I’ve been thinking a lot about strategic planning lately. Partly because I’m in the midst of doing some myself, but mostly because I see so many of us struggle with it. Regardless of what we think we know about strategic planning, the actually “doing” always seems to be more cumbersome than expected.

To simplify, I wonder if an approach like this would work:

To help focus, the CEO sets forth the three strategic goals for the company for a given year. We will grow by X% by focusing on this, this and this in 2011.

Then each department head, be it a C-level person or a VP, sets forth three strategies that their department will focus on to make part or all of the CEO’s goals come true. For example, the VP of marketing may then say, Marketing will do this, this and this to help achieve that, that and that.

Let’s keep going. Directors and managers then create three strategies that will help the VP’s strategies come to life.

Then their reports do the same for the director’s strategies.

Do you see how powerfully simple this is?

If your company was made up of 50 employees, you’d have 150 strategies in place to support just three major strategic goals set forth by the CEO.  A company with 400 employees would have 1,200 plans in place to support just three major strategic goals.

It’s like network marketing for strategic planning.

I bet it would work. I bet it would help you get through “planner’s block.”

I bet this type of thing is how great companies become great. By focusing a lot of brains on just a few things.

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This post was originally posted by Brett Duncan at MarketingInProgress.com.

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