Over the past month I have been interviewing stakeholders for a client's strategic planning process.  The interviews have sought feedback on strategic options open to the client.  The options range from "keep on being whatever the client wants us to be" to "identify a few big opportunities and really commit to tackling them."   The feedback I am getting from these interviews is that most stakeholders believe the organization will grow much faster and have much greater impact and success if it opts to focus on a few big opportunities rather than continue to "be what the client wants us to be."   Is that a surprise?  Maybe not, but in thinking about most of my client work over the years I recognize that lack of focus has been a big issue.  In fact, I think lack of focus is a bigger barrier to greater success than often recognized. Surely it's a continuing challenge that most of us grapple with. 

A key aspect of developing transformational strategies is understanding the landscape that needs to be traversed by the organization on the way to greater success.  Strategic planners develop an environmental scan to identify the external factors that are likely to have a large impact on the organization as it goes down the road. Factors to be considered in an external environmental scan might include but are hardly limited to economic indicators and forecasts, legislative and governmental trends, technological developments, energy and ecological factors, social trends and values, agricultural and food forecasts, labor concerns and trends, transportation forecasts, and much more. The question arises:  Where does one get this information on a timely and comprehensive basis?

Disruption.  Is it good or bad? While listening to Michael Raynor of Deliotte make a presentation on his great new book, The Innovator's Manifesto, I got to thinking about the two-sided nature of disruption in markets.

What happens when you abandon a customer?

We once teamed up with a major accounting firm to help rescue a publishing and market information company that was in perilous shape, with rapidly worsening financials and competitors aggressively chasing its long-time customers. While many things were wrong with this organization, the major issue was that senior management and the Board continued with "business as usual" for many, many years while markets, customer needs, competitors, technology and everything else changed around them.

Do you know the story of the frog who is placed a pot of nice cool water, gets comfy, does not notice the water is slowly heating up and eventually boils to death?Do you also know the story of the lemming who is, as always, running with the pack, has little warning that those ahead are plummeting off an unseen cliff edge and, just like the others, plummets as well?Well, Bank of America was neither the frog nor the lemming in 2008 at the height of the financial crisis when it purchased Countrywide Financial Corp. for $4.1 billion. No, it was obvious Countrywide was awash with toxic mortgage assets that everyone had been fleeing from.So why did B of A stab itself in the chest? What led it to make such an egregious strategic error?

What do you do when you gain leadership of the worst organization?

The lens we look through changes what we see. It's easy to think a simple and familiar underlying process is at work or fundamental truth is at the root and that we are seeing part of it or its results.While something is certainly underneath what we see, I think we are foolish to reduce it to something simple, familiar and fundamental. After all, when we think about it we know that what we see is really the result of a phenomenally complex system or, better stated, the interaction of phenomenally complex systems. Indeed, we can see the effects or results of these systems - a flower, a stock market drop, an entrepreneurial opportunity - but it is impossible to fully grasp or describe the system and how it works. Only when we isolate parts or pieces can we see dimly lit clues about how it works - mapping DNA to explain the human body, a stock price prediction model that poorly fits reality, volumes of market data that indicate changing consumer preference.

Look at the cloud. That's certainly a place I would look if I were trying to envision a future for an organization and understand changing market and business dynamics. The buzz about SaaS (Software as a Service) and cloud computing has been increasing, with Steven Jobs' recent announcement of Apple's iCloud service just the latest entre' on the growing menu, The potential for cloud computing and SaaS to bring paradigm shifting opportunity and disruption was brought home at a Proformative seminar for CFO-types that I just attended. My mission as a general manager, strategist and marketer infiltrating this seminar was to gain a better understanding of how medium-sized and growing organizations can gain traction by employing newer financial tools.

Over the past few weeks I have encountered the topic of innovation at seemingly every juncture: At a symposium on facilitating group innovation. In a business school strategy group discussion of writings on the process of innovation and how to foster it in organizations. Through the work of a non-profit that provides STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education to kids to encourage invention. From an insightful trade association executive who spoke about the need for associations to launch innovation processes to assure their sustainability. From this immersion in innovation thinking, a big take away is that innovation starts with a person. It starts from a person being creative, open, curious and willing to entertain change.

In the social media tsunami, many of us are running hard to stay ahead of the wave. The overall volume of conversation is rising rapidly, as are the demands and opportunities to participate.Like any new paradigm, this one calls on us to learn new ways of thinking and behavior. For instance, how do we best mine the brevity of the 140-character Twitter post? What bit can we toss in as our blog entry that will not just be something that says "me too"? How do we find the time to check in on LinkedIn and Facebook and monitor Twitter while carrying on our analog lives and not offending those we need to interact with face-to-face? How can we best use all these platforms to carry our strategic business messages and not just banal observations? How do we seamlessly weave them into our work lives to increase our scope and power as professionals?

When should you launch a strategic planning process?  Here's when.

How suited are today's management systems to the challenges at hand? That was the question raised in a discussion among a group of University of Chicago trained strategists.

Next time you are looking at an organization that is not performing well, ask yourself, what's the cause? Of course, the cause could be one of many: Lack of funds and investment, insufficient or unsuited staff, ineffective technology, misguided marketing, "me-to" branding, high cost structure, misunderstanding of customer needs, and so on. At the University of Chicago Booth School of Business Management Conference last Friday, Professor James Schrager described a handy three-option construct he uses to parse the success or failure of organizations.