Strategic Planning Kit For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Everyday Decisions Drive Long-Term Results

Everyone wants better results, right? Those results may be to earn more money, to use resources better, to create a more effective and efficient team, to improve your work and life balance, to achieve sustainability, and so on. And strategic planning helps. As I discuss in the following sections, the benefits to strategic planning are intangible and show hard bottom-line return on investment (ROI).

The day-to-day impact

Every day your work impacts aspects of your business. Following these tips can help you realize the true day-to-day impact of having a strategic plan in place:

• Spend more time on high impact, high-growth activities. These activities are where you want to spend as much time as possible. With these maneuvers, you spend less time spinning your wheels.

  Think back on the past month: Were there any projects or activities you were part of directly or indirectly that didn't actually move the organization forward because they were dead-end opportunities? I bet there were. Get rid of this dead weight as fast as possible!

• Identify true opportunities versus false starts. If you know what you're best at and where you want to go, you can more quickly identify true opportunities. Strategic planning helps you put the boundaries on your business. When you ignore extraneous distractions, you use your resources more effectively and more quickly to grow your organization.
• Be proactive instead of reactive. Being in a reactionary mode all the ...