Many individuals and organizations look into the future – and make their plans to adapt to it. They allow their current circumstances and predictions of the future to determine their plans. That’s one way to go and it is a very reasonable thing to do – as we are reminded by this quote from George Bernard Shaw: “The reasonable person adapts themselves to the world. The … [Read more...] about Create Your Future
strategic planning
A New Strategy Approach
Last week I gave the students in my graduate Nonprofit Strategy course their midterm in which I asked them to invent their own strategic planning process. After studying various approaches all semester, I thought it would be interesting to see what they would come up with. With that in mind, I thought I would create something a bit different than my Mission Impact approach – … [Read more...] about A New Strategy Approach
The Importance of All Stakeholders
You might think that only the “senior” people in your organization feel like they have a “stake” in its current operations and future. You would be wrong. I have heard all of the excuses. “They don’t know enough about the substance of the issues to provide input.” “They don’t really care.” “We already know what they think.” Wrong, Wrong, and Wrong. There are … [Read more...] about The Importance of All Stakeholders
Implementing Integrated Strategy
The three most important questions that your strategy should answer are: *What products/services/programs of value are we going to provide and to whom? *Who do we need to staff the provision of these products/services/programs? *How will we finance all of this activity? An organization should have at least one strategic goal which relates to each of these … [Read more...] about Implementing Integrated Strategy
Conduct a Premortem
We’ve all seen the TV docs do a postmortem to figure out why and how a victim died so the NCIS detectives can catch the bad guy. A lot of organizations will conduct a postmortem after a big event or project has concluded to do an evaluation (though I prefer an After Action Review, since I hope no one died while implementing the project). Research has demonstrated … [Read more...] about Conduct a Premortem