your team really thinks.

If you find you’re not as on the same page as you hoped, don’t get upset. Instead, recognize you have work to do to get your team on the same page and focused on the right things for your company’s strategy. 

2) Strategic Questions to Ask about Your Market and Competition

No business operates in a vacuum. That means external factors greatly impact your chances of success.

Fortunately, once everyone understands your strategy, you and your team can bring your unique insights and perspective to help make the strategy even better. 

This section focuses on how you can look outside your company and turn to your team to augment and improve your strategy. Because we all know a strategy is only as useful as the execution of it.

• How do you think our competitors will respond to our strategy?
• What do you think is the strategy of [our biggest competitor]? How should we respond to them based on our strategy?
• What do you think our competitors do better than us? How should that impact our strategy?
• What makes us different than our competitors? How can we take advantage of that as part of our strategy?
• What current market trends do you see that apply to our strategy? How can we use them to our advantage? 
• Which current market trends are you concerned about? How could they hurt or negatively impact our strategy? 
• What data or customer insights do you know that we should keep in mind as we work on our strategy?
• What data or customer insights do you think we need to go find or source to help us with our strategy? How do you think we can get it? 

Many of these strategic questions could leave your team with more questions than answers, and that’s a good thing! It challenges you and your team to do the hard work to really understand your market and think about how it can apply to and improve your strategy.

This is the kind of work that can make all the difference in winning or losing in a competitive market. It can also rally your team to all help contribute to making it a success, because you’re involving them in the process.

3) Strategic Questions on the Challenges Your Organization is Facing

Every team has its challenges and issues, and no one knows them better than the people experiencing them every day.

Rather than hide from them, or ignore them completely, great leaders recognize that you have to incorporate them in your strategic plans. Otherwise, they can easily interfere with achieving your goals.

To avoid hamstringing your efforts, take the time to talk to your team about what they see as your challenges. Not only can they often clearly explain problems, but if you listen to them, they often will have valuable ideas and input that can help overcome them or adapt your strategy to account for them. 

The right conversation at the right time can make all the difference in making your team more productive and more likely to help hit your strategic goals. 

Here’s some of those strategic questions you can ask:

• What do you think are the biggest challenges facing our organization right now? How do you think we can best deal with them?
• What are the biggest challenges you see for our team to contribute to our company’s strategy? What blockers and issues do you see affecting us?
• How can we overcome the blockers and challenges we’ve just discussed?
• What one thing would you change to help our team move faster or get more done? Why did you choose that?
• How can we better manage our resources (time, budget, team) to tackle our most pressing issues?
• What do you think is the biggest risk to implementing the new company strategy? How could we reduce that risk?
• If we had unlimited time/money/resources, what would you do to help us hit our strategic goals? What’s stopping us from doing that now?
• What do you think our competitors (or a startup) would do if they had the same strategy we do? What prevents us from doing those things? 

The key with these strategy session questions is to get your team thinking and talking.

You can see the first few are about simply getting your problems, their concerns, and challenges you face hitting your strategic goals all out in the open.

From there, you are able to start to talk about solutions and alternative options.

Then, finally, you push your team to get creative and think without your normal constraints. This is often where the boldest and most innovative ideas come from. Leave room for your team to share things that even you may think “will never work.”

You may be surprised what good ideas can come from things that sound impossible at first.

Further reading:

• None of this will work if your team doesn’t have psychological safety, trusting that they can share bold ideas and challenging questions. Learn more about how to create psychological safety on your team here .
• And if you find your team doesn’t voice a lot of feedback and concerns, learn how to get more feedback from your team here .

4) Strategic Questions about How Your Team Collaborates and Works Together

Does your team work well together? Do they collaborate, share ideas, and support each other?

Or is everyone territorial, with sharp elbows, and combative personalities?

How your team works together can be just as important to the success of your strategy as how brilliant the plan is. Effective teamwork and clear communication are the backbone of any successful team.

And while this should be self-evident, the data shows just how big a difference having a collaborative team really makes:

• According to a survey of over 1,400 employees , corporate executives, and educators, “86% of them believe ineffective communication is the underlying reason for workplace failures.”
• And that failure isn’t just a “blame game”, as a joint study by Babson College and the Institute of Corporate Productivity found that, “companies that promoted collaborative working were 5 times as likely to be high performing.”

So while communication and collaboration may seem unrelated to hitting your strategic goals, it really matters.

That’s why we have a whole set of questions for you focused solely on this: 

• Do you think our team collaborates or communicates well? Why or why not? (Note: If they snicker, sigh, chortle, laugh, or eye roll, you know your answer…and have work to do!)
• When it comes to communicating and collaborating, what do we do well? Why did you choose that? (Note: Do more of this, and make sure you don’t hurt this with any changes!)
• When it comes to communicating and collaborating, what do we do we need to improve? Why did you choose that?
• How do you think we can better communicate or collaborate as a team?
• How could our team’s collaboration issues hinder achieving our strategic goals? How do you think we could overcome or address those?
• What skills do you feel you or the team are missing to achieve our goals?
• How could we address the skills gaps we have on our team to help us with our goals?
• What do you think of our current meetings as it relates to keeping us on track for our strategic goals? Which ones would you start, stop, or improve and how? 
• What do you think are the best ways for us to communicate and stay connected as we work on our goals and strategic initiatives?
• What are the biggest time wasters you see across our team? How could we reduce or eliminate those to create more focus on what matters?

While some of these sections you could ask in a group setting, these questions are best asked individually in your 1 on 1s with your team members. That’s because if there are problems, or there’s a negative reaction to any of these, it’s much easier to get real candor and understand the heart of the problem in private. 

Keep in mind you may not like everything you hear when asking these strategic questions. Try to keep an open mind, and don’t get defensive. The goal is listen and source ideas to get better.

If you’re not sure if you can apply an idea as presented, work with them on how you could test it or adapt it to your concerns. You may be surprised how accommodating your team members can be when they feel heard, and you’re willing to at least try something different.  That’s how real innovation starts happening.

• You can learn How to start 1 on 1 meetings here
• To get a full tune up and improve your 1 on 1s no matter your situation, check out our comprehensive 1 on 1 Meeting Template Great Leaders Use

5) Strategic Questions about Your Customers

Without customers, you don’t have a business. It doesn’t matter what kind of product or service your company offers, you have customers that you need to serve, and hopefully satisfy.

Knowing this basic truth, that means that your strategy isn’t complete without taking into account how it impacts your customers.

Remembering to include this step in considering your process can really pay off:

• “Net Promoter ® Scores from customers who had very good customer experience averaged 24 points higher than the scores of consumers who received poor customer experience.” 
• And this translates directly to your bottom line as, “ a modest increase in customer experience at a typical $1 billion company can earn up to $824 million in additional revenues over three years. “

Sounds like a pretty solid impact, right?

Fortunately, your team can be a great source of customer insights… but only if you ask!

Try some of these strategic questions to keep a pulse on your customer’s needs, and learn how you and your team could improve customer satisfaction with your product/service/offering:

• What do you think we do best when it comes to serving our customers? Why did you choose that?
• What do you think we do poorly when it comes to serving our customers? How would you improve that? 
• What issues do you think could come up for our customers as we try to execute our company strategy? How could we address those?
• How do you think we could improve customer satisfaction and engagement? How could that relate to our current strategic goals? 
• How well do you think we understand the needs and preferences of our customers? How could we learn more quickly and apply it to our strategy?
• What changes in our customers have you noticed recently? How do you think we should adjust our approach to account for this?
• What do you think are the key pain points our customers currently experience, and how can we address them?

It’s easy to put a poster on the wall, a quote in an all hands, or words on a slide deck about how customer focused you are. Yet, none of that leads to actually caring about, nor serving, your customers.

That’s why it’s important to take time to talk to your team about your customers.

The act of asking is enough to signify to your team that it’s important. Then, these types of strategy session questions can get everyone thinking about ways to keep your customer front and center as you develop and execute on your strategy. 

Are you talking about your customers enough? 

Final word 

You can unlock a wealth of potential insights, knowledge, and ideas from your team. All you have to do is take the time to ask them.

If you do so with a mindset of wanting to listen and learn, you may be surprised by what you hear. 

The right idea can transform a team, an initiative, or a strategic goal from something that feels impossible, to making a massive, positive impact. 

Next time you’re talking about your company’s strategy, make your team really feel a part of the process, and ensure they really understand the strategy by asking some of these questions. 

And if asking strategic questions like these feels foreign and uncomfortable, start by learning how to become more curious , and practice being an effective listener . You can unlock a whole new world as a leader when you are both of those things. 

Learn something today? Share it so your friends can, too:

Jason Evanish

As the founder and CEO of Get Lighthouse, Inc , Jason and the Lighthouse team have helped managers grow their leadership skills in dozens of countries around the world. They’ve worked with a variety of companies from non-profits to high growth startups, and government organizations to well known, publicly traded companies. Jason has also been featured in publications including NPR, the Wall Street Journal, and Fast Company.

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• PRA 2024/25 Business Plan

Embedding competitiveness and growth

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The PRA's latest Business Plan , covering 2024/25, was published on 11 April. The programme of work is intended to maintain the resilience of the UK's banking and insurance sectors and deliver against the same four strategic priorities as last year. The key areas of focus, as expected, are financial and operational resilience, enforcement policies, and diversity and inclusion. Emerging risks called out include the financial risks of climate change, the impacts of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and digital money and innovation.  

There is nothing inherently new or surprising in the Business Plan for firms as it follows relatively soon after the 2024 supervisory priority letters for international banks , UK deposit takers and insurers . However, it is interesting to note the PRA's ongoing concerns about the potential impacts of NBFIs on financial stability and its continuing ambition to become a more dynamic and responsive regulator. 

Competitiveness and growth

This will be the first full year in which the PRA operates under the Financial Services and Markets Act (FSMA 2023), which expanded its rulemaking responsibilities and gave it a new secondary growth and competitiveness objective (the SGCO) in the UK. A significant portion of the plan considers how the PRA will balance the SGCO with its primary commitments to safety and soundness of the banking and insurance sectors. 

The following key initiatives underpin the PRA's work to promote UK competitiveness and growth:

• The 'Strong and Simple' (SDDT) regime  — simplifying regulatory requirements for smaller, non-systemic banks banks and building societies, in order to reduce compliance burdens without compromising on robust prudential standards.
• Reforms to bank ring-fencing  — following the independent Skeoch Review .
• The 'Solvency UK' reforms of insurance capital standards  — aiming to reduce bureaucracy in the regulatory regime, while allowing insurers to invest in a wider range of productive assets.
• Insurance special purpose vehicles (ISPVs)  — consulting on reforms to allow a wider range of transaction structures in the UK regime, improve the speed of the application process, and clarify expectations of UK insurers who cede risks to ISPVs.
• Improvements to the authorisation processes  — building on progress in improving the speed and efficiency of authorisations. Also, introducing a new 'mobilisation' regime to facilitate entry and expansion for new insurers from 31 December 2024. 

Strategic Priorities

The PRA's four strategic priorities (SPs) are to:

• Maintain and build on the safety and soundness of the banking and insurance sectors and ensure continuing resilience.
• Be at the forefront of identifying new and emerging risks, and developing international policy.
• Support competitive and dynamic markets, alongside facilitating international competitiveness and growth, in the sectors that it regulates.
• Run an inclusive, efficient, and modern regulator within the central bank.

SP1 — Maintain and build on the safety and soundness of the banking and insurance sectors and ensure continuing resilience.

Financial resilience priority areas for banks include:

• Basel 3.1  — implementation is due to start in 1 July 2025, with a transitional period of 4.5 years to 1 January 2030. This is in line with the previously communicated timeline. The second near-final policy statement, on the remaining elements of credit risk, the output floor and Pillar 3 disclosure and reporting requirements, will be published `in due course'.  The PRA expects both sets of near-final rules to be made final later in 2024, once the relevant parts of the Capital Requirements Regulation (CRR) have been revoked.
• Stress testing  — in 2024 the Bank of England (BoE) will carry out a desk-based exercise, supported by the PRA. The BoE and PRA will also review and update the framework for concurrent stress testing. Stress tests based on firm submissions will resume in 2025.
• Exposures to non-bank financial institutions (NBFI)  — particularly private equity financing and private credit — the PRA will look for further improvements in firms' ability to identify and assess correlations across financing activities with multiple clients. 
• Model risk management (MRM)  — banks are expected to embed and implement the expectations set out in SS1/23 which takes effect on 17 May 2024. The PRA will also focus on the `hybrid' approach to mortgage modelling, the IRB repair programme and continued assessment of the adequacy of post-model adjustments (PMAs).
• Liquidity risk management  — the PRA will follow up on how firms are responding to lessons learned from market events. It will continue its engagement on authorised firms' access to the BoE Sterling Monetary Framework and monitor closely how how firms consider changes in depositor behaviour and future changes in bank funding and liquidity conditions.
•   Credit risk management  — focus will be on the evolution of credit risk management practices, whether they can be `robust and adaptable' in changing conditions, whether there is appropriate consideration of downside and contagion risks, and firms' monitoring and planning for the impacts of customer refinancing. There will be a thematic review of smaller firms' credit risk management frameworks. The PRA will monitor changes to firms' business mix and credit exposures and exposures to vulnerable segments (e.g. cyclical sectors, key international portfolios, and traditionally higher-risk portfolios such as buy-to-let, credit cards, unsecured personal loans, small to medium-sized enterprises, leveraged lending, and commercial real estate). It will also continue to assess whether the policy framework for trading book risk management, controls, and culture is adequate, robust and accessible. 
• Capital  — the PRA will review its Pillar 2A methodologies once the Basel 3.1 rules are finalised and aims to consult on proposed changes in 2025.
• Securitisation regulation  — simultaneously with the FCA, the PRA will publish final rules to replace or modify the relevant firm-facing provisions in the Securitisation Regulation and related Technical Standards. It also intends to consult on draft PRA rules to replace firm-facing requirements, subject to HMT making the necessary legislation. 

Financial resilience focus areas for insurers include:

• Solvency UK implementation  — the PRA is consulting on how to transfer remaining Solvency II requirements from assimilated law into the PRA Rulebook. It will also streamline internal model and matching adjustment approval processes, supported by the establishment of dedicated, specialised teams, and publication of templates to facilitate firms' implementation of new requirements. 
• Matching adjustment (MA) reforms  — publication of final policy in June 2024. The bulk of the reform will take effect at end-June, with the remainder on 31 December 2024. This staggered approach is in response to insurers' concerns about ability to produce attestations in time for mid-year results. The PRA will also explore creating 'sandboxes' to allow for either self-certification or further expansion of MA-eligible assets.
• Single regulatory reporting insurance taxonomy  — this will be published in Q2 2024, followed by industry roundtables to support implementation by year end.
• Stress testing  — the next stress test will take place in 2025. This will be the first time that the PRA publishes the individual results of the largest annuity-writing firms and the first time an exploratory scenario will be included to assess exposure to the recapture of funded reinsurance contracts. In 2025, the PRA will run its first dynamic stress test for general insurers — details will be published in 2024.
• Cyber underwriting risk  — there will continue to be supervisory focus on cyber exposure. The PRA is monitoring the risk landscape, including contract uncertainty.
• Model drift  — in 2024, the PRA will address perceived systemic trends that may weaken the robustness of internal models across the market as a whole, and continue to address firm-level model drift.
• Funded reinsurance  — this continues to be a key policy and supervisory area of concern. In 2024, the PRA will finalise and implement its policy expectations. Assessing resilience of funded reinsurance arrangements is also part of the 2025 life insurance stress test.
• Impact of claims inflation  — the PRA will continue to monitor data throughout 2024 to assess if further work is needed.  Concerns remain around optimistic assumptions.
•   Liquidity risk management  — following market events, the PRA will develop liquidity reporting requirements for insurance firms most exposed to liquidity risk. 
• Credit risk management  — as insurers' exposure grows, the PRA will monitor how firms' credit risk management evolves as a result. Areas of focus are concentrations in exposure to internally valued and rated assets.

Other regulatory reforms:

• Operational risk and resilience  — the PRA will continue working with the FCA to assess firms' progress on their ability to deliver important business services within defined impact tolerances during severe but plausible scenarios (no later than March 2025).
• Critical third parties to the UK financial sector  — the PRA will continue working with other authorities to develop a final policy and oversight approach in 2024 on CP26/23 (Operational resilience: critical third parties to the UK financial sector).
• Review of enforcement policies  — following the principles of PS1/24 (Bank of England's approach to enforcement).
• Diversity and inclusion in PRA-regulated firms  — the PRA will continue industry engagement and provide a further update in due course.

 SP2 — Be at the forefront of identifying new and emerging risks, and developing international policy

The PRA will continue to use its horizon-scanning programme to focus on:

• International engagement and influencing regulatory standards — participating actively in bodies such as the BCBS, IAIS and FSB.
• Promoting supervisory co-operation  — via colleges and existing memoranda of understanding (MoUs).
• Overseas bank branches — consulting on targeted refinements to its approach to banks branching into the UK, reflecting lessons from the failure of SVB.
• Operational and cyber resilience  — continuing its work on the G7 Cyber Expert Group and other similar bodies.
• Managing the financial risks of climate change  — publishing thematic findings in 2024 on banks' processes to quantify the impact of climate risks on expected credit losses and commencing work to update SS3/19.
• Artificial intelligence and machine learning  — the third joint PRA/FCA survey on machine learning in UK financial services will be conducted in Q2 2024.
• International policy on digitalisation  and managing associated risks.
• Digital money and innovation  — continuing to work with HMT and the FCA on issues such as a regulatory regime for crypto-assets, and wholesale payments/ settlements and their interaction with retail payments.

SP3 — Support competitive and dynamic markets, alongside facilitating international competitiveness and growth (in the sectors that it regulates)

In addition to the areas mentioned above, the PRA will focus on developing proportionate and efficient prudential requirements including:

• Regulatory change  — embedding its approach to rulemaking, using its new powers under FSMA 2023 to repeal and replace assimilated law relating to financial services. 
• The Banking Data Review  — intended to reduce the burden on firms by focusing our data collection on the most useful and relevant information.
• Ease of exit  — the policy statement on solvent exit planning for insurers is expected in H2 2024.
• Remuneration reforms  — the PRA will consult on any changes in H2 2024.
• Changes to the Senior Managers & Certification Regime (SM&CR)  — consulting alongside HMT and the FCA on proposed changes in H1 2024.
• Improvements to the PRA Rulebook and Cost Benefit Analysis  (CBA) framework. 

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Expert's opinion

Navigating the complexities of procurement planning in a global supply chain

Jonathan beddows.

In the procurement landscape, professionals are faced with a myriad of challenges. From managing supply chains to navigating the use of complex financial instruments, the role of procurement has never been more critical in driving an organizations’ success. Procurement, once considered a back-office function, has become a strategic cornerstone for organizations worldwide. However, the journey towards efficient procurement practices has many obstacles. Here we outline some key challenges facing procurement professionals today.

Siloed Operations - Historically, procurement teams operated in silos, with little collaboration between departments. This lack of integration led to inefficiencies in reporting and visibility, and a lack of shared goals hindering the ability of procurement teams to make informed decisions aligned with global company targets.

Increasing Supply Chain complexity and disruptions - The modern supply chain is a complex global web of interconnected processes and stakeholders with divergent interests. Managing this complexity, especially in the face of global events like changing tariffs and disruptions, presents a significant challenge for procurement professionals.

Fixed Budgeting vs Dynamic Forecasting - Balancing fixed targets with dynamic market conditions is not easy. Procurement professionals often struggle to align long-term financial goals with short-term operational activities, leading to misalignment and missed opportunities.

Technological Limitations - Legacy procurement systems are ill-equipped to handle the intricacies of modern supply chains. Procurement professionals face hurdles in leveraging technology to streamline operations and drive efficiency and effectively perform complex scenario analysis.

Lack of Data Accessibility - Many organizations still grapple with multiple sources of the truth, data silos and outdated disconnected systems, impeding their ability to gain actionable insights. Siloed working practice can mean that the demand signals used to forecast by a finished product planning team are not being managed in a way that supports end to end planning, so procurement teams are often working with outdated or incorrect data.

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Keyrus has been supporting companies address these issues for over 15 years ensuring the right planning tools and strategies are in place. Correctly equipped procurement professionals can overcome these obstacles and drive organizational success. Keyrus offer leading planning solutions to streamline procurement operations. Through advanced analytical capabilities and real-time data sharing, procurement professionals to make informed decisions and drive efficiency.

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Ability to import Demand data and Manage Supply Plans

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NIST Updated Its Cybersecurity Framework. What Does That Mean for Agencies?

Nathan Eddy works as an independent filmmaker and journalist based in Berlin, specializing in architecture, business technology and healthcare IT. He is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. 

The National Institute of Standards and Technology ’s February release of version 2.0 of its Cybersecurity Framework is a milestone in the evolution of cyber standards, expanding them to encompass all sectors.

CSF 2.0 is the first major overhaul of the framework — a published set of guidelines, best practices and standards for reducing organizations’ cyber risk first introduced in 2014 — which widens its scope beyond critical infrastructure entities to all entities.

The framework supplies a comprehensive suite of cyber resources, regardless of organizational complexity or the challenges posed by the modern threat landscape, while also emphasizing governance structures and supply chain risk management.

Click the banner to read CDW’s white paper on enhancing zero trust for your agency.

What’s New in NIST's Cyber Framework?

While the original framework does an “excellent” job of establishing what must be included in a security operations program, it required updates for clarity and modernization that are included in version 2.0, says Ken Dunham, cyberthreat director at Qualys’s Threat Research Unit .

“Based on how frameworks are designed and deployed, what is core to a SecOps program does not change quickly over time,” Dunham says. “But there is a need over a period of years to improve clarity, alignment and modernization.”

Version 2.0 represents an appropriate change management control to upgrade a stable and strong cybersecurity framework, he adds.

When policies better define or set clear thresholds for what passes a benchmark, there is a greater understanding of how to determine what security controls or criteria must be implemented to meet that baseline, says Alice Fakir, federal cybersecurity services partner at IBM .

“There’s a strong focus on timeliness and reporting as part of the framework update,” Fakir says. “This updated framework is calling for better awareness and improvement of security controls around supply chain and third-party risk, but adding that layer of communication is critical.”

Adding a Suite of Cyber Resources

NIST created a holistic approach in version 2.0 based on the principles of identify, protect, detect, respond and recover , says Jason Porter, CTO of Optiv + ClearShark .

“NIST provided this to demonstrate that the framework starts at your core and builds out from there,” Porter says.

For example, the Cybersecurity and Privacy Reference Tool features an interconnected repository of NIST guidance documents providing contextualization of these resources, including the framework, alongside other widely used references. The CPRT also facilitates communication of these concepts to both technical experts and executive leadership with the goal of fostering organizational coordination across all levels.

Quick-start guides are tailored to various user profiles including small businesses, enterprise risk managers and organizations aiming to enhance supply chain security.

DISCOVER: Agencies are considering fresh zero-trust security use cases.

The new CSF 2.0 Reference Tool is designed to streamline implementation by enabling users to browse, search and export data and details from the core guidance in both human-readable and machine-readable formats, Fakir says. The tool also includes a searchable catalog of references, enabling cross-referencing of current actions with the framework’s guidance and more than 50 other cybersecurity documents, including NIST’s Special Publication 800-53 Revision 5 .

Version 2.0’s creation of more than a dozen community profiles is designed to give organizations within the same sector shared goals and outcomes as they face similar challenges, says Steve Vetter, senior global government strategist for Cisco .

“This has started a conversation, a sharing of data and a sharing of thoughts, ideas and approaches that are so critical overall,” Vetter says. “These profiles are now packaged in a way that that makes it much easier to determine your current state and where you want to get to. That is going to be very helpful.”

Jason Porter CTO, Optiv and ClearShark

Emphasizing Cyber Governance to Improve Strategic Planning

The framework puts a strong emphasis on governance through a function called Govern, highlighting cybersecurity as a significant enterprise risk that senior leaders should consider alongside finances and reputation when making and implementing strategic decisions.

“This puts a direct emphasis on the integration of cybersecurity into overall organizational governance,” Porter says. “It provides a roadmap for strategic planning through to developing a security-minded culture that spans across your workforce.” 

The focus on governance is a critical difference in version 2.0, Vetter says.

“The criticality of government leadership to drive the investment so necessary for success is absolutely essential,” Vetter says. “It’s a cross-cutting feature that now works on all of the functions. It’s not just in a couple of them; it’s in all of them.”

LEARN MORE: Agencies can take these four steps to secure systems after the CISA breach.

This pervasiveness helps to determine what the priorities are and to understand risk tolerances, decisions that are made at the leadership level, he adds.

“You can’t decide at a junior level what the risk tolerances are of agency X, Y, Z; you need leadership engaged,” Vetter says. “You need ways to accurately assess what the cyber risks are, what the impacts are. If that risk is then actuated, what needs to be done to establish enterprise policies across the environment?”

The appendix of CSF Core provides a breakdown of each principle and lays out the governance structure with reference to version 2.0 for implementation examples and recommendations.

“These resources provide an easy mapping of how organizations can implement tools, processes and governance to achieve their security goals,” Porter says.

Alice Fakir Federal Cybersecurity Services Partner, IBM

Increasing Supply Chain Dependencies Require Greater Security

The supply chain and increased dependency on third parties in shared computing models is a growing risk, as evidenced in thousands of breaches to date.

CSF 2.0 relies on cybersecurity supply chain risk management to add controls addressing these concerns. C-SCRM is a systematic process for managing exposure via the supply chain, understanding organizational context, assigning roles and responsibilities, risk management, continuous monitoring, and incident response. 

The enhanced focus on the supply chain is significant, as data has become a critical asset in today’s technology market, Porter says.

“In accounting for the impact of what technology does for government and industry in managing information, data is the commodity that needs the most protection,” Porter says. “Without the data, applications don’t run, people can’t make decisions, information doesn’t flow and essentially our economies of government and industry stop moving.”

Understanding the supply chain of each and providing traceability of what, when and where IT assets have been built, touched, traveled or used is critical, he adds.

RELATED: Agencies are adapting their data security plans as volume grows.

“NIST is providing key elements of how supply chain security should be enacted and what the triggers are to identify risk in the supply chain of technology,” Porter says.

The framework is asking for very specific supply chain activities, such as standing up supply chain risk programs and having a comprehensive, integrated risk management program. Additionally, the guidance includes new steps for making sure that agencies are effectively communicating information about those programs and managing profiles of the actual supply chain risk controls.

“It’s providing a broader set of activities that are required so that you can manage your third-party engagement, whereas before it was a very myopic view of managing security of an application that sits within a specific environment,” Fakir says.

The previous guidance was not so concerned with collateral risk or the impacts to integrated systems, which could enhance vulnerabilities simply by being connected via an application programming interface.

“What’s so significant about this new update to the risk management framework is a bigger focus on third-party risk management and supply chain risk management,” Fakir says.

MORE FROM FEDTECH:  Why content disarm and reconstruction secures cloud migrations.

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