“A good plan, ruthlessly executed today is better than a great plan two weeks from now.”
– General George S. Patton (1885 – 1945), legendary US Army leader
Today’s post is the last in our three-part series on Strategic Planning.
One: Focus on the truth and build from the market in.
Two: Get the right people in the room (no more, no fewer), focusing on the right things.
Three: Execute with flexibility. Go, now, and know where your off-ramps and on-ramps are, and use them as the journey requires.
To put a ribbon around strategic planning’s keys to success, let’s use an acronym: TAPE.
Begin with the truth. Truthfully assess the market, our organization, our people and our capabilities. If our plan isn’t based in the truth, it’ll be off the mark from the get-go.
Next, move to aspirations. If we’re not aspirational, we don’t need a plan. By starting with the truth as our foundation, our aspirations become more attainable.
It’s likely that our process will spit out more initiatives than we can swallow. How well we prioritize helps determine our success, because it helps us avoid “shiny object syndrome” and “SQUIRRELS!” By prioritizing, we can easily assess if we’re working on the important, or giving in to the temptation of the urgent at the expense of the important.
Finally, as General Patton admonishes, we must execute. Ruthlessly, relentlessly focus on what needs done, now! This is where tactics actively intersect with strategy, which, now that I think about it, is kind of a de facto definition for execution. We’ll need to be flexible yet committed, altering course where new information presents itself, but not without new information.
Strategy sets the destination and informs tactics. Tactics lead to metrics. Metrics inform adjustments. Adjustments synch back with strategy — this is the circle of business life, if we wanna go all Mufasa on the topic…
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