Strategic Planning Kit For Dummies ^{2nd Ed.}

The fast and easy way to think and act strategically.

Are you a business owner or management professional looking to weather current economic storms while planning for future growth? Providing practical, field-tested techniques and a complete 6-phase plan, Strategic Planning Kit For Dummies shows you how to make strategy a habit for all organizations, no matter the size, type, or resource constraints.

• Strategic Planning 101 — get plain-English explanations of the who, how, why, and when of strategic planning
• The nuts and bolts — discover your core DNA, identify your strategic issues, find your competitive advantage, and develop your mission, vision, and values
• Collect your data — gather information that's critical for your strategic decision making, assess your business and its capabilities, and see your company through your customers' eyes
• Pave a clear path — plan for the future, determine how to grow and be sustainable, and identify and evaluate opportunities

• Introduction
• About This Book
• Conventions Used in This Book
• What You're Not to Read
• Foolish Assumptions
• How This Book Is Organized
• Part I Kicking Off Your Strategic Planning Process
• Part II Determining Your Core DNA and Envisioned Future
• Part III Sizing Up Your Current Situation
• Part IV Mapping Your Organization's Path to the Future
• Part V Living and Breathing Your Plan
• Part VI The Part of Tens
• Icons Used in This Book
• Where to Go from Here
• Part I: Kicking Off Your Strategic Planning Process
1. What Is Strategic Planning Really?
• Clearing Up the Confusion about Strategic Planning
• Defining strategy
• Understanding the importance of a strategic plan
• Implementing the strategic management process
• Identifying the components of a solid strategic plan
• Answering the most frequently asked strategic planning questions
• Identifying the Levels of Strategic Management
• Getting Acquainted with the Strategic Plan's Key Elements
• Vision: Bringing things into focus
• Strategy: Explaining the value you deliver
• Goals and objectives: Empowering employees
• Execution and evaluation: Ensuring success
• Seeing the Signs: Why You Need This Book
2. Why Strategic Planning Works
• Strategic Planning Is Most Used Tool by Executives
• Not Having a Plan Is Too Risky
• A Plan Is Required to be a High Performer
• What makes great companies great
• What successful CEOs are spending their time on
• Everyday Decisions Drive Long-Term Results
• The day-to-day impact
• The bottom-line impact
• Agility Is a New Competitive Advantage
• Everyone Is Part of Something Bigger
• Tribal Knowledge Is Passed on to the Next Generation
• You Can Clearly Explain (and Remember) Your Strategy
• A Strategic Plan Eliminates Wasted Time and Money
3. Getting Set Up for Successful Planning
• Previewing the Elements of a Strategic Plan
• Where are we now?
• Where are we going?
• How will we get there?
• How will we measure our progress?
• Before You Begin: Assessing Your Planning Readiness
• Are we ready?
• Is the climate right?
• Taking a Look at the Strategic Planning Process and Time Frame
• Phase 1 Determining your core purpose and envisioned future
• Phase 2 Assessing your strategic position
• Phase 3 Developing your strategies and priorities
• Phase 4 Cascading your strategies to operations
• Phase 5 Aligning your people and financial resources
• Phase 6 Executing your plan
• Selecting Your Planning Team
• Getting everyone involved
• Determining who's involved when
• Going It Alone or Hiring a Facilitator
• Running the planning sessions yourself
• Using a facilitator
• Smoothing Out Your Process
• Part II: Determining Your Core DNA and Envisioned Future
4. Identifying Your Strategic Issues
• Reviewing What Happened Last Year
• Recognizing what you achieved
• Understanding why you failed
• Evaluating Your Products and Services
• Picking the winners
• Dumping the losers
• Putting Your Portfolio Together (In the Market Attractiveness Framework)
• Evaluating market attractiveness and business strength
• Creating your own matrix
• Looking at Your Financial Performance
• Understanding the financial dynamics of your business
• Sorting out three-year trends
• Trailing your numbers over 12 months
• Evaluating your numbers
• Seeing the Underlying Forces of Your Industry
• Creating Your Short List of Strategic Issues
5. Focusing on What You Do Best
• Appreciating Your Competitive Advantage
• Taking the 30-second competitive advantage challenge
• Knowing what competitive advantage isn't
• Realizing what competitive advantage is
• Discovering why having a competitive advantage is so important
• Uncovering Your Advantages
• What's your distinct purpose?
• How do you make money?
• Why do customers buy from you?
• Pinpointing Your Competitive Advantage
• Perusing a few examples
• Stating your competitive advantage succinctly
• Putting your advantage to the test
• Breaking away from the pack
• Using Your Advantages Now
• Implementing your advantages
• Measuring your advantages
• Putting your advantages in your plan
6. Developing Your Mission, Values, and Vision
• Building Your Strategic Foundation
• Assessing Your Mission
• Elements of an effective mission statement
• Evaluating your current mission statement
• Writing a new mission statement
• Fine-tuning Your Organizational Values
• Elements of effective organizational values
• Creating or updating your organizational values
• Acting on your organizational values
• Visioning: Focusing in on Your North Star
• Elements of an effective vision statement
• Imagining your future mdash; vividly
• Creating or updating your vision statement and vivid description
• Futurecasting: Looking to the Future
• Getting into the right frame of mind for futurecasting
• Leaving your assumptions at the door
• Working a strategic thinking exercise
• Finalizing Your Strategic Foundation
• Part III: Sizing Up Your Current Situation
7. Assessing Your Business and Its Capabilities
• Establishing a Starting Point: Identifying Your Business's Strategic Position
• Evaluating Your Company's Capabilities
• Human capital: Having the right people in the right positions
• Organizational capital: Getting a feeling for your corporate culture
• Knowledge capital: Knowing what you already know
• Examining Your Resources
• Processes: Connecting Your Capabilities and Resources
• Operational processes
• Customer management processes
• Relationship management processes
• Innovation processes
• Other important process areas
• Checking Your Profit Margins
• Identifying cash creators
• Detecting cash drains
8. Seeing Your Business through Your Customers' Eyes
• Getting to Know Your Most Valuable Customers
• Identifying the 80/20 customer
• Figuring out the lifetime value of your customers
• Determining Why Your Customers Are Your Customers
• Measuring satisfaction by the numbers
• Obtaining feedback without using a survey
• Spending time talking to your customers
• Focusing on How You Deliver Value to Your Customers
• Considering different business models
• Using a business model to create value
• Framing out your business model
9. Researching the Market to Find New Customers
• Gathering Information about New Markets
• Identifying your information needs
• Locating information sources
• Creating Your Target Markets
• Dividing your market into groups
• Visualizing your target customer
• Focusing on the Most Attractive Markets
• Defining an attractive segment
• Evaluating your target customer groups
• Standing Out from the Crowd: Your Positioning Statement
• Writing your positioning statements
• Perusing examples of positioning statements
• Reaching Your New Target Markets
• The Four Ps: Neither a soul band nor a legume
• The cycle of (product) life
• Staying Market-Focused
• Gathering relevant information
• Sharing what you know
• Responding to what you've discovered
• Putting It All Together: Organizing Customer Information
10. Identifying Your Opportunities and Threats
• Starting Your SWOT Analysis
• Seeing the Future
• Finding Opportunities in Your Operating Environment
• Identifying your economic indicators
• Watching important social shifts
• Staying on top of technology trends
• Monitoring political winds
• Flexing with demographic movements
• Tracking Your Industry
• Looming new competitors
• Threatening substitute products
• Bargaining power of suppliers
• Bargaining power of buyers
• Duking it out with your competitors
• Analyzing Your Competition
• Identifying your competitors
• Gathering competitive intelligence
• Isolating what you really need to know
• Seeing the competitive field
• Evaluating Your Market
• Summarizing Your Opportunities and Threats
• Finishing Your SWOT Analysis
• Part IV: Mapping Your Organization's Path to the Future
11. Strategizing for Growth and Sustainability
• Understanding the Difference between Strategy and Tactics
• Strategy versus tactics
• The levels of strategies
• Business Unit Level Strategies: Choosing Your Leading Strategic Focus
• Applying your strengths to a business unit level strategy
• Discovering why you don't want to be stuck in the middle
• Choosing the right business unit level strategy for you
• Market Level Strategies: Strategizing How to Grow
• Concentrating on market penetration
• Delivering with product development
• Extending scope with market development
• Stepping out with diversification
• Deciding how to execute your growth strategy
• Summarizing Your Selected Strategies
12. Establishing Your Strategic Objectives, Goals, and Actions
• Firming Up Your List of Strategic Alternatives
• Paring down your SWOT
• Identifying strategic alternatives
• Sorting through your other alternatives
• Evolving Alternatives into Priorities
• Sorting out internal and external alternatives
• Creating a short list of external priorities
• Compiling a short list of internal priorities
• Gut checking your priorities
• Balancing Your Strategic Priorities
• Financial priorities: If we succeed, how will we look to our shareholders?
• Customer priorities: How do we provide value to our customers?
• Internal priorities: What processes must we excel in to satisfy our customers?
• Employee priorities: How must our organization grow and improve?
• Turning Strategic Priorities into a Road Map for Your Vision
• Finalizing your strategies
• Writing your long-term strategic objectives
• Making your short-term goals SMART
• Mapping your strategy
• Building your road map
• Assembling Your Strategic Plan
• Evaluating Your Strategic Plan
13. Putting Your Plan into Action
• Managing Performance with a Scorecard
• Pegging your measures
• Aiming at your targets
• Building your scorecard
• Cascading Goals to Annual Action Plans
• Tips for cascading one level
• Tips for cascading multiple levels
• Getting down to cascading business
• Avoiding land mines in cascading
• Ensuring Your Plan Makes Cents
• Estimating revenue and expenses
• Contributing to the bottom line
• Projecting your financial future
• Forecasting with indicators
• Making Your Plan a Living Document
• Piecing out your plan by audience
• Using a performance management system
• Part V: Living and Breathing Your Plan
14. Execute, Execute, Execute: Putting Your Plan to Work
• So You Have a Plan — Now What?
• Avoiding the pitfalls
• Covering all your bases
• Making sure you have the support
• Determining your plan of attack
• Holding People (Including Yourself) Accountable to the Process
• Appointing a strategic plan manager
• Syncing individual action plans with compensation
• Coaching for achievement
• Heartbeat of Your Management Process: Strategy Reviews
• Understanding the difference between strategy and operational reviews
• Holding effective strategy review meetings
• Using a scorecard to measure progress
• Mastering the Art of Communicating Strategy
• Making sure everyone buys in
• Rolling out the plan
• Continuing communication
• Keeping Your Plan Working for You
• Accepting change — the only constant
• Adapting your plan as necessary
15. Scenario Planning: Answering the What Ifs
• Grasping the Concept: What Is Scenario Planning?
• Tackling Your Short-Term Uncertainties
• Identifying immediate risks
• Constructing possible alternative outcomes
• Confronting Your Longer-Term Futures
• Thinking about the big what ifs
• Building alternative futures
• Connecting scenarios to strategy
• Considering Example Scenarios
• Shell energy scenarios to 2050
• Cisco's Internet scenarios to 2025
• Chatham House's food futures scenarios
16. Value-Creating Strategies for Entrepreneurial Organizations
• Establishing an Owner's Vision
• Knowing your true endgame
• Deciding whether to publish your endgame
• Creating a Sellable Business
• Understanding what creates value
• Valuing your business
• Ensuring Your Business Continues after You Leave
• Planning for transition
• Considering how you want to exit your business
• Preparing for a smooth exit
• Gathering additional resources
17. Sustainability for the Social Sectors
• Moving from Profit to Sustainability
• Getting Your Board on Board the Planning Effort
• Defining the role of the policy board
• Being tight on the ends and loose on the means
• Planning for Government Entities
• Recognizing how government planning works
• Getting set up for government planning
• Determining what sustainability means for government entities
• Planning for Nonprofit Organizations
• Redefining competition with the MacMillan Matrix
• Mapping out nonprofit strategies
• Part VI: The Part of Tens
18. Chapter 18 Ten Tips to Keep Your Strategic Plan from Hitting the Shelf
• Getting Everyone Involved from the Start
• Deleting the Fluff
• Appointing a Strategy Manager
• Creating a Strategic Plan Poster (Real and Virtual)
• Hooking Achievement into Incentives
• Using a KISS
• Holding a Monthly Strategy Meeting
• Using a Scorecard
• Leading by Example
• Celebrating Your Success — Whenever You Feel Like It
19. Ten Ways to Ruin Your Strategy Meetings and How to Avoid Them
• Refusing to Use a Facilitator
• Neglecting to Conduct Any Research Before the Meeting
• Inviting Everyone
• Holding an Annual Retreat
• Getting through the Agenda No Matter What
• Forgetting to Explain the Process
• Assuming Everyone Thinks Like You
• Ignoring the Elephant in the Room
• Ending on a Low Note
• Overlooking Life after the Meeting
20. Ten Ways to Maintain Momentum in Your Planning Process (And Life)
• Create Your Picture of Success and Make It a Reality
• Pick a BHAG
• Eliminate Your Energy Drains and Recharge Yourself
• Conquer Your Fears — Concentrate and Be Brave
• Take Control of Your Finances
• Create a Brain Trust
• Find the Time
• Highlight Small Wins
• Let the Process Evolve
• Be Committed

Too low-level to be of any use to an experienced practitioner, too lacking of references for an MBA-student, and too high-level to be useful for an inexperienced beginner.

In short, not totally bad, but nothing to write home about.