• Introduce and expand strategic planning in your company
• Improve the integration of business strategies throughout your organization
• Increase efficiency by using a pragmatic strategic planning process
• Streamline implementation by understanding how to resolve trade-offs between R&D, marketing, engineering and manufacturing
• Learn how to more effectively lead strategic implementation
• Make strategic planning at your organization a process, not a one-time event

Building an Integrated Strategy

• Thinking strategically while working the day-to-day business issues
• Deciding which comes first: technology, product, quality, market, manufacturing, distribution or finance
• Understanding the influence of culture and values
• Selecting a dominant strategy that integrates marketing, R&D, and production strategies
• Focusing on the winners, dropping the losers
• Examining your firm’s mission and strategic intent
• Measuring integrated, strategic planning progression

Tools for Developing the Integrated Strategic Plan–How To’s

• Analyzing the organization’s present situation: strengths, core competencies, weaknesses, markets, competitive position, product development, customer satisfaction, cycle time, culture, and teamwork
• Setting the future direction: vision, mission, industry, market and competitor assumptions, products and services, customer focus, financial targets, and strategic objectives
• Building competitive strategy alternatives: investment choices, offensive, defensive, and functional strategies
• Selecting and validating strategy
• Writing the ‘grand strategy’
• Developing elements for your own strategic plan

Focusing on Key Strategic Issues and Opportunity Selections

• Locating yourself in the product life cycle—the effects on marketing, R&D, and production
• Extending the life cycle: strategies to employ in growth and mature markets
• Challenging choices:
  • Short-term profit versus investment
  • Cost reduction versus quality, high versus low volume
  • Standard versus customized products
• Exiting and pruning unprofitable ‘old favorite’ product-markets
• Choosing your next market, product, and alliance:
  • Using intuition, analysis, and the opportunity matrix
  • Filling the ‘planning gap’
  • Identifying your best opportunities: internal, acquisition, alliance, diversification, and global

Beating the Competition

• Projecting, assessing, and preempting competitor actions
• Differentiating to gain a competitive advantage
• Using linked strategies as competitive weapons
• Determining your competitive edge
• Corporate and business unit strategies: horizontal or portfolio management

Building Each Functional Strategy

• Marketing/Sales 
  • Incorporating changing market needs
  • Key elements of marketing strategy
  • Partnering with R&D and production
• R&D/Engineering
  • R&D’s role in business strategy
  • Integrating product and technology roadmaps
  • Implementing innovation, utilizing concurrent engineering, and achieving speed
    
• Production/Manufacturing
  • Balancing cost, quality, schedule, and service

 Tying it all Together

• Determining your stage of functional linkage and integration
• Linking objectives, culture, and key success factors
• Gaining agreement and commitment, and overcoming conflicts
• Translating the strategic plan into the annual operating plan with departmental and business unit objectives, action plans, and budgets

Executing the Plan

• The leader’s role
• Making strategy happen—the key to success
• Getting your people to assume ‘ownership’ for implementation
• Importance of communication, organization, and culture
• Using TQM, MBO, matrix management, process, and network teams for implementation
• Measuring and rewarding successful planning
• Making strategy planning a process, not a one-time event; with follow up and flexibility for change