Strategic Planning Kit For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Evolving Alternatives into Priorities

This section brings you to the scary part of strategic planning. Why scary? Because people are terrified of making wrong choices. If you worked through the previous section, you have some lists of choices, but because you can't do everything, now you have to eliminate some of those choices. Know that every other business owner, executive director, and department manager has come to the same place you're at right now. Although guarantees never exist in business, this section helps you develop your own guidelines to assure that you make the right choices. But at the end of the day, you have to make a decision.

The one concept that most business owners, executives, and managers forget is that the lack of a decision results in more derailments of the mission than any other cause.

Sorting out internal and external alternatives

Grouping alternatives helps you compare like things when making trade-offs. For example, choosing between investing in new technology or hiring a new person is an expense decision with similar outcomes, whereas choosing between entering a new market or implementing a succession plan isn't directly related. So at this point, you want to divide your choices into two groups — those that have internal implications and those that have external implications.

How do you decide what's internal and what's external? Check out the following ...