How rigorous is your strategic planning process? - SmartBrief

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How rigorous is your strategic planning process?

2 min read

Leadership

SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Leadership — tracks feedback from more than 210,000 business leaders. We run the poll question each week in our e-newsletter.

How rigorous is your strategic planning process?

  • Very — We do a great job of annual strategic planning: 25%
  • Kind of — We usually update last year’s strategic plan: 42%
  • Not very — We only do it if there’s been a major market change: 15%
  • What’s strategic planning?:18%

You Can’t Get There from Here. How can you arrive at a destination if you don’t know where that destination is? A strategic plan is your roadmap that lays out the destination and the path to get there. It drives your priorities, what you do, and what you don’t do. The biggest reason strategic plans aren’t used is because people make them too complicated. Find a simplified strategic planning process and be rigorous about conducting that exercise every year. It’s well worth the time and energy and it’s never too late to pick up the good habit of doing so.

Mike Figliuolo is managing director of thoughtLEADERS, author of “Lead Inside the Box: How Smart Leaders Guide Their Teams to Exceptional Results” and “One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership.”