What are you focused on?

... and how effectively are you moving forward?

 Developing the FOCUS for your organization and then achieving that focus through all your people and processes is never easy but always essential for success. Often this work is ignored, the need rationalized away or large planning exercise  satisfies the need and then little attention is given to implementation.   An effective focus  involves  is the result of an accurate assessment  of the situation.  This means having an effective assessment process that results in an accurate  understanding of the following:

• Your own values, resources, competencies and weaknesses (an area not as easy as it sounds)
• Your customers and prospective customer's needs, behaviors segments..
• Your potential issues and influences arising from external environments including the economy, politics, legal influences, regulations, competition, technology, ecology, demographics, culture psychographics, geography etc…

With this understanding, you need to engage as a leader and with your key people, both employees and other stakeholders or outside advisors, to  turn these assessments into understanding and then implement a process to inter-relate  the different facets of this understanding to create ideas, insights and prospective strategies.   As part of this, you should create a listing of your internal strengths and weaknesses as well as a summary of your threats, opportunities and potentially trends.  This so-called SWOTT, however is perhaps, the most mis-used concept in business planning. Without the right assessment (research), it is most commonly a list of dated and unchallenged assumptions that when used to develop ideas and strategies results in the wrong strategy and disastrous consequences.