What is the value of a strategic advisory board? V3

 What is the purpose of this article?

This article enables a discussion regarding the value of strategic advisory boards for CEOs. The audience for this article is focused on the CEOs of a for-profit businesses.

This article does not provide tax, legal or financial advice.  Your next steps must be based on your own research and fact-based analysis using current and relevant information.

AI did not write this article.  100% human written.

You can download a PDF of this article from: What is the value of a strategic advisory board. V3

What are the critical learnings in this article:

• CEOs need advisory boards to increase their cognitive abilities and address the challenges of CEO isolation.
• CEOs who can benefit from a strategic advisory board have the cognitive humility and flexibility to unlearn fundamental knowledge, experience, facts, beliefs, and decision-making processes.
• CEOs who cannot benefit from a strategic advisory board are unable to change their fundamental thinking.
• After a successful strategic advisory board meeting, the CEO leaves emotionally and intellectually exhausted. Fundamental learning/unlearning is similar to physical training – improvement is painful and exhausting because muscles are being created.
• Valuable strategic advisors can challenge the CEO’s fundamental assumptions by asking paradigm shifting questions.

Why do CEOs need advisory boards?

CEOs need advisory boards to increase their cognitive abilities and address the challenges of CEO isolation.

• The CEO can discuss their issues and concerns a psychologically safe space. Advisory boards may disagree with the CEO, in a safe space.
• The CEO can increase their cognitive capabilities by drawing upon the current, relevant, knowledge and experience of the advisors.
• The CEO can improve the quality of their recommendations and decisions resulting from advisors challenging the CEO’s thinking.

 What are the different kinds of advisory boards?

There are many kinds of traditional advisory boards plus the rare strategic advisory board.

Traditional advisory boards have domain experts with current, relevant knowledge e.g.

• External warning board. Making the CEO aware of changes occurring in the world.
• Introductory board – doing introductions for the CEO to potential customers, suppliers, employees, and investors.
• Expert board – a group of experts providing answers to the questions posed by the CEO

A strategic advisory board helps the CEO change how they think, learn, and unlearn.  A strategic advisory board is not a replacement for experts with current relevant knowledge.

There are some cases of a CEO creating an advisory board comprised totally of AI personas or having at least one member of the advisory board being an AI persona.

 How are CEO advisory boards different from consultants?

Consultants provide fact-based analysis while advisory boards provide judgement.

• Consultants may do fact-based analysis and provide recommendations to the CEO.
• Consultants may implement solutions.
• Advisory boards do not do fact-based analysis nor do they implement solutions.

 What is the value of a strategic advisory board?

Strategic advisory boards help the CEO think differently by learning new mental models and unlearning old models.

• The old mental models were a success in the old world. The world has changed. New models are critical.
• CEOs cannot learn new models by being told what the new models are. The CEOs need to develop new models, and unlearn old models, with the help of the strategic advisory board.
• Fundamental learning and unlearning can only happen with neurological changes to the CEOs brain – changes to neurons and the interconnections among neurons.

What are the characteristics of a CEO who can benefit from a strategic advisory board?

CEOs who can benefit from a strategic advisory board have the cognitive humility and flexibility to unlearn fundamental knowledge, experience, facts, beliefs, and decision-making processes.

• They need cognitive humility – able to admit, in the safe environment of the advisory board, that their knowledge and experience are limited and fallible. They can accept that their deepest beliefs may be wrong.
• They have cognitive flexibility, able to unlearn what made them successful in the past.
• They are comfortable saying “I don’t know”. person
• They don’t view their perception of their self-worth to being the smartest in the room.
• They don’t try to strongly defend past decisions. They don’t punish themselves for being wrong.

What are the characteristics of a CEO who cannot benefit from a strategic advisory board.

CEOs who cannot benefit from a strategic advisory board are unable to change their fundamental thinking.

• They view any contradiction to their beliefs as a personal threat rather than a learning opportunity.
• They confuse company performance with personal self-worth.
• They cannot alter plans when presented with new facts – they do not accept new facts, as facts.
• They have severe cognitive rigidity.

 What does success and failure of the strategic advisory board look like after 12 months?

Success may look like:

• At least one major flawed initiative was stopped due to new insights.
• Significant changes made to the strategic plan before the strategy is presented to the fiduciary board.
• At least one major implementation ran more smoothly.
• The CEO left advisory board meetings emotionally and intellectually exhausted. Fundamental learning/unlearning is like physical training – improvement is painful and exhausting because muscles are being created.

Failure may look like:

• The CEO made minor changes to major initiatives and decisions.
• The advisory board was focused on deep details of minor issues
• The CEO left each advisory board meeting “feeling good”. The meeting was pleasant with no difficult action or outcomes for you. This meant that little learning/unlearning occurred. Just as if the CEO left a private training session, not tired in the slightest, heart rate never changed, etc.,

 Who should be on the CEO’s strategic advisory board?

Your advisory board has an extremely diverse background. Potential members could include those who;

• Have excellent listening skills.
• Can challenge the CEO’s fundamental assumptions by asking paradigm shifting questions.
• Can be patient during the CEO’s neurological restructuring process. The advisor understands the biological implications of cognitive unlearning
• Can leave their egos behind – and not try to prove how smart the advisor is.

Who should not be on the CEO’s strategic advisory board?

Do not have people on the CEO’s strategic advisory board who want to give advice rather than help the CEO learn and unlearn. Don’t have people such as:

• Retired executives who have out-of-date functional and industry knowledge.
• Having a dominating, narcissistic personality.
• Avoiding conflict. Fundamental learning and unlearning requires intense uncomfortable debates.
• Friends and allies who lack the courage to not support the CEOs points of view.
• Professional services providers who may have biases to sell you major projects or be concerned about the financial implications if they upset you.

How can the CEO deal with the conflicting advice they’ll get from their strategic advisory board?

The onus is on the CEO to make decisions and not just ask for 100% consensus from the advisors. Some of the ways for the CEO to deal with conflicting advice are:

• Being able to describe conflicting options in their own words.
• Seeking out the best components alternatives.
• Resisting the biological pressure to reject conflicting data.
• Describing how they will make a decision and how/why the board and C-Suite will support the decision.
• Taking notes.
• Sleeping on the discussion and making critical decisions the next day.

What are your next steps?

• Define the words/concepts you’re using, in a glossary. I’ve seen major confusion when the same words mean different things to different people.
• Have the functional and industry expert been able to successfully address the CEO’s issues?
• If the CEO still has issues, does the CEO still need to address those issues?
• Determine which type(s) of advisory board are needed.
• If considering a strategic advisory board, assess the phycological and cognitive capabilities of the CEO.

 What further reading should you do?

• Norman Doidge, “The brain that changes itself”, Random Penguin Books, 2007
• Jacqueline Brassey, Aaron de Smet, Michiel Kruyt, “How to learn and unlearn in a volatile world”, Harper Collins, 2022
• Is the human expert panel concept obsolete? Koor & Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/creating-business-value/is-the-human-expert-panel-concept-obsolete/

• What is learning? Koor & Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/creating-business-value/why-have-your-minimized-your-talent/

Does your company have current knowledge and facts?

 What is the purpose of this article?

• This article enables a discussion about the value and creation of knowledge, facts, and data.
• The audience for this article includes: investors, board oof directors, and C-Suite
• This article applies to all companies, ranging from pre-revenue through to long established global companies.
• This article does not provide tax, legal or financial advice.
• You must do your own research and fact-based analysis using current and relevant information.
• AI did not write this article. 100% human written.

You can download a PDF of this article from:Does you company have current knowledge and facts

How is this article structured?

• Decisions and actions are based on knowledge. Knowledge is derived from facts. Facts are derived from data.

What are the critical learnings in this article?

• Your company’s survival and success depends on having better knowledge than your competitors and better ability to learn.
• Knowledge explains why things happened. Your decisions and actions are based on knowledge.
• Facts describe behaviour at a point in time and are validated. Facts are what people believe to be the truth.
• In today’s turbulent, fast changing, and unpredictable world knowledge, facts and data often become obsolete quickly.

What is knowledge?

Knowledge explains why things happened. Your decisions and actions are based on knowledge. For example:

• The facts could be that sales dropped last quarter. Knowledge is knowing why customers decided to buy from your competition rather than from your company.

What are the two types of knowledge?

• Explicit knowledge is what resides in documents and electronic files.
• Tacit knowledge is extremely difficult to document e.g. how to calm an angry customer, how to reorganize talent to cope with an unexpected crisis. Tacit knowledge resides in peoples’ brains.

 Why is current knowledge critical to your company’s survival and success?

Your company’s survival and success depend on having better and more current knowledge than your competitors in key areas.

• Some of the key areas include: Why customers make buying decisions. Why your solution more is more profitable than the competition. Why star employees decide to join your company or leave your company.
• You must have current knowledge. Why? For example, knowing how customers made buying decisions 10 years ago is not helpful in today’s world.
• Why customers make buying decisions may change within days. E.g. fashion
• The average half life of professional skills and technical knowledge is below 5 years.¹

What are facts?

Facts describe behaviour at a point in time and are validated. Facts are what people believe to be the truth.

• Facts are truthful at a specific point in time in a specific situation.
• Facts describe behaviour at a point in time e.g. 80% of revenue comes from 20% of customers.
• Facts by themselves are not the rationale for making decisions about actions to take.

Everyone needs to have a common understanding and agreement on what the facts are.

 How does your company create knowledge from facts?

• Analytical techniques and software, including AI, help identify potential knowledge from facts.
• The creation of knowledge in the brains of your board directors, C-Suite, and employees requires physical changes in their brains.

Do facts need to be validated?

Facts without validation are not facts. Assumptions, opinions, hopes, etc. are not facts. Some types of validation may include:

• Separating correlation from causation e.g. smoking and lung cancer are correlated. But it’s false to conclude that lung cancer causes smoking.
• Getting different data e.g. the statement that the new software is great success because there were 100,000 downloads in a month is not fact when the different data shows that 99% of people uninstalled after a week, and that after a month only 10 people were cash paying subscribers.

Facts need to be constantly validated in today fast changing, unpredictable world.

How does your company create facts from data?

• You must have a common definition of facts and data. Create a glossary for defining facts and data.
• Create data from variety of sources.
• Analytical techniques and software, including AI, help identify potential knowledge from facts.
• The final step is people in your company agreeing on what are the facts.

Why are current facts critical to your company’s success?

Facts are constantly changing in todays turbulent and unpredictable world.

• There is the risk that your company continues to believe out of date or unvalidated facts as the truth.
• Your decisions and actions are then based on out-of-date or unproven knowledge.

What is data?

• Data is a huge pool of unprocessed – unvalidated and without business meaning.
• Examples include: 1,000s of customer invoices and payments, sensor readings in a factory, raw survey responses, social media posts, logs of customer phone calls and emails, etc.

Why is current data critical to your company’s success?

New and changed data often appear in todays turbulent and unpredictable world.

• Current and relevant facts must be based on current and relevant data.
• Current relevant knowledge must be based on current and relevant facts.
• Your company decisions must be based on current and relevant knowledge.

What are the challenges in your people learning to create new knowledge?

It is mentally difficult and psychologically stressful to make the biological changes in your brain required for learning and creating new knowledge and new facts.

• You will very naturally, and often unknowingly, utilize a broad range of cognitive and psychological bias to resist unlearning, and to resist new knowledge which is different from the past.
• You will unconsciously favour decision making and planning processes from the past and which are no longer useful today.
• Your information technology systems continue to support the old way of doing thing.

What are your next steps?

• Define the words/concepts you are using, in a glossary. I have seen major confusion when the same words mean different things to different people.
• Identify the key areas where your company must have competitively differentiated knowledge.
• Identify the links between your company’s performance and your company’s knowledge.
• Assess your company’s knowledge and facts.
• Assess your company’s planning and decision-making links to knowledge.
• Identify your company’s process for creating fact from data.
• Assess your company’s leadership capabilities to quickly learn and unlearn. Start with the Board of Directors, CEO and C-Suite.

Footnotes:

¹ Boston Consulting Group “Reskilling for a rapidly changing world.https://www.bcg.com/publications/2023/reskilling-workforce-for-future

What further reading should you do?

• What is learning? Koor and Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/creating-business-value/why-have-your-minimized-your-talent/

• Are you solving the right problem? Koor and Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/avoiding-business-failure/are-you-solving-the-right-problem/

• Is you company planning to fail? Koor and Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/avoiding-business-failure/is-your-company-planning-to-fail/

Are you solving the right problem?

 What is the purpose of this article?

• This article enables a discussion about whether you’re solving the right problem with the greatest impact on your business.
• The audience for this article includes: investors, the board of directors, CEOs, and C-Suite.
• This article applies to all companies, ranging from pre-revenue through to long established global companies.
• This article does not provide tax, legal or financial advice.
• You must do your own research and fact-based analysis using current and relevant information.
• AI did not write this article. 100% human written.

You can download a PDF of this article from: Are you solving the right problem

What are the critical learnings in this article?

• A problem is a symptom (something observable) which has a negative impact on your company.
• You need a solution which addresses the cause of the symptoms.
• A cause explains why the symptom is occurring e.g. a fire in the building is causing smoke to pour out the windows.
• A root cause is a cause, which if addressed by a solution, means the problem will never occur again.
• The fundamental root cause is always people.

What is the structure of this article?

Symptoms > Problems > Causes > Root Cause > Fundamental Root Cause

What is a problem?

• A problem is a symptom (something observable) which has a negative impact on your company.
• A symptom occurs when what is observed in not what is expected. The observation may be by a human, sensor, or AI making an observation based on complex analysis of data. Some examples of a symptom are: smoke coming out of building windows. The observation may be measurable e.g. last quarter sales 20% below target.
• A decision is made whether or not the symptom is a problem. It is not a problem for me if the morning temperature is 2 degrees lower than I expected. It may be a problem for your company if last quarter’s sales were 20% below target.

How do you decide if a symptom is a problem you may need to correct?

• You have criteria to define if a symptom is a problem.
• These criteria may include the impact on your company, employees, your shareholders, and society.
• The impact may be in the next month, or 10 years from now.

Your company will have lots of problems. You won’t solve all of them, because many will have little impact.

Do you need a solution to the problem?

• You need a solution which addresses the cause of the symptoms.
• You do not need a solution to the problem.

What is the cause of a problem?

• A cause explains why the symptom is occurring e.g. a fire in the building is causing smoke to pour out the windows.
• A cause can only be determined after investigation i.e. is the smoke due to an electrical fire, a broken natural gas line burning, a smoke bomb, a blocked fire place, etc.

There can be a hierarchy of causes and solutions.

• There can be a hierarchy of causes e.g. the fire was from a broken natural gas pipeline, the break occurred due to failures in installing the pipeline, etc.

What is a root cause?

• A root cause is a cause, which if addressed by a solution, means the problem will never occur again. E.g. checking the natural gas pipeline for other defects to make sure there won’t be future natural gas fires. Turning of the natural gas pipeline may correct the immediate symptom but does not prevent future natural gas fires.

What is always the fundamental root cause?

• The fundamental root cause is always people. E.g. who were the people who approved the process for selecting design engineers and installations firms for a poorly designed and poorly installed natural gas pipeline.

Are your focused on the right symptoms?

Have you identified symptoms which could cause major problems for your company in the next 3-5-10+ years?

• It’s easy to focus on short-term symptoms showing that your company is currently in trouble.
• It’s hard to identify symptoms and address causes to prevent your company from getting into trouble in the future.

What will be your challenges?

• Measuring the symptoms and determining their impact.
• It is easy to focus on symptoms and causes rather than root cause. It is difficult to overcome the cognitive and psychological barriers.
• Understanding the cause-and-effect relationship between symptoms, causes and root causes.
• In today’s inter-related systems world, there may be a large number of inter-related symptoms and root causes. One symptom may have multiple partial root causes, and a single root cause may impact multiple symptoms.
• The fundamental root cause of people talent is often impossible to address, especially when changes are needed to the board of directors, CEO, or C-Suite.

 What are your next steps?

• Define the words/concepts you’re using, in a glossary. I’ve seen major confusion when the same words mean different things to different people.
• Create your own framework for analyzing symptoms and documenting problems, causes, and root causes.
• Identify symptoms indicating current problems
• Define symptoms which would identify future problems
• Always include the fundamental root cause of people.
• Define the decision-making criteria, especially the criteria for launching project(s) to address a symptom.

What further reading should you do?

Is your company planning to fail? Koor and Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/avoiding-business-failure/is-your-company-planning-to-fail/

What is learning? Koor and Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/creating-business-value/why-have-your-minimized-your-talent/

Is the human expert panel concept obsolete?

 What is the purpose of this article?

• This article enables a discussion regarding the future value and structure of expert panels.
• This article applies to all companies, ranging from pre-revenue through to long established global companies.
• This article does not provide tax, legal or financial advice.
• You must do your own research and fact-based analysis using current and relevant information.

AI did not write this article.  100% human written.

You can download a PDF  of this article from: Is the human expert panel obsolete

What are the critical learnings in this article?

• The traditional expert panel answers questions from a facilitator by sharing anecdotes from the past and opinions about what should be done today.
• The primary challenge of the traditional expert panel is that their historical experiences don’t reflect current reality or future scenarios in today’s turbulent world.
• The AI expert panel may consist of several AIs with deep current relevant knowledge and deep analytical frameworks.
• A human panel can focus on outlining the human implications of past experience in future scenarios.
• You can create your own AI expert panel to have a discussion about your own questions.
• You have to design the expert panel: all human, all AI, or a combination of human and AI.

What has been the traditional expert panel?

• The traditional expert panel answers questions from a facilitator by sharing anecdotes from the past and opinions about what should be done today.
• These experts have a long and deep history of knowledge and experience.
• A facilitator asks the panel a series of questions.
• The audience attends to learn. The audience may come from a wide range of private, public, and government organizations.

Who is in the audience?

• The audience has a wide variety of people e.g.
• Different industries
• Different types of organizations
• Different types of short and long-term issues

What are some of the challenges with traditional expert panels?

The primary challenge of the traditional expert panel is that their historical experiences don’t reflect current reality or future scenarios in today’s turbulent world.

• We live in a fast-changing world in which the future is unpredictable.
• Customer needs, competition, employee expectations, investors expectations change.
• There are multiple, unforeseen crisis at the same time.

 What has started to replace the human panel of experts?

The AI expert panel may consist of several AIs with deep current relevant knowledge and deep analytical frameworks.

Let’s look at an example:

• The panel has three AI created consulting partners: McKinsey, Bain, BCG.
• The AI facilitator asks the panel a question about a business issue. The facilitator will also provide some context.
• Each AI partner then shares some relevant global fact-based analysis from the past 18 months. This is followed by a specific point of view.
• The partners then get into a discussion where they challenge each others’ points of view.
• At the end of the discussion regarding each question, the AI facilitator summarizes the discussion.

What can a human panel do that an AI panel cannot?

A human panel can focus on outlining the human implications of past experience in future scenarios.

When looking at past experience, especially failures the audience should not repeat, the panel can outline:

• The process for making decisions and gaining commitment to action.
• Why people supported or didn’t support changes.
• The human interrelationships and politics of failure.
• The metrics being tracked before decisions were made and ever afterwards.
• The role of value, morals, and ethics.

What are the implications for you as an individual?

• You can create your own AI expert panel to have a discussion about your own questions.
• You can provide the AI experts with public information about your company.
• You might be able to provide confidential information to the AI experts if you run a Large Language Model locally on your computer.

What are your next steps?

• Define the words/concepts you’re using, in a glossary. I’ve seen major confusion when the same words mean different things to different people.
• Describe your audience and their learning objectives for attending? What are the issues and challenges requiring insights from the expert panel?
• Determine the type of panel you need e.g. all human, all AI, or a combination of human and AI.

What further reading should you do?

Is your company planning to fail?

https://koorandassociates.org/avoiding-business-failure/is-your-company-planning-to-fail/

What is learning?

https://koorandassociates.org/creating-business-value/why-have-your-minimized-your-talent/

Does everyone agree on what strategic planning is?

 What is the purpose of this article?

• This article enables a discussion about your company’s strategic plan and strategic planning process.
• The audience for this article includes: boards of directors, CEOs, the C-Suite, individual investors, and institutional investors. The article applies to all companies, regardless of size.
• This article does not provide tax, legal or financial advice. You must do your own research and fact-based analysis using current and relevant information.

What are the critical learnings in this article?

• There is no broad agreement regarding the definitions of: strategy, strategic plan, strategic planning process
• There is no broad agreement regarding the components and metrics of a strategic plan.
• There is no broad agreement regarding a strategic planning process.

 How do you read this article?

• This article is a collection of quotes defining strategy, strategic plan, and the strategic planning process.
• The quotes are from publicly available articles from the some of the world’s leading strategy consulting firms and business schools.1
• I have not read every single strategy article published by these organizations. I have not included every single strategy quote.

You can download  PDF of this article from: Does everyone agree on what strategic planning is

Are there common definitions of: strategy, strategic plan, and strategic planning process?

There are no common definitions.

A few of the many definitions of strategy are:

• “profitably differentiate a company from it’s competitors”
• “an integrated set of actions designed to create a sustainable advantage over competitors”
• “the ability to foresee the future consequences of present initiatives”
• “a strategy expresses the logic of success for the organisation”
• “explaining what enables firms to enjoy sustainable performance advantages over their competitors”

A few of the many definitions of a strategic plan are:

• “allocate resources to critical capabilities”
• “a road map of how to get to the desired destination”
• “output of the planning process”, “set of plans”, “which describe objectives and alternative strategies”

A few of the many definitions of a strategic planning process are:

• “a comprehensive process for determining what a business should become and how it can best achieve that goal”
• “the ongoing organizational process of using available knowledge to document a business’s intended direction”
• a process to “accomplish the enterprise’s desired outcomes”, “plan for action with clear and measurable goals linked to these outcomes”
• “anchors a company’s vision, aligns resources, and drives impactful decisions”
• “explicit written process for determining the firm’s long-range objectives, the generation of alternate strategies….and a systemic procedure for monitoring results”.

Is there a broad agreement on the components and metrics of a strategic plan?

There is no broad agreement on the components and metrics of a strategic plan. A few of the many examples of possible strategic plan components metrics are:

• “the size of the profit pool available in each market”, the pool’s potential growth”, “the company’s likely portion of that pool”
• “demonstrates how any changes in end markets, competitors, prices, and other external variables will affect a company’s profits, cash flow, and valuation if no action is taken”
• “market growth, segment size, customer needs, competitor strengths and weaknesses, and technological trajectories”
• “operations costs”, unit costs, total volume costs, and lifetime costs.
• “concise sentence describing the reason the organization exists”
• “what success looks like for the organization over a three-year horizon”, “two external tangible outcomes and one internal improvement in capability”
• “return on investment of stockholders”, “stability, good wages, and good benefits for employees”
• “90-day priorities for everyone in your organization”
• “Measures that allow them to understand whether their companies are outgrowing the market and taking share from competitors”
• Explicit stakeholder objectives “listing of all groups that contribute to the organization”, “creditors, stockholders, retailers, and the local community”

Is there broad agreement on the strategic planning process?

There is no broad agreement on the strategic planning process. A few of the many examples of what comprises a strategic planning process are:

• First step: “describe the organization’s mission, vision, and fundamental values”, “understand the current and future priorities of targets customer segments”
• First step: Align on the strategic challenge”, “embedding strategy into plans and budget”
• Answer the question: “is uncertainty properly defined and accounted for?”
• First step: “Systematically scan the environment for opportunities and risks”
• Answer the questions: “How are the priorities and options of leading-edge customers changing?”, “Where are today’s profit pools, and how are they likely to evolve or be disrupted?”
• First step: “Define your purpose” to create customer and employee value.
• Answer the question: “What would it take to be the Google, the Apple, or the Walmart of this market?”
• “Quantify various types of threats” using “AI and machine learning tools”
• Answer the question: “Where can we continue to improve and create value for our customers?”
• “Define stakeholder expectations and establish compelling objectives for the business”

How many strategies does your company need?

The articles from the 9 organizations identified more than 19 different strategies your company might have. ²

I am unclear from the 9 organizations about:

• How many strategies does your company need?
• Who makes the decision about whether or not a strategy is required? What will be the value of each additional strategy?
• Who makes the decision regarding your company’s overall planning and management process, which includes your various strategies?
• How does your company coordinate the various strategies: e.g. assumptions, facts, decisions about resource allocations, decisions about timing etc.
• Who approves the process for each strategy? Process includes: the questions to answer, the people involved, technology used, the types of analysis done, etc.,
• Who is accountable for documenting each strategy process?
• Does each strategic plan document start with a slide that says “Asking for the approval of….”. Do the minutes of the meeting document exactly what was approved?

What are your next steps?

• Define the words/concepts/data you’re using, in a glossary. I’ve seen major confusion when the same words mean different things to different people.
• Collect the facts regarding your current strategic planning situation, by using answering questions 2) to 6) from the above section “How many strategies does your company need?”
• Benchmark your company’s historical results with your direct competitors and the broader market.
• What are implications of the above?

Footnotes:

¹ Bain, BCG, McKinsey, Harvard, INSEAD, MIT, Stanford, University of California – Berkley, and Wharton

² I’ve listed here only 19 of the many strategies from the 9 different organizations: AI strategy, AI agent strategy, AI prompting strategy, brand strategy, corporate strategy, corporate finance strategy, crisis management strategy, customer insights strategy, data strategy, go-to-market strategy, innovation and entrepreneurial strategy, international and emerging markets strategy, investor relations strategy, M&A strategy, operating model strategy, operations and supply chain strategy, portfolio strategy, pricing strategy, transformation and change strategy,

What further reading should you do?

Your company will fail. Koor and Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/avoiding-business-failure/your-company-will-fail-v1/

Is your company planning to fail? Koor and Associates

https://koorandassociates.org/avoiding-business-failure/is-your-company-planning-to-fail/