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A Practical Guide to Strategy Formulation:
A Comprehensive Resource for the Strategic Planning Team

Website Overview

Strategy formulation is both a leadership skill and a process that leaders use to focus their organizations on where they need to go (positioning the firm), to adapt to their customer needs and to align their team. You make fundamental decisions about your product offerings and business design.

Strategy formulation is iterative: the key players assess, decide, act, and review how they are doing. The decisions are fundamental to the success of a business. The process prepares key people to take responsibility for the chosen route.

I have been a strategic planning consultant with over 20 plus years of experience and this webiste present my expert view of best practice.

The menu on the left links to the website's chapters, which walk you through the concepts, the process, prepare you to lead, to setup the team or participate, to organize the meetings, to estimate the benefits and costs, to evaluate and select the best strategy and to present your strategy or business plan to others. It is a comprehensive checklist for the process.

Strategy formulation is where leaders determine how much to stretch (the upper line in the graphic), how to create the benefits for customers, how flexible to be, how to measure progress, and how to recognize when the strategy cannot be sustained (the lower line).

As a strategic planning facilitator, I designed this guide to educate my clients, most who are skilled operators, not full time strategists. As a strategy consultant, I help leaders to think strategically, team leaders to use the best process, their teams to formulate profitable strategies and finally, to present their business plan. It is not easy, but this website will make it easier.

If you are strategic planning team leader and in a hurry, start with the Planning the Meetings Chapter for detailed advice on managing the process for three approaches:

• scenarios for long range planning,
• fast, iterative planning for bottom-up efforts and entrepreneurs, and
• team planning with a one or two year planning horizon.

This chapter describes the team leader's tasks and the next, what do you cover in the first meeting with your boss when he or she assigns you to formulate a strategy.

Welcome! and explore: click on the arrows at the bottom of each page through the follow the logic of process, use the menus on the left of each page to jump to the most important topic for you, or use the search at the top of each page to find a concept.

Also, please check out my most recent article, A Strategic Planner's Responsibility is to Anticipate Consumer Demand and follow my blog on economic trends.