A Practical Guide to Strategy Formulation:
A Comprehensive Resource
for the Strategic Planning Team

Website Overview

Strategy formulation is both a leadership skill and a process that leaders use to focus their organizations on where they need to go (positioning the firm), to adapt to their customer needs and to align their team. You make fundamental decisions about your product offerings and business design.

Strategy formulation is iterative: the key players assess, decide, act, and review how they are doing. The process prepares key people to take responsibility for strategy implementation for the chosen route.

In the strategic planning process, leaders determine (or refine) how much to stretch (the upper line in the graphic above), how to create the benefits for customers, how flexible to be, how to measure progress, and how to recognize when the strategy cannot be sustained (the lower line). The website suggest graphics like this one to explain your plan.

As a strategic planning facilitator, I designed this guide to educate my clients, most who are skilled operators, not full time strategists. I take my clients through the process.

If you are strategic planning team leader in a hurry, start with the Planning the Meetings Chapter for detailed advice on managing the process for one of three process approaches:

• scenarios for long range planning,
• fast, iterative planning for bottom-up efforts and entrepreneurs, and
• team planning with a one or two year planning horizon.

Use the Left Hand Menus as Your Checklists

The menu on the left links to the website's chapters, which walk you through the concepts, the process, prepare you to lead, to setup the team or participate, to organize the meetings, to estimate the benefits and costs, to evaluate and select the best strategy and to present your strategy or business plan to others. It is a comprehensive step by step checklist for the process.

Continue in this chapter to understand the team leader's tasks and to prepare for what to cover in the first meeting with your boss when he or she tasks you to formulate a strategy.

I have been a strategic planning consultant with over 20 years of experience. I am offering you my expert opinion on best practice.

Welcome and explore! Use the arrows at the bottom of each page to follow the process logic, the right hand menus to jump to a topic or search at the top of each page to find a concept.

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