Strategic Plans
The book Action with Traction describes how to identify and write your mission, vision, values, premises (assumptions), goals and strategies. If your organization is new, it requires a great deal of environment scanning and targeting. If your organization has been around for awhile, it requires looking carefully at the work you are already successful at and figuring out why you are doing that work - and if there is work you are doing that doesn't make a lot of sense to keep doing. The book focuses on the later, which is most common for all but start-up organizations. Below are links to books and articles on websites that provides additional guidance and ideas.
Links to books and website articles of interest
Balancing Strategic and Operational Planning by Atlantic Canadian Organic Regional Network (ACORN). This short article does a nice job of explaining how strategic planning "is an organization's summary of the development process and the presentation of core directions" while operational planning "is an annual work plan explaining how the goals of the strategic plan will be implemented and what budget and processes are required." While the article is focused at farmers moving to certification in organic practices, it applies to any business.
Aligning Strategy & Execution by Stephen G. Smith, President and CEO of Accellenx Partners - Thursday, March 12, 2009, in BPMInstitute.org. Mr. Smith presents the argument that strategies often fail to be implemented in organizations because Executive Management does a poor job of transferring their excitement and understanding for the plans to lower levels of management and /or holding them accountable for results.
The Strategic Planning Process by NetMBA. I like the NetMBA articles. They are short, to the point, and often are consistent with my point of view. This article fits that well. It starts by explaining that formalized top-down strategic planning started in the 1970's and is most applicable at the business unit level, since larger corporations are focused more on managing a portfolio of businesses at the higher level. the article goes on to provide a quick description of Mission statements and then objectives. Appropriately they say "Objectives are concrete goals..." I chose to call them goals in my book, ignoring the word objectives entirely. (It is simply a label...use what is comfortable to you.).
The article talks about situation analysis and does a great job of bringing in some of Michael Porter's ideas. I was light on the subject of situation analysis in the book, opting instead to focus on the often overlooked analysis of what the organization is already doing. I did introduce the idea of Premises, which is a process for identifying the unique need in the world the organization is serving. I also devoted a chapter to strategy-scenario analysis, which this article points out is very useful for organizations that need to deal with multiple contingencies, which I think is nearly always the case in this very flat, fast paced world.
Building a Vision for the Future by Ross A. Wirth, Ph.D. Dr. Wirth presents 14 slides in their pdf presentation that explain an approach to building the mission and vision from a whole company approach. He defines mission and vision and emphasizes the use of a visioning team to facilitate grassroots efforts chartered to "Develop a mission and vision statement that is accepted and understood by nearly all employees." He lays out a six-month "visioning timeline" consisting of the following steps: identify visioning team members, kick-oof, personal visioning, involve grassroots through networking, initiate employee communication, search for connonalities - local, bubble up and trickle down, seed conversations, craft supporting stories, summarize and wrap up, and complete an assessment and gap closure. I think his timeline is probably accurate for a larger company, and I like the steps he recommends. However, while involving everyone in the effort is ideal, the long timeline that requires may be damaging. It might be better to balance moving forward more quickly with a less than full company representation, getting to a mission and vision, and then reinforcing the messages through every possible means until the next time the mission and vision need to be updated.