Turning Strategy Into Success
Why an integrated strategy?
Business leaders and managers alike often share a universal struggle: the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. It’s a cliché, but unfortunately true for many businesses where people are pulling in different directions, duplicating work, and have an incomplete picture of where the company is really going.
An integrated corporate strategy is crucial in driving the key actions needed to achieve a vision. Such a strategy covers aspects such as allocation of resources (people and capital), organisational design, portfolio management, and strategic trade-offs. Using an appropriate approach to setting your strategy will allow you to assign accountability, measure performance, and track progress toward the overarching company goals.
How the balanced scorecard can help turn your vision into reality
The balanced scorecard (BSc) is a framework that helps to create the clarity needed in setting an achievable strategy. This framework acknowledges that simple financial targets are necessary but insufficient in formulating strategic goals and directives.
The BSc includes four dimensions of performance:
- The financial perspective
- This indicates whether the company’s strategy and operations add value to shareholders. For organisations without shareholders, it indicates how well the strategy and operations contribute to improving the organisation’s financial health.
- The stakeholder perspective
- The BSc acknowledges that the various stakeholders within a business have unique and often competing demands which have to be balanced.
- The internal process perspective
- This is used to indicate the ability of the internal business processes to add value to customers and stakeholders and to improve shareholder wealth.
- The learning, growth, and innovation perspective
- This indicates the strength of the infrastructure for innovation and long-term growth.
Determining strategy: How does it work?
All four of the perspectives would have specific objectives tied to measures, along with time-based targets that would be met through strategic initiatives/actions. These actions can be assigned to a specific person, team, or division.
How Camino Consulting helps:
- An organisational development practitioner will meet with key stakeholders from the client’s company.
- The practitioner will guide them towards creating an appropriate strategy.
- We also assist with the implementation of key initiatives in order to execute the strategy.
Our clients have benefited greatly by utilising our services in facilitating the development of their corporate strategy.
Expert help vs a D.I.Y. approach:
- The facilitator will set and guide a thinking process that maximises productive decision making and produces clear strategic directives.
- Maximum productivity for the time spent – avoid talking in circles with a facilitator guiding the session.
- Identification of actionable and relevant high-impact focus areas that will achieve measurable results.
- Drawing inputs from everyone around the table and reaching quicker and more meaningful consensus and buy-in.
- An external person is not inhibited by incumbent thinking and can take an objective view of the company.
- The practitioner will ask simple and straight-forward questions to guide the strategy towards a realistic and implementable solution.
Our approach will naturally depend on the needs of the individual business. It may even be fruitful to review the wider business strategy with a framework such as the business model canvas before creating a balanced scorecard strategy.
Our clients engage in annual strategic planning sessions from October through January, often with a half-year review. In these turbulent times it will be fruitful to create a clear strategy that can be communicated across your company in order to ensure that actions are aligned to the success of the organisation.
