A recent article in BNET was somewhat scolding executives for needing to go to ‘Strategic Planning 101′ in response to a Dartmouth Professor’s claim that newspaper publishers are just sitting around and whining, while their businesses go in the tank. 

A clip from the article shows a somewhat insulting list of what Strategic Planning 101 is all about. Usually I just ignore this type of advice, but in this case it was so far off the mark, I had to comment.  

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Strategic Planning 101

1. Get a bunch of smart people in a room together … without cell phones and Blackberrys
2. Have somebody present a completely honest analysis of the competitive situation
3. Throw out all the sacred cows and preconceived notions
4. Brainstorm new ideas until you can’t stand to look at each other anymore
5. Vote on them, take the top ten, assign each to an executive to develop a business plan
6. Meet back, present the plans, debate, decide on one or two to implement, and execute

At least you’d think that’s what they’re doing, right? All those high-paid executives with fiduciary responsibility can’t just be sitting around complaining and waiting to die. Or can they? What do you think? Do Syd and I expect too much from officers and directors that shareholders depend upon to make their investment worthwhile?

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This misguided view of what strategic planning has two major gaps that are the undoing of most efforts to set and execute strategy.

First, the process of strategic planning should never focus on competitors as a starting point. The core external information to guide a growth strategy and innovation is customer needs. Too often, companies simply look at more successful competitors or industry best-practices and try to copy their way into market leadership. The problem is that you can’t get into the lead by copying others. Also, in the case of the newspaper industry, the entire industry structure and business model needs to be re-invented. You need to not look at other newspaper companies, but rather at how consumers are relating to media, what other media sources are available to companies spending money to advertising, and what assets do you have that could be redefined to better servce those consumers and corporate customers of the newspaper.

Second, there is a huge misconception that executive leaders are supposed to be the ones with all of the answers. The BNET article lays out the typical solution of, “let’s get all the executives to an offsite, hammer out a strategy, and then go to employees and get their buy in to execute.” This is never a good idea. The better approach is to have senior executives confront the realities of the business from an external perspective and agree on areas of the business that need to change significantly. Then, engage the operational-level leaders in thinking through innovative ways to solve the problems or drive new growth, work together between executives and mid-level leaders to set up plans and then focus priorities on a very narrow number of high-impact initiatives. Align budgets and other resources to ensure proper focus and support. Finally, engage each level of employees in deciding what they can individually do to advance the key initiatives. This way, the ownership and accountability of the plans sits with a much broader set of people than just the handful of executives suggested in the article.

The reason company strategies don’t seem to change fast enough is that shifts in customer needs and markets are not fully comprehended or recognized as significant shifts fast enough. And, despite the efforts of a handful of executives at the top to repeatedly call for change, the full organization doesn’t move. This “Strategy 101″ article describes the ineffective approach that leads to companeis and industries failing. Exectuvies who serve as leaders keep focused on customers, challenge their teams to generate the right strategies and effectively engage the entire organization in driving change. The leaders recognize that they alone can not have all the answers or force all of the changes to occur. Business is made up of teams that need to be leveraged to generate success.

Michael Kanazawa is Chief Executive of Bedrock Dissero and co-author of Big Ideas to Big Results.

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