Planning Tools - Little Change
Building on my last post regarding the need to bridge branding and strategic planning to ensure meaningful differentiation, I participated in a discussion with a few senior level CMA council members recently. Our session was ‘about’ strategic planning rather than focused on ‘building’ a strategic plan itself. Our discussion covered a range of strategy, branding and planning topics building on our own management experience, client learning and current research. During our discussion, I was struck by how little has changed in the past two decades.
The lack of change in strategic planning processes may speak to the fact that ‘change’ has not been necessary or simply that when it comes to the process of planning itself, organizations simply do not have the time, the focus or required skills to develop new planning tools. No doubt several of us have participated in ‘planning sessions’ with varying degrees of results. Indeed a good moderator in leading a strategic planning session can be very valuable but the planning methodologies themselves are another topic.
While my team continues to inventory current planning practices while building a tool kit to assist Canadian companies in this endeavor, I thought it would be helpful to share an online tool that we found fairly comprehensive in structuring corporate planning:
Developing a Corporate Marketing Strategy: a proven approach and premium tool-kit by Demand Metric
You may also find a recent article on strategic planning and the importance of repetition and differentiation by Chris Zook, Bain Consulting of interest (his latest book "Repeatability" was featured in today's Globe & Mail):
I will continue to post learning and share resources as this exercise in building a tool kit for strategic planning continues to develop over the next few weeks.