Strategy Collaboration

Business Strategy

Make Collaboration part of your Business Strategy and you will see how much better your strategy is executed as well as the profitable results it will deliver

I recently wrote an article that was distributed and published by several ezine organisations such as Ezinearticles.  The first one that I published was “A Picture Paints a Thousand Words – Or More.” (link is below)

Being the first one I was a bit apprehensive about the points of view that I made, which have come from working as a consultant all over the world with various businesses and organisations.  Well,  after finally getting all the of the editing correct and what not, I had a confirmation that it was accepted and that I had earned Expert Author Status!  For a moment I thought does everyone get that – well I found out that they don’t.

There has been some vocabulary in the last few years whose frequency of use has increased such as “sustainable”, “billions”, “recession” and in particular “Collaboration“.

With the increase in social media and the various tools for real time communication, collaboration has become – easier, complicated, confusing, noisier, irrelevant, and beneficial?

I suspect we all have our own opinion and it will vary on what we have to use and what we decide to use.

Strategy Collaboration and analysis by business people working in office
Co-create your strategy by working together
Collaboration and analysis by business people working in office

Collaborative Strategizing

However, one phrase that has struck a chord with me is Collaborative Strategising.  The process of creating strategy – there’s a novel idea!

In previous companies, every year we were asked to produce our strategy for the next 3 years.  We would be sent a PowerPoint deck (80 plus slides) to complete, with associated spreadsheets to fill out.  No-one ever said we need to strategise to develop the strategy, all we needed to do was complete the PowerPoint deck, that was the “strategizing”.  After completing this with limited collaboration with peers, managers, employees, supply chain partners and clients, you would submit the strategy.

Strategy Success

Did anyone read it – I doubt it, there was too much.

Did everyone buy into it – certainly not.

There was no co-development, there was no collaborative strategising, hence there was no understanding and consequently mediocre to low strategy performance.  The blame then shifted to strategy execution – we were not executing the strategy correctly.  Well if there is no co-creation and understanding during the creation of the strategy, then it’s no big surprise that the strategy fails to deliver – that makes sense, doesn’t it?

Well the global recession has changed all of that and if your still developing your strategy with a select few with no collaborative strategising, maybe this is the time to change.

Here is the link http://bit.ly/bda3rP

Hope you enjoy it and look forward to hearing from you.

Warmly

Jason

Assess Your Collaboration Capability

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