How One Typical Facilitator (Mistakenly) Concluded the Client Wasn’t Doing Strategic Planning
I got a call last week from a facilitator, asking for advice about an aspect of strategic planning. He kept asserting that his client, a manufacturer of outdoor recreational equipment, wasn’t doing strategic planning. I asked how he came to that conclusion.
He responded that, first, there was no Plan document that the client could show him. Second, they couldn’t answer his questions about what the client would do if there were changes, e.g., politically or economically, that would influence the client’s organization. The client wasn’t able to come up with a strategy. So the facilitator concluded the client was simply not doing strategic planning.
But Wasn’t the Client Doing Strategic Planning? Really?
I began asking questions in order to understand more about the client so I could give good advice to the facilitator about his strategic planning project. From the questions, I learned that the client:
Realized the “baby boomer bubble” was getting older, so he’d need to update his product line accordingly, perhaps to accommodate the “young old” (people from 60-80 years of age).
Wanted to reduce his labor costs, perhaps by outsourcing more work, especially to other countries having cheaper labor costs.
Wanted to position his company to be more competitive in the marketplace where there was increasing competition. The client especially wanted to update his unique value proposition.
I asked the facilitator how the client came to realize those priorities. The facilitator mentioned that, although the client doesn’t do planning, he does seem to stay on top of a lot of the current trends in his industry and society, and does have some ideas.
So then I asked the facilitator if the client really was doing a form of strategic planning — it just wasn’t the best form of comprehensive, explicit, research-based and systematic planning that usually is best for an organization.
Yes, the Client Was Doing Strategic Planning — Just Not the Best Planning
At this point in our conversation, the facilitator realized that he had been to quick to conclude that the client simply was not doing planning. He added that he should even affirm to the client that he had been doing planning, and that the facilitator could help the client to do it even better.
Moral of the Story: Don’t Be So Quick to Proclaim Your Clients Aren’t Planning
It seems increasingly with writers and consultants that, if an organization is not doing their particular preferred form of planning, they conclude the organization is not doing planning. (This is true especially as we’ve put for more emphasis on the need to be “strategic” — a term which has different definitions for different people. )
That conclusion can be damaging to the planners and to the working relationship with the client. Instead, recognize and affirm any planning that the client is doing.
What do you think?
(There’s a massive amount of free resources in the Strategic Planning topic in the Free Management Library.)
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Carter McNamara, MBA, PhD – Authenticity Consulting, LLC – 800-971-2250
Read my weekly blogs: Boards, Consulting and OD, Nonprofits and Strategic Planning.
One of the most vexed issues when talking to people who aspire to company directorship is the simple question, ‘What does it take to be a director?’
There are few satisfactory responses. There are courses (some of which are very good and comprehensive) but none of these are accepted as proof that an aspiring director has any real potential. There are proponents of appointing ‘eminent persons’ such as successful politicians, business-people or academics in the hope that the good judgement they developed in reaching their positions of eminence will be the sort of judgement that will also serve a board. In the not-for-profit boardroom the ability to make substantial donations is often considered to be sufficient qualification for the role. But none of these criteria really touch the core of the problem; how to identify good director talent before the aspiring director has already built a board career.
This confusion over the suitable ‘entry level qualification’ for boards is exacerbated by the team-based nature of the role. In consulting to boards it becomes quickly apparent that many board problems are actually simple interpersonal or team dynamic issues that are played out at the highest (and most dangerous) level in the organisation. How can board recruiters measure the ability of an aspiring director to make a valuable contribution to the team, without losing their independence of thought?
Every board is unique and individuals who perform well on one board may fail spectacularly on another. Taking on a new board role is a nerve wracking experience for both the recruit and the recruiters. There are never any guarantees of success. At the present time we are witnessing a world in which previously well respected, widely experienced, board directors have been found lacking in judgement and have presided over corporate failures that, with the benefit of hindsight, make it obvious they never should have been given that responsibility.
Regulatory standards are of little help. All around the world there are ‘lowest common denominator’ standards that helpfully inform us that directors should be over the legal age of adulthood, out of jail, not currently banned from directing and, in some (but not all) jurisdictions, not certified as insane. These are easily measured criteria but they are also clearly not sufficient qualification for a role in which lives, as well as life’s savings may be at stake.
The work of academics studying the board provides some useful indications. There is no overwhelming statistical proof that structural board arrangements such as audit committees, balance of executive and non-executive, or of independent and non independent directors, etc. have any impact on the likely performance of the company. There have been suggestions that the slight correlations are proof that companies that are performing well can afford to fill their board with enough independent NEDs to staff the relevant committees and provide the desired ‘balance’. Companies that have performed badly often go through a process of having very engaged ‘executive-style’ boards as they right the problems and get corporate performance back on track.
The academics are generally agreed that a board that operates as a team, with effective conflict resolution and rigorous debate in an atmosphere of trust and mutual respect, has a better chance of driving better performance than a board that is dysfunctional and unable to reach agreement on the key issues. But the thorny problem remains; there is little way to tell which individuals will enhance the board’s dynamics before the appointment.
The use of skills matrices to ensure that the board has members who can adequately understand the issues expected to be raised as the company progresses in implementing its strategy does assist in some respects. However, the fact remains that there are still some glaring inconsistencies. Most companies need people to implement their strategies and yet very few boards have anyone with a human resources background among their members. The number of IT and marketing specialists on boards is also generally very low. Legal and financial skills are generally better represented than the softer skills. There is no doubt that understanding the law and finances is a necessary skill for every director; but is it really necessary for companies to have such a preponderance of highly qualified professionals from these two disciplines at the cost of a more balanced array of skills?
The current debate on diversity would appear to suggest that the more diverse the board the better the expected corporate performance. There is not yet any great evidence for this, especially when gender is the basis for the conversation. Perhaps looking at other types of diversity, such as skills based diversity, would give a more informed understanding of what a board really needs. Then, working back from the needs of a board, we might be able to establish a baseline for the minimum criteria a director must satisfy to be considered fit to take on the role.
For directorship to become professional, we need professional standards for directors. If only we could agree on what those standards were ….
Nike makes shoes, right? Well, not exactly. Nike is a wonderful company with superb marketing capability. But Nike outsources the actual manufacturing process to someone else. So in that sense, Nike does not make shoes. Nike’s competitive work is the design and marketing of athletic shoes. Obviously, the company has succeeded for years at doing just that. Knowing when to outsource work and when to keep it in-house is a key to successful strategy.
The underlying principle of business strategy is that you cannot excel at everything since resources are always finite and limited. Instead, you must make strategic choices. Key among these choices is a critical decision: which elements of work must be done by the company itself, and which elements should be outsourced? To make a sound decision of this sort, begin by identifying the work of the organization that is “mission critical.” Mission critical work cannot be trusted in the hands of another organization.
As a start toward culling the mission critical work from work that can be outsourced to others, it is helpful to perform and assessment of all the work processes performed by your company and sort each into one of three categories. Once work is categorized, the organization can be aligned to properly support the requirements of each type of work. These three categories are:
Competitive or Strategic Work. This is mission critical work. It is the core competence of the organization. Strategic work is that which creates sustainable competitive advantage and distinctiveness. For example, Nike differentiates itself through its strategic marketing work (sending non-core work such as manufacturing overseas), while Apple excels at product design. Competitive Work is always performed and managed in-house.
Competitive Enabling Work. This work “leverages” the competitive work, or enables the competitive work. Companies that stake their reputation on the excellence of their personnel will often consider employee development and education to be Competitive Enabling work. As another example, while Wal-Mart’s strategic differential and competitive work is considered operational excellence — managing information and keeping stock ever present on its shelves – the company’s competitive enabling work is both the development and maintenance of their state of the art information technology (IT).
If Competitive Enabling work is done better, the Competitive Work becomes more distinct in the eyes of stakeholders.
Business Essential Work. This work must be done to stay in business, but is work that customers don’t really value. Even if done at a world-class level, business essential work does not create sustainable competitive advantage. Nonetheless, if done below industry standards, the outputs of business essential work can cause disadvantage and/or poor performance. Business Essential work includes “compliance” work which is performed to comply with governmental regulations or to mitigate legal risk to the organization. Designers of high performance organizations should heed this important guiding principle: Business Essential work, if left unabated, will consume the organization’s competitive work. That is, people can get so consumed by the busy work of the company that they put off and lose focus on the organization’s truly strategic endeavors.
It’s critical for leaders to understand that by categorizing work as Business Essential, it doesn’t mean that this work is not important to the organization. On the contrary, it is essential to the organization to stay in business. In fact, if Business Essential work is done below the industry standard, it can lead to disadvantage. At the same time, if leaders invest a lot to get this work above a level at parity with competitors, it will never lead to distinctiveness in the eyes of the customers.
Outsourcing selected business processes has become an important strategic option for companies wanting to maintain a focus on their strategically important or competitive work. Resourcing decisions should be dictated by the type of work and the nature of the individual skills and knowledge required to perform the work.
Work that is not categorized as competitive work is subject to consideration for outsourcing of one sort or another. To determine the best possible distribution of work, we use the following model
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Mark Rhodes is a highly experienced organizational strategy and design consultant with Strategy By Design. You can reach him via email at markrho@mindspring.com..
People are always asking us for examples of business plans, which is a bit ironic, in that every credible plan I’ve ever seen has “Confidential” stamped all over it. That said, there are samples out there, which is fine as long as you don’t assume you should do it the way they did it.
Here are some good places to look for sample business plans:
Palo Alto Software offers more than 100 free plans in 28 different categories. The plans are truly free; their hook is that if you buy their Business Plan Pro software, you can import any number of these plans and edit them to get a good start on your own plan; or use any of the 500+ plans that come with the software.
SCORE, the business advisory nonprofit organization with services delivered by volunteers, provides about a dozen business plan templates.
Entrepreneur lists more than 50 sample business plans in many different sectors.
Center for Business Planning provides business plan “winners” from their Moot Corp Competition, which simulates entrepreneurs asking for funding. MBA students prepare the plans.
About.com provides a fictional “professional” plan “with exceptional graphics and formatting” with (gulp) ten appendices. Their Critical Steps for Business Planning is worth taking a look at also.
The Bridgespan Group offers several sample business plans for nonprofit organizations.
Unfortunately, there is no standard business plan format. Use these samples, and the suggested reading mentioned in my previous blogs, to inform your thinking. Then create a plan (or hire a consultant) that works for your market, for your business and for you. Good luck!
Recent Breakthrough in Development: Systems Thinking
One of the recent breakthroughs in organizational and management development is the ability to understand organizations and each of the various functions in them as a system. Each of the functions, such as Boards, planning, leadership, management, marketing, sales and finances is a system. Each of these functions is also a subsystem in the overall system of the organization.
Our understanding of systems helps us to be much more effective in “diagnosing,” including to identify causes versus symptoms in order to improve the organization or any of its functions.
What is a System (Inputs, Processes, Outputs)?
A system is an ongoing series of activities focused on achieving an overall purpose. It has various subsystems, each of which is connected and aligned to achieve that overall purpose. For example a car is a system, but a pile of sand is not.
Systems have various inputs which are processed to produce various outputs. The inputs usually come from other systems and the outputs usually are input to other systems, as well. Strong alignment of these systems usually optimizes the performance of the system, as well.
What is the System of a Board of Directors?
Let’s look at the system of a Board of Directors.
Inputs
Typical inputs to Board operations include:
Past evaluation results of Board
Annual calendar of Board activities
Strategic plan
Business plans
Stockholders’ expectations
Laws and regulations on governance
Employees
Best practices on Boards
Processes
The typical recurring processes of a Board can be organized into four stages, including planning the Board, developing the Board, operating the Board and evaluating the Board.
Process: Planning the Board
Develop Board policies and procedures
Update Board member job descriptions
Update the Board organization chart
Develop Board Committee work plans
Process: Developing the Board
Form Board Governance Committee
Recruit new Board members
Provide Board Manual to each
Train members about Boards
Orient members about the organization
Organize members into committees
Process: Operating the Board
Attend meetings
Research, discuss and debate issues/topics
Make motions and decisions
Drive strategic planning
Supervise the CEO
Conduct public relations
Review financials
Declare stock equity and dividends (in for-profits)
Drive fundraising (in nonprofits)
Process: Evaluating the Board
Evaluate each meeting
Evaluate quality of attendance, participation, teamwork, strategic decisions
Evaluate Board operations annually
Develop and implement Board Development Plan
Outputs
Examples of typical outputs or results from Boards include:
It’s helpful to “diagnose” the performance of a system by working backwards from the quality of the system’s outputs, then examining each of its recurring processes, and then the quality of the inputs to the system (remember that these inputs often are outputs from another system.) A good Board evaluation would examine at least the occurrence and ideally the quality of the outputs, processes and inputs. Here are several Board evaluations.
Too often, we look primarily at the results, or outputs, of Board operations and then we exhort Board members to improve those results. If we also look at the processes then we can also mention those to members as ideas about how they can improve their results.
Organization and management sciences today are placing a great deal of attention to naturalistic approaches to development. One of the most prominent approaches is called “self-organizing” systems. These are systems that develop primarily according to certain values, rather than according to specific procedures.
Biological systems (people, plants, animals, etc.) are fine examples of self-organizing systems. They might grow in any variety of ways – ways which are rarely sequential in nature. However, these biological systems always develop according to certain key principles or values, such as propagation of their species and self-preservation.
Contrast to the Traditional Approach to Strategic Planning
Contrast that naturalistic, unfolding approach with the traditional approach to strategic planning, which is usually linear, or sequential, in nature. In the traditional approach, planners might:
First identify broad mission, vision and/or values statements
Conduct a situational analysis involving external and internal assessments
Establish broad goals in accordance with the mission and results of the assessments
Identify strategies to achieve those goals (small organizations often skip these strategies)
Develop specific action plans (objectives, schedules, responsibilities and resources) to achieve each of the goals.
This linear approach is not well suited to all types of organizations. Some organizations might prefer a more naturalistic planning process that allows all perspectives and activities in an organization to unfold over time. This planning process might be deemed “organic”, that is, it emerges like that in natural systems, such as plants, animals and people. Some might prefer to call it “holistic.”
What is an Organic Approach to Strategic Planning?
This is a rather unconventional approach to planning – certainly, an approach that some might argue is not strategic at all. However, the value of this approach is that it can match the nature of certain types of organizations much more closely than the traditional, linear approaches. It might even be argued that the linear approaches can even hurt these types of organizations as their members struggle to conform to a planning process that is quite contrary to their nature.
Step #1: Clarify stakeholders’ vision and values
In meetings of perhaps half a day, stakeholders clarify their common vision and values. Here are various methods to clarify vision and values. The types of stakeholders depend on the purpose of the planning. For example, neighborhood development planning might include members of the neighborhood, potential funders and community leaders.
Step #2: Each person establishes personal action plan
At tables of 4-6 people each, each person identifies a relevant and realistic action that he/she can take, and by when, in order to work toward the vision and according to the values. Actions might be derived from telling stories about “the best time that we …” or “my wish is that …” This approach is well developed in the emerging field of appreciative inquiry.
Step #3: Each person reports results of actions; all update vision and values
In the next meeting, at each table, each person reports the results of his/her actions, including progress toward the vision and any learnings that he/she gleaned. After each person has reported, a spokesperson for that table shares a summary of the actions and learnings with the entire group.
The group can use the same process used in Step #1 to update the vision and values based on the results of the actions and the associated learnings.
The group repeats steps 2-3 until the group agrees sufficient progress has been made toward the vision.
When Should Organic Strategic Planning Be Considered?
Organic strategic planning might be suited to your planning if one or more of the following is true:
The vision for your organization and its stakeolders applies to a large group of people, and might take a very long time to achieve.
The effort to achieve the vision might involve lots of very diverse people.
The culture of the organization is quite averse to conducting orderly, sequential activities.
The role of vision and values in your organization is extremely important.
The culture of the organization highly values the working from the positive and telling of stories.
If your organization expects funding from investors or donors, it has confidence that it can obtain that funding without presenting a conventional strategic plan document with goals and strategies.
The focus of the process needs to be on the interaction among stakeholders as much, or more, than on achieving certain, specific results.
The principles of strategy are timeless. The following notes on the essentials of strategy are drawn from the great works of strategy… Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Napoleon’s Maxims, Clausewitz’ On War. Though dating up to 2,500 years ago, the advice of these strategists is helpful today no matter your competitive landscape, from high tech to agriculture, from manufacturing to government.
1) An effective strategy is deeply understood and shared by the organization.
Genghis Khan’s Mongols defeated far larger armies because they were able to make adjustments on the battlefield despite ancient systems of communication that limited the way orders could be delivered to warriors already in action. The secret was instilling battle strategy in the hearts and minds of all soldiers so that they could make correct tactical decisions without direct supervision or intervention.
Like the mission statement published in your annual report or guiding principles framed in your lobby, a strategic plan itself accomplishes nothing. What matters is whether the people of your organization understand and internalize the strategic direction you have articulated and can make tactical choices on their own. Strategic plans must be articulated in a manner such that operational and tactical decision-making can follow suit.
As a strategist, you must count on the employees or members of your organization to make sound tactical and operational decisions that are aligned with your desired strategic direction. To ensure that these decisions are well made, your articulated strategic direction and strategic plans must be applicable and clearly related to the issues that people face.
Remember that an effective strategy provides a picture of the desired long term future. In order to make sound day to day decisions, all members of the organization must be able to begin with the end in mind. All steps must ultimately keep the company on course toward the long term objective.
2) An effective strategy allows flexibility so that the direction of the organization can be adapted to changing circumstances.
Watching the rise of Napoleon’s French empire in the first decade of the 19th century, the Prussian generals were anxious to do battle with Napoleon’s army because their soldiers were highly trained and disciplined in battle tactics that had succeeded for Frederick the Great fifty years before. It turned out, though, that the Prussian army was designed to fight “the last war” while Napoleon’s innovations, including soldiers carrying their own provisions instead of the supply train of impedimenta typical of the traditional European armies, allowed Napoleon’s troops to react and adapt to conditions far faster than could the Prussians. When the Battle of Jena–Auersted occurred in 1806, Napoleon’s army out-maneuvered their slow and plodding enemy and destroyed the Prussians in that pivotal confrontation.
A rigid strategic direction seldom turns out to have been the best course of action. To assure that your business is nimble and able to react to changes in the marketplace, it is essential that your strategy is flexible and adaptable. As a strategist, you will count on timely and accurate information about market conditions. It is essential to build and employ effective mechanisms for observing and listening to what is going on in the competitive environment. Real-time information, in turn must feed on-going strategic and operational shifts and deployments.
3) Effective strategy results from the varied input of a diverse group of thinkers.
Abraham Lincoln used the language of empathy and metaphor to communicate strategy to the Amercian people.
Moreover, participants in strategic decision-making must be unafraid to state contrary opinions. In Doris Kearns Goodwin’s excellent book Team of Rivals, she explains how instead of bringing in a cadre of leaders whose thinking closely matched his own, Lincoln made a point of surrounding himself with his political rivals, naming William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edwin M. Stanton, and Edward Bates – all of whom had opposed Lincoln in a bitterly fought presidential race – as members of his cabinet. Despite initial misgivings, this unlikely team learned that Lincoln valued their opinions, would consider and reflect on their disagreements and challenges, and would not stick unnecessarily to preconceived notions. Though the mix of personalities and opinions inevitably led to debate and verbal conflict, Lincoln was able to facilitate and mediate, tapping into a rich variety of ideas in order to find the optimal solution to political and military issues. Goodwin attributes this ability to manage disagreement and lead an effective decision-making process as perhaps Lincoln’s greatest strength as he led a troubled nation.
To ensure that your strategic team is ready to make effective decisions, look carefully in the mirror. Do you encourage debate, even argument, among your team about key decisions, or do you encourage toeing the company line? Remember that the well documented occurrences of groupthink – Kennedy’s ill-fated bay of Pigs invasion, NASA’s decision to launch the Challenger space shuttle, Bush’s reaction to presumed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – occur not because of oppressive or stifling leaders. Rather, groupthink tends to occur when leadership groups enjoy collegial and fond relationships, leaving deliberants unwilling to rock the boat, or to voice contrary opinions.
4. An effective strategy follows a thorough and deep analysis of both the external environment and the internal capabilities of the organization.
This is the essence of the famous SWOT model (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats). The strategist must understand the effects and dynamics of external entities such as competitors, suppliers, regulators and strategic partners. A sound assessment of these external factors leads to a rich understanding of threats to ward off and opportunities to pursue. The strategist must also understand the internal capabilities of his or her organization. A realistic self assessment enables the organization to leverage the strengths of the organization and to shore up areas of weakness.
To take advantage of intelligence gained through a SWOT analysis, the strategist must ensure that intelligence does not sit idle, but is immediately mined for insight that can be used in strategic and operational decision-making. All historical stories of the great strategic achievements of history – from D-Day and the Normandy invasion to Napoleon’s greatest campaigns – include anecdotes of decision-makers poring over maps and data and striving to find the optimal course of direction and events.
5. An effective strategy identifies areas of Competitive Advantage
Writing in The Art of Wart of War some 2,500 years ago, Sun Tzu postulated two dialectic forces: Zheng is the “ordinary” element that fixes the enemy in place. Qi is the unexpected and devastating blow. Qi is indirect, unorthodox, extraordinary. Qi does not work, though, unless Zheng is able to hold the opponent in place until the decisive blow is struck.
To put this in the context of today’s competitive dynamics, understand that many aspects of business must be held at parity across a wide swipe of the competitive landscape. In business, this is called the “business essential” elements of organizational design. You don’t need to be world class at mundane business practices that are not your distinctive competence, but you must maintain standards of work equal to that of your competitors. That is, the organization must maintain parity with competitors in the ordinary and mundane matters.
But at the same time, every successful organization is able to explicate an audacious Qi or extraordinary force. You must be world calls at something that differentiates you from the competition. Moreover, all members of the organization must keep the uniqueness of their company in the forefront, always keeping competitive advantages unharnessed in order to compete in a vigorous manner. In short, every strategic plan must educate the full organizational team how it must use carefully identified competitive advantages in order to compete and win.
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Mark Rhodes is a highly experienced organizational strategy and design consultant with Strategy By Design. You can reach him via email at markrho@mindspring.com.
When Boards have recurring problems, such as poor attendance, low participation, high turnover of members or increasing conflicts, here’s a quick process that I’ve used successfully to “jump start” recovery.
Sure, the steps aren’t all of those needed for complete Board development — those steps would produce a blog post about 25 pages long. But the steps often are enough to get things going.
1. Propose a very brief Board evaluation as a “best practice.”
Don’t suggest it to “fix” a broken Board. Instead, suggest it as a “best practice” — members rarely refuse to do a best practice. Use a straightforward questionnaire that asks about occurrence of various “best practices.” The tool should not require more than 20-30 minutes for each Board member to do, because they’re all very busy people. Here’s some Board evaluation tools: https://staging.management.org/boards/boards.htm#anchor580514
2. Ask a couple of Board members to be an ad hoc “Board Governance Committee.”
The Committee compiles results of the evaluation and shows them to Board members in the next meeting. Don’t do a lot of analysis and interpretation of results. Just compile the results onto a couple of sheets of paper.
3. In the next meeting, show the results, then ask “What do we want to do?”
Be quiet and listen as Board members discuss what they themselves wrote on the evaluation — it’s their words that are being fed back to them, not the Committee members’. Ask “What if we do nothing? What do we want to do?” Usually, members want to do something, but they’re just not sure what to do.
4. So then suggest that they approve a simple “Board Development Plan.”
The Plan lists goals for improving the Board. The goals simply are the questions from the evaluation tool that now are reworded into goals. Don’t worry about whether there’s too many goals in the Plan. The real purpose is to get members energized and focused to improve their board.
5. On each meeting agenda, have “Status of implementing Board Development Plan.”
In each meeting, members are at least reminded that they could improve Board operations. That usually makes them mindful of improving the Board, or at least trying harder to do a better job as Board members. From there, members might get help if needed, but they’ll certainly have more focus and a much stronger vision for health of their Board.
The above steps might not be all that’s needed, but they’re often useful in doing just what this blog post mentions — jump starting activities to fix the Board for the long term.
Some Cautions — What Often Doesn’t Work
1. Don’t get caught up in analyzing Board members’ personalities.
When Boards struggle, members often start blaming each other. Don’t get caught up in analyzing the titillating psychodynamics of the interpersonal relationships of the Board members. Instead, move them away from focusing on personalities to focusing on plans and practices. The above procedure helps to do that. Often the most irritating Board members become the best ones when they see the Board is making progress.
2. Don’t do a one-shot Board training session.
Members rarely struggle because they’ve simply forgotten their roles and responsibilities. They need more than new knowledge from a training session — they need skills from practicing that new knowledge. So instead of a one-shot training session, they need Board development. Board development often includes a variety of “interventions,” for example, an initial Board evaluation, a resulting Board development plan, adopting various Board policies, coaching of Board officers over several months and even a post-evaluation.
3. Don’t just preach at, or continue to confront members — and don’t just try get them excited about their jobs.
Those tactics might work for a short while, but it’s very likely that motivation will quickly go away when members are back in meetings, faced with the realities of their ongoing roles and responsibilities. Board members rarely have chronic struggles because members just don’t feel good about each other, or because they’ve somehow completely forgotten the importance of their jobs. Instead, they struggle because they’ve gotten away from the basic structures, roles and practices that provide the framework and foundation within which they do their jobs.
Sometimes the best things in life are free. So if your preference is to find out what’s available on the web before investing in a business planning book (see previous blog entry for a list of books), here’s a quick list of ten “best” business planning web sites.
My next blog will indicate where you can find sample business plans.
Ten Painless Steps to Starting and Finishing Your Business Plan. Some good tips on how to go about researching and writing your plan.
Creating Your Business Plan, which also does a good job of outlining how to frame and get to work on your plan.
What Is A Business Plan?, from Palo Alto Software, the maker of the top-selling Business Plan Pro software discussed in a earlier blog. They also have a section called How To Write A Business Plan worth checking out as well.
There’s a wealth of information in these websites, some of it contradictory, which is part of the nature of relying on free business planning advice. So if you’re serious about creating a business plan, you’ll probably want to buy a book and possibly some software as well, but these sites should help you get started. Good luck!
The Corporate Secretaries International Association recently released a report, “Twenty Practical Steps to Better Corporate Governance.” It struck me that almost all of the steps applied to nonprofit Boards as well.
(The Report refers to “corporate” governance, the phrase commonly used for for-profit Boards, which is a misnomer I believe because Boards are required for nonprofit corporations, too).
It also struck me how much for-profit and nonprofit Boards could learn from each other, but the continued misperception that they’re totally different continues to hamper that synergy from happening. (I’ve spent 15 years maintaining a massive website, in part, to show the similarities and to help the two types learn from each other, in the Free Management Library.)
The report suggests that following 20 practices:
1. Recognize that good corporate governance is about the effectiveness of the governing body — not about
compliance with codes
2. Confirm the leadership role of the board chairman
3. Check that non-executive directors have the necessary skills, experience, and courage
4. Consider the calibre of the non-executive directors
5. Review the role and contribution of non-executive directors
6. Ensure that all directors have a sound understanding of the company
7. Confirm that the board’s relationship with executive management is sound
8. Check that directors can access all the information they need
9. Consider whether the board is responsible for formulating strategy
10. Recognize that the governance of risk is a board responsibility
11. Monitor board performance and pursue opportunities for improvement
12. Review relations with shareholders — particularly institutional investors
13. Emphasise that the company does not belong to the directors
14. Ensure that directors’ remuneration packages are justifiable and justified
15. Review relations between external auditors and the company
16. Consider relations with the corporate regulators
17. Develop written board-level policies covering relations between the company and the societies it affects
18. Review the company’s attitudes to ethical behaviour
19. Ensure that company secretary’s function is providing value
20. Consider how corporate secretary’s function might be developed
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Are used to monitor the performance of marketing campaigns
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Are used for individual targeting
Can be used for retargeting on other partner platforms
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