Asset-based strategic planning

ot so long ago, a colleague of mine asked me to help with a project because, in her words, "I want your strategic mind."

Oh.

You see, I was as confused by the word "strategic" as most people are.  What exactly is it and how could I learn to operate "strategically?"   I needed to know for this project, but more importantly, I really wanted to understand.     

So I spent the next few weeks scouring the literature on strategy.  I read a lot of good things and a lot of nonsense.  Sometimes, I could even tell the difference.

After a while, some things began to be clear to me, and I eventually arrived at this definition:

trategy is a set of related decisions about how to allocate the resources we have under our control to accomplish a desired goal.

ere are three phrases in this definition that are especially important.  The first is that a strategy is a set of "related decisions."  It is not a document or a goal or a mission statement. It is decisions, specifically about how to allocate resources.  That is the second critical phrase -- the "resources under our control."  The third, of course, is the "desired goal."

I have worked on a lot of strategic plans, and often we spend much of our time trying to decide on the goal we are hoping to attain but little time on how to allocate our resources.   In fact, a clear accounting of the resources under our control is rarely even included in the discussion.

To be effective, any strategy development process needs to keep the desired goal, the available assets and the decision making process front and center.   The company leaders need to spend their time wrestling with the allocation of the people, capital, know-how and intellectual property to get to their goal.  

or the last two years I have been developing an alternate approach to strategic planning that I call Asset Based Strategic Planning. This process focuses on cataloging and understanding the assets that that are available to achieve the goal.  It includes a gap analysis to identify the resources that are missing and it builds towards a set of specific action decisions.  In this way, we avoid the common problem of creating a strategic plan only to have it set on the shelf gathering dust.