Be Different or be dead

June 13, 2016

Expert advice on how to build a winning business plan

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Expert advice on how to build a winning business plan.

Much has been written about how to build a business strategy that is effective in today’s height volatile and competitive world.

Here are a few tips from the experts on how to build a business plan that works in today’s highly volatile world, and on the common mistakes organizations make.

▪️“The granddaddy of all mistakes is competing to be the best, going down the same path as everybody else and thinking that somehow you can achieve better results.” — Michael Porter, Business Strategy Guru

▪️“Everyone in the industry follows the same advice. Companies benchmark each other’s practices and products. Customers, lacking meaningful choice, buy on price alone. Profitability deteriorates…. Nothing is more absurd — and yet more widespread — than the belief that somehow you can do exactly what everyone else is doing and yet end up with superior results.” — Joan Magretta, Stop Competing To Be The Best

▪️“I saw that leaders placed too much emphasis on what some call high-level strategy, on intellectualizing and philosophizing, and not enough on implementation. People would agree on a project or initiative, and then nothing would come of it.” — Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan/Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

▪️“The extraordinary—and accurate, as I see it — hypothesis is that we inordinately pay attention to strategy, customers, innovation, and the like, but not the true discriminator between success and failure — implementation!” — Ram Charan, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

▪️“Abandoning activities is not as sexy as acquiring them or building them up, but it’s just as important – and the most overlooked aspect of leadership. Yesterday’s star product may produce profits now, but it soon becomes a barrier to the introduction and success of tomorrow’s breadwinner. One should, therefore, abandon yesterday’s breadwinner before one really wants to, let alone before one has to. Of course innovation is risky. But defending yesterday is far more risky than creating tomorrow.” — Peter Drucker on Purposeful Abandonment

▪️“If you want to grow your business; before you decide where and how to grow - the first thing you need to do is stop doing what’s not working and get rid of the outgrown, the obsolete and the unproductive.” — Peter Drucker on Purposeful Abandonment

These are all excellent points which highlight the critical ways to make your business plan successful and to differentiate your organization from every other one in the markets you serve.

My takeaways:

1. A business plan based on copying others will never produce a winning strategy;

2. A business plan without execution isn’t a strategy, it’s a wish;

3. A business plan built on a base of irrelevant activity will never work until the CRAP in the organization is purged.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 6.13.16 at 04:50 am by Roy Osing
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