Strategic Business Planning ^{2nd Ed.}

A clear and robust business strategy is essential to any successful enterprise. It must be understood by employees, customers and stakeholders, and must have the universal support of the entire leadership team and board of directors.

However, all too often business strategies fail to survive even the slightest economic downturn or minor change in idustry trends, and organizations that are unable to hold to an agreed course — even over a short period of three to five years — will never perform well.

Strategic Business Planning outlines a proven business planning system that will help any organization to develop a lasting business plan. The aim of the book is to enable the reader to link company purpose, business goals, strategy, performance targets and an action programme into one robust and focused framework.

Based on work with some 80 businesses in Europe, the United States and Asia, and developed over a period of 14 years, this unique is structured in three parts:

• the strategic business planning framework
• strategic concepts that allow for change
• the strategic planning process

This fully updated second edition offers a unique business planning system that will improve the performance and competitive position of any commercial or not-for-profit organization.

• Introduction
• Part 1: The strategic business planning framework
1. The purpose of strategic business planning
• What is strategic business planning?
• The confused company
• The focused company
• Serving the customer
• The benefits of SBP
2. Understanding the framework
• Company purpose
• Goals
• Performance targets
• Action programs
• Summary
3. Company purpose
• The overarching purpose
• The business model
• Profit
• Process
4. Distinctive capability
• Characteristics of distinctive capability
• Distinctive capability comes from business processes
• Developing a new distinctive capability
• Overall competence
• Traditional thinking
• Strategic assets
• The new distinctive capabilities
• Competitive advantage
• Developing new distinctive capabilities from the old
• Distinctive capability and the strategic plan
• Outsourcing plan
• Outsourcing and distinctive capability
5. Market/product/service
• Summary
6. Identity
• The value proposition
• What is identity?
• Customers' actual perception
7. People
• The resource pool
• Business value and company culture
8. Efficiency
• Summary
9. Synthesizing the strategy
• Effective strategy
• Three generic strategies
• Company strategy
• Fixed cost base reduction
• Process cost base reduction
• Differentiation
• Combined low cost and differentiation
• Principles for a general differentiation strategy
• Assumptions
• Strategic options summary
• Successful strategies
10. Completing the SBP framework
• Developing the performance targets
• The draft first report
• Refining the plan
11. Evaluation
• Test the logic
• Test the soundness
• Financial analysis
• Part 2: Strategic concepts
12. Degree of strategic change
13. The role of the hypothesis
• Death of a salesman
14. Simple strategy in a complex world
• Part 3: The strategic business planning process
15. The development process
• The strategic business planning structure
• Planning
• The terms of reference
• Data collection
• Building the team
• Data analysis
• The development of the plan
• Format and presentation
• Evaluation
• Implementation
• The process of strategic business planning
• Organizing a workshop
• Starting the process
16. The reasoning and psychology of SBP
• Robust strategy
• Implementation
• The SBP psychology
• Learning through the SBP process
• Communicating the strategy
17. Building the leadership team
• Emotions and tensions
• The role of the leadership team
• The motivations of leadership team members
• Team roles
• Adding Value
18. Implementation
• Communicating the strategy
• The first year
• Long-term fundamental or complex performance targets
• Prioritizing performance target
• Performance targets
• Instructions to PTTs at the start of the project
• Action program decomposition
• Monitoring attainment
19. Data collection
• The base data
• Base data forms
20. Financial analysis
• Introduction
• Analysis of assets and liabilities
• Analysis of performance
• Using the analysis to compare two companies
• Traditional cost accounting
• Activity-based costing
• The 10 per cent rule
• Business unit cells and market/product units
• Monthly management performance summary
• Increasing management impact
• Develop financial requirements for next budget year
• Organizing the financial analysis workshop
• Calculations
21. Business analysis
• Introduction
• Organization of the business analysis workshop
• Three-stage sieve
• The base analysis
• Strengths and weaknesses analysis
• Summary
22. Some useful techniques
• Introduction
• Product/service analysis
• External appraisal
• Organization
• Chapter summary
23. Summary
• The rules of strategy
• Strategic thinking

Incredibly practical approach to strategy creation. Recommended reading.