Ahead: Strategy is the way to a better future

By Lee Crumbaugh

Vision and strategy matter. They are most fundamental in life and business. Vision and strategy answer the questions: "Where do we go?" "What do we do?""AHEAD: Strategy is the way to a better future" is based on four decades of research, thinking and application by Lee Crumbaugh, a strategy consultant and certified strategic planner with deep experience leading and growing varied organizations. His mission is to help us understand and tap the power of vision and strategy to transform our organizations. Crumbaugh calls us to see the amazing potency of strategic planning and yet how much it is ignored or poorly executed. Companies that plan and execute achieve higher profits, greater return on invested capital and better odds of survival, yet evidence abounds that organizations pay much too little attention to anticipating change and driving toward a better place in light of that expected change. Studies indicate that only 23% of companies use a formal strategic planning process to make important strategic decisions and more than 70% of companies with a strategic plan don't execute it. "AHEAD: Strategy is the way to a better future" aims to change those statistics, to make strategic planning and plan execution pervasive and expected, to promote planning common sense and processes that are effective, easy to execute, not time consuming, over elaborate or expensive. Indeed, use this book as your practical and thoughtful guide to finding your vision, creating smart strategies and driving implementation. It's designed to help your organization, for-profit or not-for-profit, through the planning thicket, anticipate change and get down the road to a great place. It offers hard-won insights on finding a shared vision of future success, creating powerful strategies, and developing and taking action steps to move to the vision. It can help you simplify and accelerate the strategic planning process, while recognizing pitfalls and opportunities, as well as where more advanced techniques can be useful. You'll get essential guidance on risk, innovation, process, measurement, timing and much more. As a guide for leaders, "AHEAD: Strategy is the way to a better future" is neither a text book nor a planning "cookbook" - though it does offer some of the theoretical basis for strategic planning and it does have some "how to" sections interspersed with writings meant to be thought-provoking wake-up calls and spurs to action. "AHEAD: Strategy is the way to a better future" has six parts:* Part one: "Get on the road" begins with shared vision - why it is vital, how to find it and know it is good, and how to stay the course toward it. * Part two: "Create in space and time" addresses finding actionable strategies that lead to the vision. * Part three: "Be true to succeed" considers the vital choice of the basis on which to compete, the need for truth-telling, how to find opportunities and innovation.* Part four: "It's scary out there!" takes on anticipating strategic threats, avoiding strategic error, seeing and addressing unfolding events, and recognizing and adapting to systemic change.* Part five: "Time to act" recognizes that strategy making is only worthwhile if action steps are planned and then taken to move the organization toward that envisioned brighter future. It considers how to deal with risks and disruptions that we may encounter going down the road, how to get commitment to the journey and maintain it, the high value of persistence, and how to make appropriate course changes when the road ahead is unexpectedly blocked.* Part six: "Got it? There's more..." provides added insight on effective planning processes, introduces techniques that can help ensure success including scenario planning, agile planning and The Balanced Scorecard, and offers thoughts from other planners on how to make planning successful in this time of rapid and hard-to-predict change.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 148396311X
• ISBN13: 9781483963112
• Release Date: May 2013
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 130 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.3" x 6.0"