Understanding Strategy
Strategic Marketing Management: Building a Foundation for Your Future – University of Minnesota Extension -- This workbook is designed to help firms and individuals become more familiar with the implications of a strategic marketing management program for their businesses.
Value-Added Strategies – University of Hawaii – Taking Agricultural Producers to the Next Level.
Got a New Strategy – Now Make it Happen – HBS Working Knowledge -- Despite widespread rhetoric about the need for organizational agility, an astonishing number of businesses stay stuck in neutral when they need to implement a new strategy.
Strategic Planning
Strategic Planning: Scanning the Horizon -- Purdue University Extension – Strategic planning involves making decisions now to reach a desired future.
Strategic Thinking, Forecasting for Growth – Small Business Administration -- Strategic thinking is a process whereby you learn how to make your business vision a reality by developing your abilities in team work, problem solving, and critical thinking.
Keeping Track: Performance Measurement, Control & Strategy – HBS Working Knowledge -- In today's fast-moving economy, how do managers balance profit and growth against control? What's the trade-off between short-term results and long-term capabilities? How can you calculate the effectiveness of your business strategies?
Strategic Planning: Not Just for Big Business – Small Business Notes -- Strategic planning has become a concept that is commonly suggested as the "solution" to many business problems.
How to Develop a Strategic Plan – BizMove.com -- Strategic planning is matching the strengths of your business to available opportunities.
Devising Business Strategies – PlanWare -- Success and failure, existing strategies and future SWOTs, strategic combinations and statements, and next steps.
The Strategy Pyramid - Bplans.com -- Learn how to plan an effective strategy for your company and how to implement your strategy with tactics and programs.
How to Perform SWOT Analysis -- Bplans.com -- A valuable step in your situational analysis is to assess your firm's strengths, weaknesses, market opportunities, and threats through a SWOT analysis. This is a very simple process that can offer powerful insight into the potential and critical issues affecting a venture.
Your Company Strategy - in Pictures - HBS Working Knowledge -- Preparing a company strategy can bury you in data. Make it easier by drawing a strategy picture.
Creating a Strategy
All the Right Moves - HBS Working Knowledge -- Superior strategy is all about continuing to find and exploit unique strategic positions. Here are key ingredients of a distinctive strategy and the kind of "breakthroughs" that separate winning strategists from the also-rans.
Does your HQ Operation Fit With Corporate Strategy? - HBS Working Knowledge -- Is a lean headquarters operation the key to success? How should headquarters design fit with corporate strategy?
The Role of the Board in Corporate Strategy - HBS Working Knowledge -- Strategic planning, according to a recent survey of CEOs, ranks high in importance but low in terms of board effectiveness.
A Perfect Fit: Aligning Organization & Strategy - HBS Working Knowledge -- Is your company organizationally fit? Business success is a function of the fit between key organizational variables such as strategy, values, culture, employees, systems, organizational design, and the behavior of the senior management team.
Reinventing Your Company: How to Start – Iowa Small Business Development Centers -- How can a company reinvent itself when it can barely keep up? It starts with recognizing the symptoms of a stale operation.
Going Green Makes Good Business Sense – HBS Working Knowledge -- Green can be good. How environmentally-minded company policies can make good strategic sense for business. Here are some strategies you might consider.
Strategy for the Recession - HBS Working Knowledge -- What would your company do if demand suddenly fell off the table? If a global recession hit?
Strategy for Small Fish - HBS Working Knowledge -- Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and eBay provide ecosystems in which other companies thrive or fail. But what are effective strategies for a small fish in a big pond?
Strategies for Tough Times - HBS Working Knowledge -- Are you a master of uncertainty? Every strategist needs to be.
The Strategic Role of Marketing - HBS Working Knowledge -- Marketing must help drive organizational change.
Strategy and Your Core Business
The Core of Strategy – HBS Working Knowledge -- The most successful companies know how to ignore distractions and build market power based on their core business.
Moving Beyond the Core Business – HBS Working Knowledge -- Finding opportunity in new directions.
Figuring Out What’s Core – HBS Wokring Knowledge -- Most would agree that the best corporate strategy these days is focusing on your core. Problem is, just what is essential in your company may be a matter of opinion. Here’s how to separate the essential from the expendable.
Your New Core Strategy: Employee Retention - HBS Working Knowledge -- The Baby Boom is de-booming and soon there will be many more jobs than people available to fill them. The message: Keep your workers happy today.
Strategy Tools
Mapping your Corporate Strategy – HBS Working Knowledge -- From the originators of the Balanced Scorecard system, Strategy Maps is a new book that explores how companies can best their competition. A Question and Answer report.
The Strategy-Focused Organization – HBS Working Knowledge -- In the ten years since it was introduced, Robert Kaplan's and David Norton's Balanced Scorecard has become not just a measurement tool but a means of putting strategy at the center of a company's key management processes and systems.