Strategic Planning - Not Just "a thing", but 2 Things.

We unpack why strategic planning fails, when leaders confuse the destination with the plan — and how a bold North Star fuels execution.

Key Takeaways:

• AVOID thinking too small (seeing goals as “Finish Lines”)
• INSTEAD, think bigger: set goals as your “North Star”. 
  • SUMMIT VISION – from 3 lenses (marketing, ops, finance)
  • TRANSFORMATIVE PERSPECTIVE from the peak
• “Attainable” goals provide short-term reward, but don’t inspire much
•  BHAG thinking (combined with well-sequenced quick wins) creates real momentum
•  Commit to one system of executing the plan: EOS, OKRs, OGSM, our 1-2-3 Growth Process, etc. 
•  THE ULTIMATE TRAP: the crime of low aim

Always growing.

Benno Duenkelsbuehler 

CEO & Chief Sherpa of (re)ALIGN 

reALIGNforResults.com

benno@realignforresults.com 

Transcript

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Planning Feels Hard

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Strategic planning. Oh my god, it is so difficult for so many, so challenging for so many people. And we just got it back, we just got back a survey that we had sent to a few hundred um owners, executives of mid-sized manufacturers, distributors, sales agencies, uh selling to retailers.

Strategy Versus Planning

SPEAKER_00 0:21

And the overarching theme was planning is difficult, executing on the plan is difficult, coming up with the plan is difficult. Um, so I wanted to follow up on uh season three, episode four on strategic planning, and just really drive down drive on the point around strategic planning is not a thing. It is two things there's strategy, and then there's the planning and the executing part of it,

North Star Not Finish Line

SPEAKER_00 0:50

right? And I think a lot of uh strategies fail um because people confuse the goal of strategic planning, the goal, the strategy goal as a finish line rather than a North Star, right? Uh they come up with a strategic goal that is too small. They come up, people come up with strategic goals that um are achievable next month or next quarter as opposed to achievable in three to five years. Um, and there's a lot of reasons why people do that, right? The old, you know, there's the um smart goals have to be specific and measurable and attainable, and let's just stop there, right? Uh the attainable, oh my god, we have to be able to attain it, you know, next week or next quarter. So when you do strategic planning, um think of the overarching goal uh as the north

Paint A Three-Dimensional Vision

SPEAKER_00 1:56

star, not the finish line, right? And Jim Collins, good to great, he talks about the B HAG. Um, you do have to make that North Star come alive, right? And so that it doesn't just say, you know, uh pretty words and a vision's vision statement in the lobby in a gold frame. That's not you know gonna work. But make sure that your North Star is, you know, um, as Americans, we're really good at you know big golds, big, you know, man on the moon statements, JFK, right? Alexis de Tocqueville talked about uh do not go for paltry aims, right? So uh make sure, yeah, you know, in EOS terminology you have rocks, but sometimes also boulders, right? Sometimes, you know, a Mount Everest mountain you want to climb. So make sure that your strategy has a a well painted three-dimensional image and vision uh from all three perspectives, right? The CMO, the C O O the CFO's perspective. Um make sure you have uh a North Star that people can really understand, smell, feel, touch, right?

Choose A Planning System

SPEAKER_00 3:29

And then the second part of planning and strategic planning is the planning part, and here you get into the acronym soup of processes, and I just say pick your pick your poison, pick your process. There's EOS, great system. Uh uh OKRs, right? Makes a lot of sense. OGSM's uh objectives and goals uh strategy and measurement makes a lot of sense. KPIs, KIs for key initiatives. All of that is part of, you know, you have to gant chart that out, timeline it out, you have to create milestones to for there to be accountability and ownership, um, and also to sequence things out, right?

Sequence Milestones To Everest

SPEAKER_00 4:18

Um back to the yeah, it's great to have a quarterly rock in EOS terminology, but you're not going to land on the moon next month or by the end of the quarter, right? So you have to uh sequence out, you know, if you have a five-year Mount Everest goal to climb, uh, yeah, you have to have 30, 60 day, and 90-day rocks and things to get to base camp, prepare base camp, have a roadmap. Um so everything has to be sequenced out. Um so none of that planning process is gonna stick.

Reject Low Aims

SPEAKER_00 5:00

If you have paltry aims, my favorite quote is not failure, but low aim is crime. Don't commit that crime of aiming too low.