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If you're like other business leaders you will periodically take your leadership team off-site to spend some time together reviewing and developing strategy. But, all too often, these strategy retreats are lost opportunities that produce, at best, incremental improvements for their organisations.
So, what prevents the collective wisdom of these companies from generating new insights and new actions that can materially accelerate growth? From my experience of working with executive teams I have identified five causes of failure.
Unclear goals. Many strategy retreats are focused on 'improving strategy', rather than finding ways to deliver specific results. One of the most important exercises I undertake with my clients is to identify their #1 goal - the specific improvement in performance that, above all else, will signal success for the business. Your goal may be financial, such as a sales or profit goal, or customer-led, such as number of customers, market share or customer loyalty, or something else entirely. Whatever your goal, once it is clear and unambiguous it makes the rest of your strategy development much more focused.
Too much opinion, too few facts. I am not a fan of huge analytical reports, but you need a balance between opinion and facts. In particular, you must ensure that the 'voice of the customer' enters the room in some form. In many retreats, however, it is opinion that wins the day and, commonly, the opinion of the individual with the most stripes and the loudest voice. The problem is that these opinions, and the assumptions on which they're based, may not be valid. I know of a company where the CEO rejected three consumer-focused pieces of research that cast doubt on his new growth strategy. Unsurprisingly, his ill-advised pursuit of this strategy did not generate the returns he was after and he was ultimately shown the door.
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