Page 82 - The Handbook for Quality Management a Complete Guide to Operational Excellence

68 I n t e g r a t e d P l a n n i n g S t r a t e g i c P l a n n i n g 69

that captures the essence of the leader’s vision. A clerk provides exceptional
cus tomer service, an engineer takes a risk and makes a mistake, a supplier
keeps the line running through a mighty effort. These are concrete examples of
what the leader wants the future organization to become. She should repeat
these stories to others and publicly recognize the people who made the stories.
She should also create stories of her own, even if it requires staging an event.
There is nothing dishonest about creating a situation with powerful symbolic
mean ing and using it to communicate a vision. For example, Nordstrom has a
story about a sales clerk who accepted a customer return of a defective tire.
This story has tremendous symbolic meaning because Nordstrom doesn’t sell
tires! The story illustrates Nordstrom’s policy of allowing employees to use
their own best judgment in all situations, even if they make “mistakes,” and of
going the extra mile to satisfy customers. However, it is doubtful that the event
ever occurred. This is irrelevant. When employees hear this story during their
orientation training, the message is clear. The story serves its purpose of clearly
communicating an otherwise confusing abstraction.

Strategy Development
After specifying the objectives of the business via the vision and mission
statements, the next activity in strategic planning is to develop the strate-
gies (i.e., the plan) to achieve these objectives. Yet planning must go beyond
simply coming up with new things the business can do in the future. We
must also ask of each present activity, product, process, or market, “If we
weren’t already doing this, would we start?” If the answer is “No,” then
the organization should develop plans to stop doing it, ASAP.
The planning aims to make organizational changes: changes in the
way people work, changes in the systems to meet customers’ future needs.
The plan shows how to allocate scarce resources and builds accountability
into the plan. Deadlines are necessary, as is feedback on progress and
measurement of the final result.
A traditional basis of strategy formation is the comparison of internal
Strengths and Weaknesses to external Opportunities and Threats (SWOT).
As shown in Fig. 5.1, strategy is created at the intersection of an external
appraisal of the threats and opportunities facing an organization in its
environment, considered in terms of key factors for success, and an inter-
nal appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of the organization itself,
distilled into a set of distinctive competencies. Outside opportunities are
exploited by inside strengths, while threats are avoided (or addressed)
and weaknesses circumvented (or addressed). Opportunities and threats
are identified by understanding customers and their markets. Internal
strengths and weaknesses are evaluated through rigorous organizational
assessments. (Each of these is discussed in detail in the chapters that follow.)
Taken into consideration, both in the creation of the strategies and in their

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