A January 25, 2010 article in the Wall Street Journal caught my attention.  Entitled “Strategic Plans Lose Favor, Slump Showed Bosses Value of Flexibility, Quick Decisions” by Joann S. Lublin and Dana Mattioli, the article describes several big companies’ efforts to find a better way, in the current economic uncertainty, to plan for the future.

Walt Shill, head of the North American practice for Accenture, is quite blunt: “Strategy, as we knew it, is dead. Corporate clients decided that increased flexibility and accelerated decision making are much more important than simply predicting the future.” Corporate planners are increasingly revising their forecasts monthly, but this too is the wrong solution in my opinion. It consists of continually moving the goal posts. When you first miss your numbers, recast them. Next month, repeat.

It is great to see corporate America, and consulting giants like Accenture, beginning to see the problems with long-term static planning approaches to strategy. We identified similar problems in the nonprofit sector years ago and prescribed a better approach to strategy, our Real-Time Strategic Planning methodology, which was described in The Nonprofit Strategy Revolution in 2008. Sometimes our sector leads the way! In this work we describe an ongoing strategy process designed to anticipate and respond to challenges and opportunities as they emerge.

Tags: economy, foundations, Nonprofit Sector, sector blurring, Trends

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Consulting for Nonprofits, Recommended Reading, Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.