Day 1 - Session 1: External Situation

• Markets
- Key data to collect on markets for strategic planning
- Customer behavior and strategy
- Market segmentation

• Competition
- Key data to collect on competitors
- Where to get competitive data
- What matters most about a competitor

• Other external factors
- How technology can make or break strategy
- Supplier Market dynamics
- Economics and strategy

Day 1 - Session 2: Internal Situation

• Financials
- The role of the balance sheet
- Assessing your income statement

• Measures of performance
- Measures you should use to think about strategy
- Why financials aren’t enough
- How to select the most important measures

• Profitability analysis
- Using the profitability analysis to spot strategic issues
- Why profitability shouldn’t dictate strategy

Day 1 - Session 3: Strategic Capabilities and Competencies

• Quick strengths and weaknesses
- Defining your capabilities quickly, without fuss
- Pitfalls in using strengths and weaknesses in strategy

• Strategic competencies
- Understanding competencies, and why you should invest in them
- Identifying your strategic competency

Group Exercise:
An example of strategic competency in a multi-unit company

Day 1 - Session 4: Assumptions

• Market assumptions
- Projecting changes in your markets
- Key data to assess in formulating strategy

• Competition assumptions
- How to see how you will stack up against the competition in the
future
- Understanding how you can change your competitive position

• Opportunities and threats
- Brainstorming the best opportunities
- How to separate the best opportunities from the good ideas
- Highlighting the most critical threats to your strategy

• Industry scenario and winners’ profile
- Projecting the more distant future
- Using the far future to guide your strategic thinking

Day 2 - Session 1: Strategies

• Strategic assessment
- Identifying market attractiveness
- Identifying your competitive position
- Using your position to begin strategic thinking

• Strategic issues
- The one strategic issue every company must address
- How to identify and resolve most of your strategic issues

• Strategies
- Defining strategies for market segments
- Capturing your vision about your strategic focus
- Building a set of capabilities to support your vision

Day 2 - Session 2: Goals and Objectives

• Mission statement
- Why you need a mission statement – and why you don’t
- How to get your mission written down in 30 minutes

• Goals
- Defining corporate goals
- Relating goals to measures of success
- How goals can drive execution – and how they shouldn’t

• Objective setting
- How to set objectives for optimal execution
- What to do with objectives that you don’t select for execution

Day 2 - Section 3: Action Plans

• Action plan writing process (group exercise)
- Formulating action steps
- Sequencing action steps
- Allocating resources to action steps

• Rules for better execution
- Tips from companies that achieve 100% of their objectives
- How to build better execution into your processes and culture

Day 2 - Section 4: Budgets

• Cash flow budget
- Using the cash flow budget to protect your company

• Investment budget
- How to prioritize spending on strategic initiatives

• Five year projection
- Testing your strategic plan as a hypothesis
- How to quickly use your strategic plan to create a five-year budget forecast

Day 2 - Session 5: Schedules and Agendas

• Time budgeting process
- Understanding the role of time in strategy execution
- How to allocate time and schedule execution for better results

• Schedules
- Putting the whole strategic planning process together – what to do and when
- How to modify the process to fit your company

• Monitoring process
- How to keep your strategic planning dynamic and alive
- How to assure excellent execution by monitoring