We all have turning points in our lives, after which nothing is ever the same. When I was in my twenties, I stumbled across the subject of goals. Within thirty days my life had changed forever.
Over the years, I studied goals and learned how important they were for both business and personal success. One of the discoveries that astonished me was finding that less than 3 percent of people at all levels of business and industry have clear, specific, written, time-bounded goals for their lives that they are working toward on a daily basis.
As I began to implement goal setting in my own life and experience the remarkable changes that working toward clearly defined goals can bring about, I became interested in the subject of strategy, especially business strategy, which is really business goal setting. For many years, I have studied the leading military generals of history and how they used strategic thinking to achieve extraordinary victories, sometimes against overwhelming odds.
Over the last three decades, I have worked with more than 1,000 of the world’s largest corporations, and over 10,000 small and medium-size businesses. I became fascinated by the subject of strategic planning and the impact it can have on an organization of any size.
What I discovered was that most companies have no strategic plan at all. What they have is a budget. They have sales projections. They have operational plans. They have hopes, dreams, and aspirations, but in terms of crystallizing the future of the organization and deciding how they are going to get from where they are to where they want to go, very few companies have a genuine strategic plan.
Business Model Innovation
We are living in an age of the most dramatic change in all of history. What worked very well for some companies for a long time does not work at all today. Companies like Blockbuster and Borders Books went from market leaders to bankruptcy in just a couple of years when the business environment changed.
Today, business model innovation is one of the hottest subjects determining business success or failure. According to the experts, fully 80 percent of companies today are attempting to survive and thrive with obsolete business models. Just look at what is happening to newspapers, magazines, and traditional media of all kinds. They are in serious trouble.
What is the most important work that you do? The answer is “thinking.” Your ability to think clearly about who you are, what you want, and how to create a wonderful future for your business is more important than anything else you can do. In the pages ahead, I will share with you some of the most powerful, helpful, and important ideas that have ever been developed in the subject of strategic planning. You will learn how to think better, with greater clarity, and make better decisions about the future of your business than perhaps you ever have before.
With each idea or insight, you will think of your own ideas about actions that you can take immediately to get better results. You will see things that you can change or improve in your business, starting immediately. Whether you are a one-person company or an international giant, when you and the people around you practice the principles of Business Strategy, you will find that you can accomplish more in a few years than organizations without this capacity are able to accomplish in five or ten years, if ever.
By thinking and acting strategically, you will increase your profitability and the level of satisfaction that you get from your company and your career. You will increase your overall levels of quality and market penetration. More than anything else, you’ll have a tremendous feeling of being in control of your personal and business destiny. You will be able to look back every year or two and say, “This is exactly where we wanted to be.”