Use high involvement techniques to develop a new powerful strategic direction! Build a vision to drive down cycle times in the workplace. Reduce overhead and costs. Focus on your customers in a new cohesive environment. Improve quality in the working environment and win back market share. Use team based approaches to enable you to become a fierce competitor.

* Raise awareness and involve everyone in building a new direction.

* Develop a new competitive direction for your business and become more customer driven.

* Develop your own master plan while building a custom strategy for inducing radical change.

* Develop cohesiveness among your managers using a team building approach that focuses on results.

* Create a cohesive team environment through high involvement.

* Formulate teams to streamline processes, improve productivity and substantially reduce costs.

* Develop missions, goals and objectives for self-managing teams that vertically link with your company's strategic direction.

* Use a state-of-the-art tool to integrate the vision with annual business/budget planning, and daily operations.

* Develop measurable action plans to ensure success.

* Create accountabilities and link the new direction with performance measurement and reward systems.

Tough competition and regulations are driving companies to seek new ways of doing business. Large scale changes are being forced by market dynamics. Market shares are shifting. The pressure is on to be nothing less than the best. No industry is immune. But being the best takes radical change and it's no easy matter. You must assume control of your future.

You have to streamline workflow, systems and organizations, and open up lines of communications. You have to break down barriers between departments and put an end to the "we've always done it that way" argument. You have to change old reward systems that have become obstacles in the path of progress. You have to get your employees highly involved in assuming new responsibilities if you're going to compete in the tough dynamic markets of the next decade.

Why do plans fail in the traditional organization?

First: "hipshot" thinking. Too many strategic planning sessions are accomplished over a stint in a nice resort. The time is often compressed to a few days for such critical planning. Executives don't have much of a chance to think through their assignments. As a consequence, long range plans emerge from "hipshot" gestures made by beer-soaked brains.

Second: quite often only a few key executives are involved in the planning sessions. Functional departments may not be represented in a plan that consequently affects them. This result in having too narrow a functional representation, and few owners of the plan. The odds of accomplishing the plan is drastically reduced.

Third: when a plan is devised, it may not be authored by people below the first tier of management. The old paradigm is that the top executives are the best qualified to accomplish the planning. Since the participation is limited, those responsible for daily operations in the firm have no authorship in the future of the company: no "buy-in." Again, the chance of a successful implementation is reduced dramatically.

Fourth: when the strategic plan is finished, it often dies at the end of the sessions because it is not integrated with the annual business plan or the annual budget. In this instance, life goes on in the organization the same way it did before the strategic planning session. Nothing has changed and the plan collects dust. It is not a "living document" in any sense of the meaning.

Fifth: too few people are measured by the success or failure of the plan. If too few feet are held to the fire for the plan's outcome, it has little chance of success. We believe that you get what you measure. Measure the results of the plan, and you will get results.

Sixth: hardly anyone gets paid as a result of the success or failure of the strategic plan. Except for a few key executives who have objectives to meet to make their bonuses, pay systems generally tend to be mutually exclusive from the success of a strategic plan. Workers and salaried people, in addition to middle managers, are paid as a result of some obscure compensation system.

Seventh: individual and team efforts are seldom ever tied to the outcome of the company's strategy. Workers respond to how they are measured. They know that keeping the machines running increases utilization, that's what they have been taught that the company wants, and so they build inventory, even when its not needed.

Eighth: most workers, whether they be executives, salaried, or labor, don't know how to behave as a team member. Our society teaches us to be heroes, to worship heroes, and that we are rewarded for individualistic efforts. It starts in school with academic and sport competition. The hero is the pitcher with the most games won, or the quarterback with the most yards gained. We foster entrepreneurial efforts in business. Most team efforts in the company boardroom are feigned.

The overall quality of the long range plan increases substantially when executives have an opportunity to think through the ramifications of their actions. The best situation is when a plan is devised during one or two day sessions, twice a month, over a period of several months. This allows assignments to be given out in between sessions, and provides the executives a chance to spend more concentrated time on the assignment at home, or in the evenings when they are more relaxed.

The quality of each individual's contribution to the plan vastly improves. Then, the results of the assignments are brought in to the sessions and synthesized with the efforts of others to achieve a much higher quality plan.