Strategic Planning

Developing Your Organization's Leaders While Creating A Stronger Strategic Map

WHY HARNESSING EXECUTIVE EDUCATION AND LEADER DEVELOPMENT CREATE MORE SUCCESSFUL STRATEGIC PLANS.

1. The real costs of employing traditional consulting-firm approach to strategic planning.

There are at least six likely and undesirable consequences when your organization delegates (and abdicates) its strategic planning to a traditional business consulting firm:

1. Your organization funds the strengthening of the consulting firm's knowledge base.
2. Your organization funds and feeds the development of the consulting firm's future leaders.
3. Your organization pays for the enhancing of the consulting firm's ability to market and serve the rest of your industry - your competitors.
4. Your organization is fed the consulting firm's view of your future - a view that is, at best, constrained by the consulting firm's financial incentives and business development goals.
5. Your company and its current and future leaders are denied one of the richest sources of organization development and professional growth.
6. You decrease the likelihood of internal ownership of and accountability for successful execution of the strategic plan.

2. How Executive KnowledgeWorks employs executive education and leader development for better strategic mapping results.

For better than 21 years Executive KnowledgeWorks has helped it's Fortune 500 clients accomplish stronger strategic planning and accelerated leader development by creatively and efficiently marrying the two. We have been able to help our clients accomplish this powerful two-for-one strategy because of our:

• Substantive experience. We have had the good fortune of working with many of America's finest corporations. Each client a truly unique organization. Each industry a different collection of challenges and opportunities. When combined with our seven years of marrying executive education and leader development to strategic mapping inside Motorola, we have accumulated a rich heritage of tried and proven experience.
• Results-focused information sourcing. When you employ a traditional management-consulting firm for strategic planning you buy the services and expertise of the individuals in that firm. When Executive KnowledgeWorks assists you with your strategic mapping, you work with the best available world-class information sources - regardless of affiliation. We have never employed (and therefore, have never had to prioritize the use of) an in-house team of subject matter "experts". From day one, our philosophy and practice has been to remain free to connect each of our clients with the very best available information sources. Those resources include a stellar list of:
      a. CEOs
      b. Ambassadors
      c. Consultants
      d. University professors
      e. Leading authors.
• Creative and compelling customized design. Executives are most fully engaged when their education, development and/or planning processes are:
  • Highly relevant
  • Demandingly efficient
  • Creatively compelling.
  Executive KnowledgeWorks has delivered these kinds of results by thoughtfully employing action learning, customized cases, business simulations, live and historic cases, rich presentations and timely and artfully conducted facilitation. We have a long and consistent track record of designing and building developmental and planning initiatives that command and hold the enthusiastic participation of even the most demanding of executives. Case Studies.
• Experienced and professional facilitation. The vast majority of our work is with CEOs, presidents, vice presidents and directors. In strategic mapping events across a wide range of industries we've helped insure engaged executives, completed agendas and productive meetings. We quietly and confidently facilitate developmental and planning processes such that key issues are dealt with candidly and respectfully, challenges and opportunities are substantively explored and the most demanding of expectations are exceeded.
• Singular dedication to your company. In eighteen years of business, we have always agreed to work with our clients' competitors only after receiving our client's full and comfortable permission. More than once, when presented with the opportunity to take on a new client in an industry where we already served one corporation, we declined the opportunity. The services we provide and the processes we employ are a distinct competitive advantage for our clients. We do not, without permission, share that advantage with a current client's competitor.

3. The benefits of harnessing executive education and leader development for your organization's strategic planning processes.

There are at least six likely and highly desirable consequences when your organization aggressively leverages executive education and leader development in its strategic planning processes:

1. You dramatically increase the likelihood of internal ownership of and accountability for successful execution of the strategic plan.
2. Your development dollars are spent on your company and its current and future leaders. As a result your most valuable current and future assets experience the stimulation and connectivity that comes with strategically focused, world class professional and organization development.
3. Your organization develops its own distinctly personal vision of your future - a vision that is created by the organization and anchored in its reality.
4. The rich body of data and insight generated by your organization stays in your organization - your competitors are left to share in the consulting firm reworks currently being circulated throughout the rest of your industry.
5. Your organization funds the strengthening of its own knowledge base.

Back to top