Redefining Global Strategic Planning

By M. Isi Eromosele

The general concept of strategic planning had been to focus on corporate vision. The premise was that in order for a company to stay alive and grow, it must constantly delineate its products, markets and potential customers. This vision may include restructuring the fundamental base of the organization in order to realign itself to new market conditions, with focus on the needs of the customer versus the sale of the product. Formalized planning was used to stop businesses from just trying to replicate their previous successes, take advantage of new technologies and global markets to bring a higher level of functional organizational functionality into company processes.

During the past two years, the world has experienced a weakened economy, high energy prices, increased global competition and the advent of innovative technologies that transformed the way companies conducted business. Many companies responded by employing strategies of downsizing, re-engineering and re-focusing on quality. Emphasis was placed on efficiency and improvement of core competencies to improve profits and enhance productivity. However, little progress was made in implementing competitive advantage strategies to differentiate companies and their products from those of competitors.

Today, strategic planning requires the involvement of line and staff managers who are responsible for differing departments within the company. Additionally, vision and strategic planning components need to be implemented. These include:

• Core Competencies - with unwavering focus on elevating functional and organizational processes that would give the business competitive advantage
• Business Collaboration - implementing the concept of strategic alliances with customers, suppliers and even competitors to achieve increased growth
• Value Relocation - the movement of business opportunities within industries and companies
• Strategic Intent - an elongated business goal
• Inherent Opportunities - identifying areas of growth that fall between the responsibilities of business units because there is no skills or responsibility match

A major reason why strategic planning often fails is that it uses existing relationships, business paradigms and functional processes. As such, creativity and deep insights are disregarded. The results: What had been supposedly working is continued; what does not exist is not invented; what has not been applied is not thought about. This has to change.

Economies of scale requirements has made modern corporations so large and geographically dispersed that top management are generally unaware of what their middle managers are doing or what processes are being employed. What companies need to do in the process of strategic planning is to gather intelligence about them, turn that data into information and generate a spark of insight that would result in a cohesive vision/business strategy. This would then be implemented in a way that brings better controls to an organization that is seemingly out of strategic alignment.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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