Strategic Planning for Dummies (Olsen, 2006)

Book Description
If you’re starting a new business or planning your business’s future, there are plenty of things you should take into account. Strategic Planning For Dummies covers everything you need to know to develop a plan for building and maintaining a competitive advantage — no matter what business you’re in.
Written by Erica Olsen, founder and President of a business development firm that helps entrepreneurial-minded businesses plan for a successful future, this handy guide covers all the basics, including:

How a strategic plan is different than a business plan

Establishing a step-based planning process

Planning for and encouraging growth

Taking a long-view of your organization

Evaluating past performance

Defining and refining your mission, values, and vision

Sizing up your current situation

Examining your industry landscape

Setting your strategic priorities

Planning for unknown contingencies

If you’re in business, you have to plan for everything — especially if you intend your business to grow. Whether you’re planning for a small business, large conglomerate, nonprofit, or even a government agency, this book has the planning specifics you need for your organization. Step-by-step, you’ll learn how to lay the foundations for a plan, understand how your plan will affect your business, form planning teams, discover what your strengths are, see where you are, and, finally, plan where you’re going. And there’s much more:

Learn to analyze business trends that will determine your business’s future

Set measurable, realistic goals that you can plan for and achieve

Make strategic planning a habitual part of the organization

Prioritize multiple strategies that you can implement simultaneously

Set a defining vision for the organization that guides all your planning and strategy

This friendly, simple guide puts the power of strategic planning in the palm of your hand. For small businesses that can’t afford to hire strategic planning consultants, it’s even more imperative. Careful, constant planning is the only way to handle an uncertain business future. With this book, you’ll have all the step-by-step guidance you need to ensure you’re ready for anything that comes.

p.7,8 Having a strategic plan is the best way to bring focus and direction to your organization... No one can predict the future. But effective leaders aren't sitting around and waiting for it to happen either. They're anticipating what lies ahead.

p.10 Strategy means consciously choosing to be clear about your company's direction in relation to what's happening in the dynamic environment.

p.12 Simply put, a strategic plan is the formalized roadmap that describes how your company executes the chosen strategy. A plan spells out where an organization is going over the next year or more and how it's going to get there. Typically, the plan is organization-wide or focused on a major function such as a division or a department. A strategic plan is a management tool that serves the purpose of helping an organization do a better job, because a plan focuses the energy, resources, and time of everyone in the organization in the same direction.

p.81,83 A competitive advantage is something you do that is unique. To compete, you must have a unique advantage... what makes your company unique is that your competitive advantages stay constant.

Founding your strategic plan on the basis of your competitive advantages is the most important thing you can do... The leading organizations in the world have a razor sharp understanding of their competitive advantage.

p.105 Values are enduring, passionate, and distinctive core beliefs. They're guiding principles that never change. Values are why you do what you do and what you stand for. Values are deeply held convictions, priorities, and underlying assumptions that influence your attitudes and behaviors. They have intrinsic value and importance... Your core values are part of your strategic foundation.

p.115 All the elements of your strategic foundation - competitive advantage, mission, values, vision, and vivid description - should work together... Your strategies, goals, objectives, and actions change based on... conditions, but they're always built on your strategic foundation.

p.120 Good decision making comes from collecting the right data on which to base your decisions.

p.122 To move from where you are today to where you want to go, you have to determine your strategic position, where you stand today... You get an assessment of what's working, what's not, the things you need to fix, and the things that can wait... SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats.

p.124 The first phase of identifying your strengths and weaknesses is looking at your capabilities or intangible assets

p.128 Information is an intangible asset that can be a significant competitive advantage if you can harness it... Knowledge is information that has been processed and identified as continually useful to the organization. Knowledge must contribute to your competitive advantage. Identify what are the key areas of knowledge that make your company run.

p. 129 [Bill Gates quoted] The most meaningful way to differentiate your company from your competition, the best way to put distance between yourself and the crowd, is to do an outstanding job with information. How you gather, manage, and use information determines whether you win or lose.

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