On Wednesday, August 24, 2016, I published Part 1 of my share (from 30 years experience) in Strategy Planning.
I introduced, a colleague, Australia’s leading strategy advisor, Chris Tipler. He has written a book (Corpus RIOS) about business strategy that is a breath of fresh air. RIOS stands for ‘Realistic Imagination Of Success’.
Chris has written about and developed a new simple and practical approach to strategy planning that is both powerful and plain-speaking.
In Part 1, we covered that in practice strategy is generally generated in one of 6 ways and very few companies do any of this very well and so are at the mercy of the market and of external factors.
The Corpus RIOS Process has 5 core steps, and the process is as follows:
- Define our purpose – using the 3-way test (Mission, purpose, raison d’etre, scope and scale)
- Who our customers will be
- The customers’ needs that the business strives to meet
- How these need will be met
- SOWOT: What are the interesting facts/insights about our business?
- Good habits
- Good ideasSecrets of success
- Areas of particular strength or weakness
- Areas of particular opportunity or risk
Within the context of:
- Financial assessment
- Technology assessment
- Operational assessment
- Market and industry assessment
- The intent is to arrive at the powerful ideas that flow from the above.
WINNING: What does winning look like in our selected timeframe (ideally 7-10 years)? We will imagine, for example …
- What we are selling
- Who are our customers and why they are queuing up to buy these products or services from us
- What our customers say about us
- What our employees and suppliers say
- How many brands we have. Where we are positioned in the market
- How we are perceived in the industry and investment community
- Why we are making so much money
- Why our people love coming to work so much
- What our sales revenue is
- How many people we employ
- Where we do business
- The premises we occupy
- What the industry says about us
- What our shareholding structure looks like
ARENAS: What must we excel at to win. There should be between 6- 10 arenas. More than 10 is too unfocused
We must excel at ….
We must excel at
RECITALS: For each Arena that we must excel at, this means (examples below, all actions)
Doing…
Ensuring…
Putting in place…
Bringing…
ACTS: For each of the ARENAS
Within 180 days we will… (3-7 actions) with accountabilities
Within 24 months we will (3-7 actions) with accountabilities
It is as simple as this!