Strategic Planning: The Essence of Success In Business

By M. Isi Eromosele

Businesses are going to be managed differently in the next millennium.  Organizations will be managed through the use of a highly integrated, holistic business operating system that is fast, flexible, and accountable. 

These companies will be hard on issues and soft on people.  It’s leadership that makes the difference in a company. A tremendous difference.

Strategic Model Planning

Success model planning is the one unique and imperative step that every company needs to complete as part of its strategic planning process.  With more traditional approaches, most organizations go straight to strategic plans, operating plans and numbers. 

Companies need to treat success model planning as a front-end exercise for strategic planning. Managers really have to know what success looks like if they are going to do

a good strategic plan. Success modeling is the ideal performance of a business benchmarked against best in class. 

The success model involves benchmarking on markets, portfolio, best-in-class measures, and, most importantly, gaps. Different groups within a company should be required to benchmark independently in order to discover true facts about themselves.

The traditional planning methods just don’t work and will not deliver satisfactory results.  The new methodology focuses more on developing and nurturing the ability to compete, picking a few target programs, driving for success, competing on time, and working toward more of a continuous strategic planning and budgeting type of process.

If the strategic planning process is spread out over an extended period of time, there is usually often tremendous disconnects between what was strategically imagined and the realities of resource constraints to execute the strategy. 

This often led to great disappointments during the budgeting phase of planning. To help eliminate this problem, expectations should be bounded with the success model front end and more closely tie budgeting to strategy.  The key is to make the boundaries large enough to encourage strategic thinking yet small enough to keep the thinking realistic.

Success Model Matrix

Success in different kinds of markets demands different strategic approach and has different results metrics. Use a Success Model 4x3 Matrix that recognizes and categorizes three kinds of markets and four resource approaches.

Analyze the 4x3 matrix by product/market and then roll up by product line, business unit, and the corporation can provide insights into how well a business entity is driving the success model criteria and what resource allocations will be required.

Pull all the information discovered to build an Analysis-Action-Impact-Management (AIM) chart, which is a strategic management tool.

The top left quadrant, Success Criteria/Trends, houses the benchmarking data.  The top right quadrant, Analysis, includes gaps and discontinuities.  Action, bottom left quadrant, is a thumbnail of the implementation.  And the fourth quadrant is impact, answering the

question:  What is the expected benefit, measure of success, and progress for each action?

All this information is essential to the success of a company’s strategic planning.

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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