Strategic planning: Three tips for 2009

Strategic planning: Three tips for 2009
Even in these tumultuous times, strategic planning doesn’t have to be an exercise in anxiety—or futility.
APRIL 2009 • Renée Dye, Olivier Sibony, and S. Patrick Viguerie
Source: Strategy Practice


Strategic-planning season has arrived for many companies, and it couldn’t be more different than it has been in years past. Gone are the days of linear trend-extrapolation exercises that produce base, upside, and downside cases. Strategists, now facing the most profoundly uncertain times in their careers, are creating disaster scenarios that would have been unthinkable until recently and making the preservation of cash integral to their strategies.
Most strategists we know are avoiding the obvious mistakes, such as planning as usual or, conversely, eliminating essential strategy-development activities or even strategic planning itself. Nonetheless, strategists remain deeply—and understandably—concerned that the priorities emerging from the annual planning rituals won’t address the demands of today’s tumultuous environment.
These are uncharted waters, and no one has a clear map for sailing through them. It’s clear that scenario planning, a well-established technique for coping with uncertainty, should play a critical role this year, but executing successfully has never been as challenging as it is now. Most companies will have to consider more variables and involve more decision makers than they have in the past. Strategists will also need to place a greater emphasis on measurement—the only way to recognize when changing conditions merit quick strategic adjustments. Finally, the focus on new or surprising scenarios shouldn’t obscure relevant long-term trends or devalue important existing strategies.
Be realistic about scenario planning

In a highly uncertain environment, the advantages of scenario planning are clear: since no one base case can be regarded as probable, it’s necessary to develop plans on the assumption that several different futures are possible and to focus attention on the underlying drivers of uncertainty.
Today’s pervasive uncertainty complicates scenario-planning efforts: the number of variables at play—and the range of plausible outcomes—have exploded in the past year. Consider, for example, the predicament of an industrial supplier that is not only heavily exposed to commercial and residential real estate but also has many government customers. For this company, the critical uncertainties include the direction of the commercial-credit and mortgage markets, housing prices, tax revenues, and government stimulus spending. Different outcomes for each of these uncertainties produce vastly different paths for the business. Since the heart of scenario planning—crafting a number of strategies for different outcomes—has become significantly more complex,1 strategists should prepare for a more demanding process of gathering information, exploring possibilities, and plain old hard thinking.
Senior executives outside the strategic-planning group—even those accustomed to developing scenarios—may find the diversity and complexity of this year’s scenarios bewildering. It’s critical to bring such executives into the process early: for example, by kicking off the planning process with a scenario-development exercise involving the full senior team. Similarly, as the process of reviewing business units gets under way, a company can inculcate an appreciation of the threats it faces and of its collective strategic response by inviting executives from a number of divisions to participate in the proceedings—rather than hold one-off events between the senior team and the leader of each individual unit.
Intensify monitoring

Depending on how events unfold, the industrial supplier mentioned above could make radically different moves. If the commercial and residential real-estate markets stabilized, it could expect reduced sales within those channels until the economy rebounded, but its business model would remain fundamentally the same. If those markets softened further, the bulk of the company’s market opportunity, for the foreseeable future, would lie in infrastructure investments underwritten by government stimulus spending. In that case, the company would need to redeploy its sales resources to government-oriented business and focus on maximizing sales there.
The company’s strategy, in short, must account for many more contingencies than it has until recently. Since the effectiveness of such a strategy depends on an organization’s ability to adjust rapidly as the fog starts to lift, managers must identify and intensively monitor key indicators suggesting which scenario might unfold. For the industrial supplier, some of the most important indicators are sales of new and existing homes, foreclosure rates, mortgage interest rates, new building starts, and announcements of “shovel ready” government projects. Of course, the company’s managers always followed such indicators, but the strategic-planning process typically collapsed their potential variations into average market growth forecasts. Given the present heightened uncertainty, however, the strategy group decomposed the average forecast into its individual elements to make the possible outcome for each of the indicators more transparent and to monitor them in greater detail.
There’s no occasion like the strategic-planning process to get a fix on such indicators—a fix that should also help companies make ongoing budget decisions in real time. That’s critical, because it makes no sense to set each operating unit’s budget allocation at the start of the fiscal year if cash is tight and corporate executives expect to dole it out carefully as plans become less uncertain. What companies need now is a dynamic “pay as you go” resource allocation process that conserves cash and encourages adherence to the strategic road map laid out in scenario planning.
This year’s planning process should also generate unusually specific plans to monitor the performance of suppliers, customers, and competitors. As we’ve seen in the past six months, the most entrenched incumbents can plunge into financial distress with dizzying speed. Early intelligence helps companies to recognize when they should negotiate more favorable supply terms, line up alternatives to risky suppliers, offer kinder credit terms to critical customers, accelerate collections from faltering ones, or scoop up all or part of vulnerable competitors. Leading indicators of distress include such familiar signals as delinquent accounts payable, downgraded debt ratings, large share price declines, late inventory deliveries, or lower-quality goods or materials. These signs, though all too familiar to operating managers, are typically addressed in an ad hoc way, not in the strategic-planning process. This year is different.
Look beyond the crisis

Given the vastness of the economic change now under way, the temptation for many planners will be to gaze, mesmerized, at the unfolding crisis. That’s a mistake, for at least two reasons.
First, devastating as the current downturn may be, it cannot roll back fundamental market trends—such as the aging of consumers in Europe and North America or the continued economic development of Brazil, China, India, and Russia—which will continue to create strategic opportunities and threats. Managers must focus their eyes—and resources—on these trends no matter what happens.
Second, planners who become fixated on current economic events run the risk of overlooking a core responsibility: evaluating the effectiveness of current strategies. Although the crisis may force companies to suspend or redirect some of them, others will remain relevant even in the changed environment. This year’s strategic-planning process is a time to encourage managers to sort out which current strategies the crisis has helped, hurt, or failed to affect and to ensure that a system and metrics are in place to track their performance. While all this may sound like common sense, extreme uncertainty makes it easy to overlook.
One company that’s staying the course is McDonald’s, which has profited in the downturn from its low-cost menu items and is enjoying its most robust same-store sales growth in years. Meanwhile, senior management has remained focused on longer-term strategies involving expensive store renovations, operational overhauls, high-end coffee products, and healthful menu options. Managers elsewhere can learn valuable lessons from the company’s efforts to benefit from the current circumstances while sticking to longer-term strategies and the underlying trends (such as healthier lifestyles) that they reflect.
Despite the challenging times, this year’s strategic-planning process need not be an exercise in anxiety or futility. Developing scenarios in greater depth, monitoring strategies more rigorously, and remaining focused on the long term will all help strategists boost the odds of creating plans that can lead their companies through the turbulence.

About the Authors
Renée Dye is a consultant in McKinsey’s Atlanta office, where Patrick Viguerie is a director; Olivier Sibony is a director in the Paris office.


Notes
1See Lowell Bryan and Diana Farrell, “Leading through uncertainty,” mckinseyquarterly.com, December 2008.

安排工作3祕訣，做事俐落、效率高

取材自《工作一次就做對──成為可靠的職場紅人超簡單53招》，小田切展子著，春光出版。



即使是同樣的工作內容，每個人所花費的時間與完成工作的品質，顯然還是有相當大的差異。


其實只要掌握以下這3大訣竅，任何人都能在不出錯的情況下，乾淨俐落地完成工作。


1.整頓辦公環境：
丟滿凌亂文件的辦公桌，以及堆積如山的未處理案件，會讓人有一種「不知該從哪裡著手才好」的緊張感覺。要是把已處理的文件與尚未處理的文件混在一起，則會造成更大的問題。


所幸，只要先確實做好分類，就能順利地進行工作。


你可以先準備一個專門放文件的盒子，能讓送來的文件（例如上司交代的工作、郵件、傳真等等）整齊地收納在盒子裡，以免送件人隨意放置，導致文件散亂、甚至丟失。


碰到要出差或放假時，可在最後上班日的下班前，先在辦公桌上放一個盒子，請大家「把文件放在這裡」；當然，像公司內部公報之類的分發刊物或傳閱的資料等等，也可以放進盒子裡。


這樣的話，就能避免桌面陷入整個被文件埋起來的「混亂狀態」。


此外，建議使用網狀或是透明壓克力製成的盒子，這樣即使將盒子疊在一起，也可以一眼就判斷出裡面是不是有文件。


2.依緊急程度決定優先順序：
分類與處理文件的要訣，就是判斷文件的「緊急度」；至於處理的優先順序，便是按照緊急度來決定。


一般而言，必須趕快處理的文件，大多會蓋著「緊急」（urgent）的印章，所以在著手處理之前，請先檢視所有文件，挑出緊急度高的文件優先處理。


不過，當看到緊急度高的文件時，雖然想立刻開始著手處理，但是，最好先將所有文件檢查一遍。


因為，在還沒確認的文件中，可能會有進一步的消息，或更新／訂正的內容，所以必須先行確認，以免在還沒完全弄清楚狀況時就開始處理。同時也要檢查電子郵件信箱，因為有可能會透過電子郵件收到後續聯絡的相關內容。


在工作場合中，除了例行事務之外，通常也會出現各式各樣不同的工作，而且大部分都設有期限，所以如果同時處理好幾件案子，就要考量每個案子的完成期限及所需時間，來判斷優先順序。這裡舉一個簡單的例子來做具體說明：


工作①和工作②的期限差了1小時，所以先做完①再做②也沒問題。順序就是①→②→③。
但是，因為工作②有人正等著收文件，考慮到這個工作只要30秒就能完成，所以就可以按照②→①→③的順序處理。


其實，工作的方法或順序並沒有正確答案，重點在於「用頭腦思考如何提升工作效率」，如此就能從每次工作時獲得的教訓中抓住要領，來確立自己「安排工作的方法」。


3.事先排定每日「工作紀錄表」：
「工作紀錄表」是為了管理日程而製作、像日曆一樣的東西。不管是使用有日期的記事本，或是自己做都可以（自製工作紀錄表，只要用影印紙裁切之後再裝訂即可）。


「工作紀錄表」的內容其實就是按照工作類型，寫上當天必須完成的工作。每天按表操課，就能省下不少時間，更不怕工作有所遺漏。


一旦工作告一段落，就可以確定「下次會有動作的日期」，並在確定時間點的當下，寫上預定的工作內容，藉以確實掌握某件工作是「處理完畢」或「尚未處理」。如果有尚未完成的工作，而且即使延期處理也沒有什麼影響，那就再謄寫到下一個上班日。