Week 3: Develop a Framework and Implement Strategic Planning

Must use SC Johnson A Family Company for assignment

Week 3 – Assignment 1: Develop a Framework for Strategic Planning

Instructions

Strategic planning provides guidance to organizations in fulfilling their mission and goals with maximum efficiency and impact. To begin such a planning process leadership must know the organization’s current situation. Generally, the planning process begins by assessing the organization’s internal and external situations using a specific tool. The most used organizational assessment tool is the S.W.O.T. (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) Analysis.

Imagine that you’re a consultant to the global company you selected in your earlier assignment. The company has requested that you create a strategic plan for them. A strategic plan is a document that organizations develop to communicate goals and the actions needed to achieve those goals with a timeline and all of the critical elements in the planning exercise. Complete a SWOT analysis on your company using the template included in this week’s resources (SEE TEMPLATE BELOW). Then, prepare at least three recommendations for improvement based on the results of the SWOT. Your recommendations will also be used as you develop your organization’s strategic plan in the next part of this assignment. Using the SWOT analysis template available in the Week resources, complete the analysis on your company.

Week 3 – Assignment 2: Implement Strategic Planning

Instructions

An organization’s strategic plan is a comprehensive document representing the “big picture” and helping to give clarity determining where the organization is going over the next year or beyond. Every organization maps a strategy, incorporating goals and action steps that are tailored to meet their needs.

For the second part of this assignment, imagine that you are a consultant hired to create a strategic plan for your selected global organization and present it using a PowerPoint presentation. You must include information from the outcome of the SWOT. The slides should include the following:

· Organizational summary

· Vision & Mission statement(s)

· SWOT Analysis Results (1 page) – You may include the actual template

· At least three goals with objectives, a timeline and resources required.

· Possible barriers

· Your recommendations

Length: 10-15 slides (with a separate reference slide)
Notes Length: 100-150 words for each slide

References: Include a minimum of five scholarly resources.
Your presentation should demonstrate thoughtful consideration of the ideas and concepts presented in the course by providing new thoughts and insights relating directly to this topic. Your response should reflect scholarly writing and current APA standards.

Be sure to include citations for quotations and paraphrases with references in APA format and style where appropriate.

SWOT Analysis

Use this template to perform a SWOT analysis

Instructions:

1. List the organization’s internal forces, including strengths and weaknesses, in relation to mission achievement.

2. List key opportunities and threats (political, economic, social, technological, demographic, or legal) that may influence the organization’s ability to achieve its mission.

3. Indicate possible connections between an opportunity or threat, and a strength or weakness.

Internal Forces

External Forces

Strengths:

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



Opportunities:






Weaknesses:






Threats:







NOTE: You may adjust the formatting of this document to fit the needs of your analysis. You can expand it to an additional page if required. Since we are using bullet points in this document, you do not need to use complete sentences nor do you need citations (Citations are required for the written component of this week’s assignment).

MBA-5110: Week 3 Grading Rubrics

Week 3 – Assignment 1: Develop a Framework for Strategic Planning

Criteria

Content (2 Points)

Points

Completed organizational SWOT analysis using the assignment template.

At least three recommendations are formulated for improvement based on the results of the SWOT.

Organization (1 Point)

SWOT items are clearly defined and presented.

Total

Week 3 – Assignment 2: Implement Strategic Planning

Criteria

Content (8 Points)

Points

Slides include an organizational summary with a vision and mission statement.

Results of the SWOT Analysis are included.

Assignment includes at least three (3) goals with objectives, a timeline and resources required.

An analysis is included on the possible barriers and strategies to help mitigate these challenges.

Organization (2 Points)

PowerPoint is organized, The length is 10-15 slides (with a separate reference slide). Notes Length: 100-150 words for each slide.

Total

Week 3: Mini Lecture

Planning Strategies

Think about a time you were looking forward to a special family vacation, or you were responsible for a staff celebration or you were thinking about something much bigger like starting a business. No matter what, a plan would be essential to accomplishing your goals. The same is true of any organization

The most essential of the business planning process is the strategic plan. The strategic plan incorporates all of the organization’s departmental and functional plans from which management decision-making stems. Overall, the strategic planning process drives organizations to become what it intend to be in the future with the essential steps needed to get there.

Central to the strategic planning process is conducting a situational analysis. For many organizations they conduct a SWOT Analysis revealing Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats. This helps organizations to evaluate where they stand in relation to their competition. The SWOT includes two major steps: first, collecting information in the four areas about the organization and then making decisions based on an interpretation of that information. Internally strengths and weaknesses are collected from business reports but most importantly from people throughout the organization. On the other hand, external information comes from sources such as government and environmental reports, customers, and competitors. When conducting the SWOT, organizations are encouraged only to include key points where there is evidence to back it up but still it is important to avoid being too rigid.

An organization’s strategic plan provides the path of action for achieving the desired future of an organization. A winning strategic plan is a key management tool for the staff and a performance contract between management and its stakeholders. Overall the strategic planning process anchors the staff and leadership answering the questions about the vision, mission, values, issues and specific strategies that will be used to achieve a desired standing for the business.

ANSWER TRUE OR FALSE: “I am an ethical manager.”

If you answered “true,” here’s an uncomfortable fact:
You’re probably not. Most of us believe that we are ethical
and unbiased. We imagine we’re good decision makers,
able to objectively size up a job candidate or a venture
deal and reach a fair and rational conclusion that’s in our,
and our organization’s, best interests. But more than two
decades of research confirms that, in reality, most of us
fall woefully short of our inflated self-perception. We’re
deluded by what Yale psychologist David Armor calls the
illusion of objectivity, the notion that we’re free of the
very biases we’re so quick to recognize in others. What’s
more, these unconscious, or implicit, biases can be con-
trary to our consciously held, explicit beliefs. We may be-
lieve with confidence and conviction that a job candi-
date’s race has no bearing on our hiring decisions or that
we’re immune to conflicts of interest But psychological
research routinely exposes counterintentional, uncon-

scious biases. The prevalence of these biases suggests that
even the most well-meaning person unwittingly allows
unconscious thoughts and feelings to influence seemingly
objective decisions. These flawed judgments are ethically
problematic and undermine managers’ fundamental
work – t o recruit and retain superior talent, boost the per-
formance of individuals and teams, and collaborate effec-
tively with partners.

This article explores four related sources of uninten-
tional unethical decision making: implicit forms of prej-
udice, bias that favors one’s own group, conflict of interest,
and a tendency to overclaim credit. Because we are not
consciously aware of these sources of bias, they often can-
not be addressed by penalizing people for their bad de-
cisions. Nor are they likely to be corrected through con-
ventional ethics training. Rather, managers must bring a
new type of vigilance to bear. To begin, this requires let-
ting go of the notion that our conscious attitudes always
represent what we think they do. It also demands that we

56 HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW

DECEMBER 2003 57

How (Un)ethical Are You?

abandon our faith in our own objectivity and our ability
to be fair. In the following pages, we will offer strategies
that can help managers recognize these pervasive, corro-
sive, unconscious biases and reduce their impact.

Implicit Prejudice:

DIUS 1 fmt [viost fair-minded people
Emerges from strive to judge others accord-

Unconscious ‘”̂ ̂ ^ ‘]^Z “”^”u’ ̂ “‘.r’
, . „ research shows how often

HeliejS people instead judge accord-
ing to unconscious stereo-

types and attitudes, or “implicit prejudice.” What makes
implicit prejudice so common and persistent is that it is
rooted in the fundamental mechanics of thought. Early
on, we leam to associate things that commonly go to-
gether and expect them to inevitably coexist: thunder and
rain, for instance, or gray hair and old age. This skill-to
perceive and leam from associations -often serves us well.

But, of course, our associations only reflect approxima-
tions of the tmth; they are rarely applicable to every en-
counter. Rain doesn’t always accompany thunder, and the
young can also go gray. Nonetheless, because we auto-
matically make such associations to help us organize our
world, we grow to trust them, and they can blind us to
those instances in which the associations are not accu-
rate-when they don’t align with our expectations.

Because implicit prejudice arises from the ordinary and
unconscious tendency to make associations, it is distinct
from conscious forms of prejudice, such as overt racism or
sexism. This distinction explains why people who are free
from conscious prejudice may still harbor biases and act
accordingly. Exposed to images that juxtapose black men
and violence, portray women as sex objects, imply that
the physically disabled are mentally weak and the poor
are lazy, even the most consciously unbiased person is
bound to make biased associations. These associations
play out in the workplace just as they do anywhere else.

In the mid-1990s, Tony Greenwald, a professor of psy-
chology atthe University of Washington,developed an ex-
perimental tool called the Implicit Association Test (IAT)
to study unconscious bias. A computerized version of the
test requires subjects to rapidly classify words and images
as “good” or “bad.” Using a keyboard, test takers must
make split-second “goodA>ad” distinctions between words
like’Move,””joy,””pain,”and”sorrow”and atthe same time

sort images of faces that are (depending on the bias in ques-
tion) black or white, young or old, fat or thin, and so on.
The test exposes implicit biases by detecting subtle shifts
in reaction time that can occur when test takers are re-
quired to pair different sets of words and faces. Subjects
who consciously believe that they have no negative feel-
ings toward, say, black Americans or tbe elderly are nev-
ertheless likely to be slower to associate elderly or black
faces with the “good” words than they are to associate
youthful or white faces witb “good” words.

Since 1998, when Greenwald, Brian Nosek, and Mah-
zarin Banaji put the IAT online, people from around the
world have taken over 2.5 million tests, confirming and
extending the findings of more traditional laboratory ex-
periments. Both show implicit biases to be strong and per-
vasive. (For more information on the IAT, see the sidebar
“Are You Biased?”)-

Biases are also likely to be costly. In controlled experi-
ments, psychologists Laurie Rudman at Rutgers and Peter
Glick at Lawrence University have studied how implicit
biases may work to exclude qualified people from certain
roles. One set of experiments examined the relationship
between participants’ implicit gender stereotypes and
their hiring decisions. Those holding stronger implicit
biases were less likely to select a qualified woman who
exhibited stereotypically”masculine”personality qualities,
such as ambition or independence, for a job requiring
stereotypically “feminine” qualities, such as interpersonal
skills. Yet they would select a qualified man exhibiting these
same qualities. The hirers’ biased perception was that the
woman was less likely to be socially skilled than the man,
though their qualifications were in fact the same. These
results suggest that implicit biases may exact costs by sub-
tly excluding qualified people from the very organizations
that seek their talents.

Legal cases also reveal the real costs of implicit biases,
both economic and social. Consider Price Waterhouse v.
Hopkins. Despite logging more billable hours than her
peers, bringing in $25 million to the company, and eam-
ing the praise of her clients, Ann Hopkins was tumed
down for partner, and she sued. The details of the case
reveal that her evaluators were explicitly prejudiced in
their attitudes. For example, they had commented that
Ann “overcompensated for being a woman” and needed
a “course at charm school.” But perhaps more damning
from a legal standpoint was blunt testimony from exper-
imental research. Testifying as an expert witness for the
defense, psychology professor Susan Fiske, now at Prince-
ton University, argued that the potential for biased deci-

Mahzarin R. Banaji is the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics in the department of psychology at Harvard Uni-
versity and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Cambridge. Massachu-
setts. Max H. Bazerman is the Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School in Boston.
Dolly Chugh, a Harvard Business School MBA, is now a doctoral candidate in Harvard University’s joint program in orga-
nizational behavior and social psychology.

58 HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW

How (Un)ethical Are You?

sion making is inherent in a system in which a person has
“solo” status-that is, a system in which the person is the
only one of a kind (the only woman, the only African-
American, the only person with a disability, and the like).
Judge Gerhard Gesell concluded that “a far more subtle
process [than the usual discriminatory intent] is involved”
in the assessments made of Ann Hopkins, and she won
both in a lower court and in the Supreme Court in what
is now a landmark case in discrimination law.

Likewise, the 1999 case of Thomas v. Kodak demon-
strates that implicit biases can be the basis for rulings.
Here, the court posed the question of “whether the em-
ployer consciously intended to base the evaluations on
race or simply did so because of unthinking stereotypes
or bias.” The court concluded that plaintiffs can indeed
challenge “subjective evaluations which could easily mask
covert or unconscious race discrimination.” Although
courts are careful not to assign responsibility easily for

Are You Biased?

Are you willing to bet that you feel. the same way toward European-
Americans as you do toward African-

Americans? How about women versus

men? Or older people versus younger

ones? Think twice before you take that

bet. Visit implicit.harvard.edu or www.

tolerance.org/hidden_bias to examine

your unconscious attitudes.

The Implicit Association Tests available

on these sites reveal unconscious beliefs

by asking takers to make split-second

associations between words with positive

or negative connotations and images rep-

resenting different types of people. The

various tests on these sites expose the

differences-or the alignment-between

test takers’ conscious and unconscious

attitudes toward people of different races,

sexual orientation, or physical character-

istics. Data gathered from over 2.5 million

online tests and further research tells

us that unconscious biases are;

• widely prevalent At least 75% of test
takers shovy an implicit bias favoring

the young, the rich, and whites.

• robust. The mere conscious desire
not to be biased does not eliminate

implicit bias.

• contrary to conscious intention.
Although people tend to report little

or noconscious bias against African-

Americans, Arabs, Arab-Americans,

Jews, gay men, lesbians, or the poor,

they show substantial biases on

implicit measures.

– different in degree depending on
group status. Minority group members
tend to show less implicit preference

for their own group than majority

group members show for theirs.

For example, African-Americans report

strong preference for their group on

explicit measures but show relatively

less implicit preference in the tests.

Conversely, white Americans report a low

explicit bias for their group but a higher

implicit bias.

• consequential. Those who show higher
ievelsof biason the lAT are also likely

to behave in ways that are more biased

in face-to-face interactions with mem-

bers ofthe group they are biased

against and in the choices they make,

such as hiring decisions.

• costly. Research currently underway
in our lab suggests that implicit bias

generates a “stereotype tax” – negotia-

tors leave money on the table because

biases cause them to miss opportunities

to learn about their opponent and

thus create additional value through

mutually beneficial trade-offs.

DECEMBER 2003 59

How (Un)ethicai Are You?

unintentional biases, these cases demonstrate the poten-
tial for corporate liability that such patterns of behavior
could unwittingly create.

In-Group Favoritism:

Bias
That
Favors
Your
Group

Think about some of the favors you
have done in recent years, whether for
a friend, a relative, or a colleague. Have
you helped someone get a useful in-
troduction, admission to a school, or
a job? Most of us are glad to help out
with such favors. Not surprisingly, we
tend to do more favors for those we

know, and those we know tend to be like ourselves: peo-
ple who share our nationality, social class, and perhaps
religion, race, employer, or alma mater. This all sounds
rather innocent. What’s wrong with asking your neighbor,
the university dean, to meet with a coworker’s son? Isn’t
it just being helpful to recommend a former sorority sis-
ter for a job or to talk to your banker cousin when a friend
from church gets turned down for a home loan?

Few people set out to exclude anyone through such acts
of kindness. But when those in the majority or those in
power allocate scarce resources (such as jobs, promotions,
and mortgages) to people just like them, they effectively
discriminate against those who are different from them.
Such “in-group favoritism” amounts to giving extra credit
for group membership. Yet while discriminating against
those who are different is considered unethical, helping
people close to us is often viewed favorably. Think about
the number of companies that explicitly encourage this
by offering hiring bonuses to employees who refer their
friends for job opportunities.

But consider the finding that banks in the United States
are more likely to deny a mortgage application from a
black person than from a white person, even when the ap-
plicants are equally qualified. The common view has been
that hanks are hostile to African-Americans. While this
may be true of some banks and some loan officers, social
psychologist David Messick has argued that in-group fa-
voritism is more likely to be at the root of such discrimi-
natory lending. A white loan officer may feel hopeful or
lenient toward an unqualified white applicant while fol-
lowing the bank’s lending standards strictly with an un-

qualified black applicant. In denying the black applicant’s
mortgage, the loan officer may not be expressing hostility
toward blacks so much as favoritism toward whites. It’s
a subtle but crucial distinction.

The ethical cost is clear and should be reason enough
to address the problem. But such inadvertent bias pro-
duces an additional effect: It erodes the bottom line.
Lenders who discriminate in this way, for example, incur
bad-debt costs they could have avoided if their lending
decisions were more objective. They also may find them-
selves exposed to damaging publicity or discrimination
lawsuits ifthe skewed lending pattern is publicly revealed.
In a different context, companies may pay a real cost for
marginal hires who wouldn’t have made the grade but
for the sympathetic hiring manager swayed by in-group
favoritism.

In-group favoritism is tenacious when membership
confers clear advantages, as it does, for instance, among
whites and other dominant social groups. (It may be
weaker or absent among people whose group member-
ship offers little societal advantage.) Thus for a wide array
of managerial tasks-from hiring, firing, and promoting to
contracting services and forming partnerships-qualified
minority candidates are subtly and unconsciously dis-
criminated against, sometimes simply because they are in
the minority: There are not enough of them to counter
the propensity for in-group favoritism in the majority.

Overclaiming Credit:

Bias
That
Favors
You

It’s only natural for successful people to
hold positive views about themselves.
But many studies show that the major-
ity of people consider themselves above
average on a host of measures, from in-
telligence to driving ability. Business

executives are no exception. We tend to overrate our in-
dividual contribution to groups, which, bluntly put, tends
to lead to an overblown sense of entitlement. We become
the unabashed, repeated beneficiaries of this unconscious
bias, and the more we think only of our own contribu-
tions, the less fairly we judge others with whom we work.

Lab research demonstrates this most personal of biases.
At Harvard, Eugene Caruso, Nick Epley, and Max Bazer-
man recently asked MBA students in study groups to

Would you be willing to risk being in the
group disadvantaged by your own decision?

60 HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW

How (Un)ethical Are You?

estimate what portion of their group’s work each had
done. The sum of the contribution by all members, of
course, must add up to uxm. But the researchers found
that the totals for each study group averaged 139%. In a
related study, Caruso and his colleagues uncovered ram-
pant overestimates by academic authors of their contri-
bution to shared research projects. Sadly, but not surpris-
ingly, the more the sum of the total estimated group
effort exceeded 100% (in other words, the more credit
each person claimed), the less the parties wanted to col-
laborate in the future.

Likewise in business, claiming too much credit can
destabilize alliances. When each party in a strategic part-
nership claims too much credit for its own contribution
and becomes skeptical about whether the other is doing
its fair share, they both tend to reduce their contributions
to compensate. This has obvious repercussions for the
joint venture’s performance.

Unconscious overclaiming can be expected to reduce
the performance and longevity of groups within organi-
zations, just as it diminished the academic authors’ will-
ingness to collaborate. It can also take a toll on employee
commitment. Think about how employees perceive raises.
Most are not so different from the children at Lake Wobe-
gon, believing that they, too, rank in the upper half of
their peer group. But many necessarily get pay increases
that are below the average. If an employee learns of a
colleague’s greater compensation – while honestly believ-
ing that he himself is more deserving-resentment may
be natural. At best, his resentment might translate into
reduced commitment and performance. At worst, he may
leave the organization that, it seems, doesn’t appreciate
his contribution.

Conflict of Interest:

1 ncit Everyone knows that conflict
Favors Those “^ interest can lead to inten-

p tionally corrupt behavior.
L.an

But numerous psychological
Benefit You experiments show how pow-

erfully such conflicts can un-
intentionally skew decision

making. (For an examination ofthe evidence in one busi-
ness arena, see Max Bazerman, George Loewenstein, and
Don Moore’s November 2002 HBR article, “Why Good
Accountants Do Bad Audits”) These experiments suggest
that the work world is rife with situations in which such
conflicts lead honest, ethical professionals to uncon-
sciously make unsound and unethical recommendations.

Physicians, for instance, face conflicts of interest when
they accept payment for referring patients into clinical tri-
als. While, surely, most physicians consciously believe that

their referrals are the patient’s best clinical option, how
do they know that the promise of payment did not skew
their decisions? Similarly, many lawyers earn fees based
on their clients’ awards or settlements. Since going to trial
is expensive and uncertain, settling out of court is often an
attractive option for the lawyer. Attorneys may consciously
believe that settling is in their clients’ best interests. But
how can they be objective, unbiased judges under these
circumstances?

Research done with brokerage house analysts demon-
strates how conflict of interest can unconsciously distort
decision making. A survey of analysts conducted by the
financial research service First Call showed that during a
period in 2(xx> when the Nasdaq dropped 60%, fully 99%
of brokerage analysts’client recommendations remained
“strong buy,” “buy,” or “hold.” What accounts for this dis-
crepancy between what was happening and what was rec-
ommended? The answer may lie in a system that fosters
conflicts of interest. A portion of analysts’ pay is based on
brokerage firm revenues. Some firms even tie analysts’com-
pensation to the amount of business the analysts bring in
from clients, giving analysts an obvious incentive to pro-
long and extend their relationships with clients. But to as-
sume that during this Nasdaq free fall all brokerage house
analysts were consciously corrupt, milking their clients to
exploit this incentive system, defies common sense. Surely
there were some bad apples. But how much more likely
it is that most of these analysts believed their recommen-
dations were sound and in their clients’ best interests.
What many didn’t appreciate was that the built-in conflict
of interest in their compensation incentives made it impos-
sible for them to see the implicit bias in their own flawed
recommendations.

Trying Harder Isn’t Enough
As companies keep collapsing into financial scandal and
ruin, corporations are responding with ethics-training
programs for managers, and many of the world’s leading
business schools have created new courses and chaired
professorships in ethics. Many of these efforts focus on
teaching broad principles of moral philosophy to help
managers understand the ethical challenges they face.

We applaud these efforts, but we doubt that a well-
intentioned, just-try-harder approach will fundamentally
improve the quality of executives’decision making. To do
that, ethics training must be broadened to include what
is now known about how our minds work and must ex-
pose managers directly to the unconscious mechanisms
that underlie biased decision making. And it must provide
managers with exercises and interventions that can root
out the biases that lead to bad decisions.

Managers can make wiser, more ethical decisions if they
become mindful of their unconscious biases. But how can
we get at something outside our conscious awareness? By

DECEMBER 2003 61

How (Un)ethical Are You?

bringing the conscious mind to bear. Just as the driver of
a misaligned car deliberately counteracts its pull, so can
managers develop conscious strategies to counteract the
pull of their unconscious biases. What’s required is vigi-
lance-continual awareness of the forces that can cause
decision making to veer from its intended course and con-
tinual adjustments to counteract them. Those adjust-
ments fall into three general categories: collecting data,
shaping the environment, and broadening tbe decision-
making process.

Collect data. The first step to reducing unconscious
bias is to collect data to reveal its presence. Often, the
data will be counterintuitive. Consider many people’s sur-
prise to leam of their own gender and racial biases on tbe
IAT. Why the surprise? Because most of us trust the “sta-
tistics” our intuition provides. Better data are easily, but
rarely, collected. One way to get those data is to examine
our decisions in a systematic way.

Remember the MBA study groups wbose participants
overestimated tbeir individual contributions to the group
effort so tbat the totals averaged 139%? Wben the re-
searchers asked group members to estimate what eacb
of the other members’ contributions were before claiming
tbeir own, the total fell to i2i%. The tendency to claim too
much credit still persisted, but this strategy of “unpack-
ing” tbe work reduced the magnitude of the bias. In envi-
ronments characterized by “I deserve more tban you’re
giving me” claims, merely asking team members to un-
pack tbe contributions of others before claiming tbeir
own sbare of tbe pot usually aligns claims more closely
witb wbat’s actually deserved. As this example demon-
strates, sucb systematic audits of botb individual and

group decision-making processes can occur even as tbe
decisions are being made.

Unpacking is a simple strategy tbat managers should
routinely use to evaluate tbe fairness of tbeir own claims
within tbe organization. But tbey can also apply it in any
situation wbere team members or subordinates may be
overclaiming. For example, in explaining a raise that an
employee feels is inadequate, a manager sbould ask tbe
subordinate not what he thinks be alone deserves but
wbat be considers an appropriate raise after taking into
account each coworker’s contribution and tbe pool avail-
able for pay increases. Similarly, when an individual feels
she’s doing more tban ber fair sbare of a team’s work, ask-
ing ber to consider other people’s efforts before esti-
mating her own can help align ber perception with real-
ity, restore ber commitment, and reduce a skewed sense
of entitlement.

Taking the IAT is anotber valuable strategy for collect-
ing data. We recommend tbat you and otbers in your or-
ganization use tbe test to expose your own implicit biases.
But one word of warning: Because tbe test is an educa-
tional and research tool, not a selection or evaluation
tool, it is critical tbat you consider your results and otbers’
to be private information. Simply knowing tbe magni-
tude and pervasiveness of your own biases can help direct
your attention to areas of decision making tbat are in
need of careful examination and reconsideration. For ex-
ample, a manager whose testing reveals a bias toward cer-
tain groups ought to examine ber hiring practices to see
if she bas indeed been disproportionately favoring those
groups. But because so many people barbor sucb biases,
tbey can also be generally acknowledged, and tbat knowl-

62 HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW

How (Un)ethical Are You?

What list ol names do you start with when
considering whom to send to a training program,
recommend for a neŵ assignment, or nominate
for a fast-track position?

edge can be used as the basis for changing the way deci-
sions are made. It is important to guard against using
pervasiveness to justify complacency and inaction: Perva-
siveness of bias is not a mark of its appropriateness any
more than poor eyesight is considered so ordinary a con-
dition that it does not require corrective lenses.

Shape your environment. Research shows that im-
plicit attitudes can be shaped by external cues in the en-
vironment. For example, Curtis Hardin and colleagues
at UCLA used the IAT to study whether subjects’ implicit
race bias would be affected if the test was administered
by a black investigator. One group of students took the
test under the guidance of a white experimenter; another
group took the test with a black experimenter. The mere
presence of a black experimenter, Hardin found, reduced
the level of subjects’ implicit antiblack bias on the [AT.
Numerous similar studies have shown similar effects with
other social groups. What accounts for such shifts? We can
speculate that experimenters in classrooms are assumed
to be competent, in charge, and authoritative. Subjects
guided by a black experimenter attribute these positive
characteristics to that person, and then perhaps to the
group as a whole. These findings suggest that one remedy
for implicit bias is to expose oneself to images and social
environments that challenge stereotypes.

We know of a judge whose court is located in a pre-
dominantly African-American neighborhood. Because of
the crime and arrest patterns in the community, most peo-
ple the judge sentences are black. The judge confronted
a paradox. On the one hand, she took a judicial oath to be
objective and egalitarian, and indeed she consciously
believed that her decisions were unbiased. On the other
hand, every day she was exposed to an environment that
reinforced the association between black men and crime.
Although she consciously rejected racial stereotypes, she
suspected that she harbored unconscious prejudices
merely from working in a segregated world. Immersed in
this environment each day, she wondered if it was possi-
ble to give the defendants a fair hearing.

Rather than allow her environment to reinforce a bias,
the judge created an alternative environment. She spent
a vacation week sitting in a fellow judge’s court in a neigh-
borhood where the criminals being tried were predomi-

nantly white. Case after case challenged the stereotype
of blacks as criminal and whites as law abiding and so
challenged any bias against blacks that she might have
harbored.

Think about the possibly biased associations your
workplace fosters. Is there, perhaps, a “wall of fame” with
pictures of high achievers all cast from the same mold?
Are certain types of managers invariably promoted? Do
people overuse certain analogies drawn from stereotyp-
ical or narrow domains of knowledge (sports metaphors,
for instance, or cooking terms)? Managers can audit their
organization to uncover such patterns or cues that un-
wittingly lead to stereotypical associations.

!f an audit reveals that the environment may be pro-
moting unconscious biased or unethical behavior, con-
sider creating countervailing experiences, as the judge
did. For example, if your department reinforces the
stereotype of men as naturally dominant in a hierarchy
(most managers are male, and most assistants are female),
find a department with women in leadership positions
and set up a shadow program. Both groups will benefit
from the exchange of best practices, and your group will
be quietly exposed to counterstereotypical cues. Manag-
ers sending people out to spend time in clients’organiza-
tions as a way to improve service should take care to se-
lect organizations likely to counter stereotypes reinforced
in your own company.

Broaden your decision making. Imagine that you are
making a decision in a meeting about an important com-
pany policy that will benefit some groups of employees
more than others. A policy might, for example, provide
extra vacation time for all employees but eliminate the
flex time that has allowed many new parents to balance
work with their family responsibilities. Another policy
might lower the mandatory retirement age, eliminating
some older workers but creating advancement opportu-
nities for younger ones. Now pretend that, as you make
your decisions, you don’t know which group you belong
to. That is, you don’t know whether you are senior or ju-
nior, married or single, gay or straight, a parent or child-
less, male or female, healthy or unhealthy. You will even-
tually find out, but not until after the decision has been
made. In this hypothetical scenario, what decision would

DECEMBER 2003 63

How {Un)ethical Are You?

Just considering a counterstereotypical choice
at the conscious level can reduce implicit bias.

you make? Would you be willing to risk being in the
group disadvantaged by your own decision? How would
your decisions differ if you could make them wearing var-
ious identities not your own?

This thought experiment is a version of philosopher
John Rawls’s concept of the “veil of ignorance,” which
posits that only a person ignorant of his own identity is
capable of a truly ethical decision. Few of us can assume
the veil completely, which is precisely why hidden biases,
even when identified, are so difficult to correct. Still, ap-
plying the veil of ignorance to your next important man-
agerial decision may offer some insight into how strongly
implicit biases influence you.

Just as managers can expose bias by collecting data be-
fore acting on intuition, they can take other preemptive
steps. What list of names do you start with when consid-
ering whom to send to a training program, recommend
for a new assignment, or nominate for a fast-track posi-
tion? Most of us can quickly and with little concentration
come up with such a list. But keep in mind that your in-
tuition is prone to implicit prejudice (which will strongly
favor dominant and well-liked groups), in-group favor-
itism (which will favor people in your own group), over-
claiming (which will favor you), and conflict of interest
(which will favor people whose interests affect your own).

Instead of relying on a mental short list when making
personnel decisions, start with a full list of names of em-
ployees who have relevant qualifications.

Using a broad list of names has several advantages.
The most obvious is that talent may surface that might
otherwise be overlooked. Less obvious but equally impor-
tant, the very act of considering a counterstereotypical
choice at the conscious level can reduce implicit bias. In
fact, merely thinking about hypothetical,counterstereo-
typical scenarios-such as what it would be like to trust a
complex presentation to a female colleague or to receive
a promotion from an Afr-ican-American boss – can prompt
less-biased and more ethical decision making. Similarly,
consciously considering counterintuitive options in the
face of conflicts of interest, or when there’s an opportu-
nity to overclaim, can promote more objective and ethi-
cal decisions.

The Vigilant Manager
If you answered “true” to the question at the start of this
article, you felt with some confidence that you are an eth-
ical decision maker. How would you answer it now? It’s
clear that neither simple conviction nor sincere intention
is enough to ensure that you are the ethical practitioner

you imagine yourself to be. Managers who as-
pire to be ethical must challenge the assump-
tion that they’re always unbiased and ac-
knowledge that vigilance, even more than
good intention, is a defining characteristic of
an ethical manager. They must actively collect
data, shape their environments, and broaden
their decision making. What’s more, an obvi-
ous redress is available. Managers should seek
every opportunity to implement affirmative
action policies-not because of past wrongs
done to one group or another but because of
the everyday wrongs that we can now docu-
ment are inherent in the ordinary, everyday
behavior of good, well-intentioned people.
Ironically, only those who understand their
own potential for unethical behavior can be-
come the ethical decision makers that they
aspire to be. ^

Reprint R0312D; HBR OnPoint 5526
To order, see page 127.

64 HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW

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STRATEGY EXECUTION

How Employees Shaped Strategy
at the New York Public Library
by Bruce A. Strong and Mary Lee Kennedy

DECEMBER 05, 2016

The New York Public Library is one of the largest public libraries in the world, with 18 million

visitors yearly, a budget of nearly $300m, and 93 branches. It serves vastly diverse populations:

toddlers and caregivers, new immigrants, lifelong learners, famous novelists, and scholars.

Although based in New York City, it serves a global audience of researchers and tourists.

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Library leaders knew that given the immense changes brought on by digital innovations, as well as

shifts in the communities that the Library served, it would need to evolve. How to transform such a

huge, iconic institution, wrapped in history, into a nimble player? How to provide hyper-local

services tailored to the diverse needs of its patrons while also upholding a consistent and high

standard of service?

In the spring of 2014, we proposed a radical approach: offer anyone on staff – over 2,500 individuals,

many of them union members – the chance to shape the library through strategic conversations with

senior leaders. We believed that if the Library was to be truly nimble, senior leaders couldn’t

unilaterally come up with a plan. Involving staff in conceiving, designing, and implementing the

change would result in a course of action that was more fit-to-purpose and more likely to be well

executed. Staff would fully understand the changes and be accountable to each other for their

implementation.

The conversation would be neither bottom-up nor top down. Staff would take a lead role in

designing, testing, and advocating solutions. Leadership would shape the conversation to ensure

proposals were strategically on-point. Senior leaders also would provide resources, guidance, and

act as decision makers.

But would involving so many people work in practice? How to get them engaged? How to ensure

that the conversations didn’t bog down or become chaotic?

Several organizations for whom we had worked or had researched used a technique we call

“innovation communities” to structure strategic conversations so that they’re both efficient and

effective. These diverse groups of volunteer employees work across organizational boundaries and

outside of their regular operational duties. They are empowered by – and in frequent

communication with – senior management. Innovation communities had been used by Best Buy to

grow its portion of the women’s consumer electronics market by $4.4b in less than five years.

Boston Children’s Hospital used them to make advances in telemedicine. Japanese pharmaceutical

Eisai used them to improve care for Alzheimer’s patients.

Convinced, the library’s management team created three innovation communities with each one

focusing on a core library function: circulation, collections, and reference.

The Teams
Each community was structured as three embedded circles. The smallest was the “core team”

consisting of five to seven staff members from each of the three boroughs served (the Bronx, Staten

Island and Manhattan). Their expectation was to spend about a day a week for the next six months

on the identification, design, and testing of a business model innovation.

The next larger circle was made up of “testers,” approximately fifty staff members who piloted the

solutions. Finally, all staff were invited to be “conversationalists” and participate by providing their

ideas, critiques, expertise, and encouragement.

Internal experts helped innovation community members with unfamiliar tasks such as data

collection and analysis, environmental scanning, and preparing and delivering management-level

presentations.

Shared Spaces
The three innovation communities shared virtual, physical, and temporal spaces to promote cross-

community exchanges. The virtual space was a social media platform open to all staff. This social

network was designed to reduce the friction typically found in a hierarchical organization: we

wanted staff from any branch to be able to communicate with each other and with senior managers,

unmediated by reporting structures.

The physical space was a room in the Library’s Midtown Manhattan branch dedicated to the

innovation communities where the core teams, and other interested parties, could work together.

Painted on many of the walls were huge whiteboards, where the three teams worked on designs and

exchanged ideas.

The temporal space was a day set aside each week: the three communities met on Wednesdays in

order to reduce scheduling issues and allow support people – for instance the data and analytics

experts — to meet with the three communities within a predictable block of time.

The Process
The three core teams were given a month to present to senior leaders options for their experiments,

and the capabilities needed to try them. They were asked to describe their solutions, the benefits to

the intended audiences, and to list up to five hypotheses that could be tested before the end of their

six-month project. Built into the template were the library’s guiding principles: that its services had

to be consistent, convenient, empowering, and inspiring. Each team came up with two to three of

these “options statements.”

We knew from the start that coming up with all this in a month would be a challenge. But we

anticipated that the very rawness of the presentations would create opportunities. Because the

recommendations wouldn’t be fully baked, it would be easier for senior managers, and the rest of

the community, to challenge assumptions and conclusions without seeming threatening. We wanted

to create an environment where “thinking out loud” was encouraged.

The discussion around the options statements played out as we had hoped. In the crucible of these

conversations, the library’s strategy was transformed from an impersonal statement into a living,

internalized guide. Having to develop testable hypotheses forced the participants to think deeply

about how to structure their work so that it was rigorous and data-driven.

In partnership with senior management, and with the support of the internal experts and the rest of

the community, the options statements were strengthened and then approved. The core teams then

moved to design and test their solutions with senior management, the testers, and the

conversationalists. Nearly 250 staff members (almost 10% of Library staff ) became involved in the

process, providing their own input as they became familiar with the core teams’ work.

The Results
The Circulation team examined how books flow through the NYPL system. Of the total circulation of

about 23 million, about two million items are reservations (called “holds” in library lingo)

— typically items that the library needs to transfer from another location. The team discovered that

the library was processing holds more slowly than its North American peers because of inefficiencies

throughout the process. Implementing the team’s recommendations should result in at least a 20%

reduction in wait times for books while providing patrons with better information about where they

are in the queue. The changes will also reduce staff workloads.

The Collections team focused on improving the library’s ability to provide content to youth and

young adults. They made a major discovery: this population was two and a half times more likely to

use books and other materials in the library than check them out. NYPL librarians had long

suspected that in-house use was substantial, but the magnitude was surprising and something for

which the library’s business model had never accounted. Of course, more usage is good news. But

given this evidence, the team concluded that the library could do much better at serving this

population. More materials could be made available for in-house use (as opposed to expecting

patrons to put them on hold from other branches). And the collections could be tailored to serve

local needs though more interaction with local educators and schools. The team also believed that

this solution would appeal to branch librarians’ professional pride by providing them more

autonomy to shape their collections. The solutions, which required a radical rethinking of how

materials circulate, are scheduled to be rolled out to all branches by the end of 2017.

The Reference team came to another startling–and in this case concerning– revelation. While NYPL’s

online reference service was heavily used, and its research libraries conducted in-depth

consultations on a regular basis, patrons almost never consulted with librarians at neighborhood

branches. The team discovered that when general reference support was sought, staff often didn’t

have the time or skills to meet patrons’ needs. Based on its analysis of the issues, the team piloted a

“reference receipt” for patrons with recommendations for book titles and online resources to

support research beyond the initial reference conversation. The teams also tested signage at the

local branches to guide patrons to such common services as signing up for using computers so that

staff would have more time to offer reference services. And finally, they recommended modular

training sessions for staff on providing those services. All three recommendations were adopted.

Both staff and senior leaders were enthusiastic about these outcomes – in fact, the library already

has launched the next set of experiments.

Staff was energized by the opportunity to shape how the library worked. As a core team member put

it, “We entered the process with the perspective of employees and came out with the perspective of

leaders.” They were deeply appreciative of the chance to interact with, and learn from, peers across

NYPL, something that rarely happened otherwise. They were excited to master new skills and

knowledge relevant to librarians such as sophisticated data collection and analysis.

The core team members turned out to be superb community organizers. They rallied their peers to

take on significant testing tasks and to participate in the overall conversations. They also were the

best advocates for their solutions. And they had an innate notion of the types of conversations that

would generate real change.

The project expanded their sense of belonging. Many had felt isolated in their individual branches.

Now they had a clear line of sight to the entire system through their interactions with colleagues

from across the institution. This institution-wide connection went beyond the work per se; staffers

also felt much more connected to the library than ever before. As one participant put it: “Doing

Innovation Communities changed everything for me. I went from looking for jobs outside of NYPL

to looking at this system and thinking, ‘Where do I want to be next?’ It helped me think about the

NYPL system and where my career could go here.”

It wasn’t just staff who were transformed. Senior leaders better understood how the library operated

“on the ground” and they began to see how employee involvement in strategic conversations

opened up real possibilities for reducing managerial burden. Staff — when offered meaningful

autonomy and real opportunities for mastering their professions — become problem-solving leaders

in their own right. And the cost was marginal. The project released staff energy that was more than

ready to be tapped.

This isn’t to say that everything went completely smoothly. We were initially overly enthusiastic

about exposing staff to new management concepts and templates, unnecessarily overwhelming

them. The Reference team’s pilots didn’t immediately produce the desired results. Not everyone in

the hierarchy –top, mid or bottom – was comfortable with networked, open conversations that

exposed problem areas for all to see. And two of the three teams went beyond their six-month

mandate, over-burdening participating staff and the branches in which they worked.

Despite these difficulties, innovation community participants more than rose to the occasion. Staff

cared deeply about the work and put in much more effort than anticipated.

What surprised us most was the importance of the social aspect of the innovation communities.

Community members consciously forged new and strong bonds of comradery, commitment, and

common purpose.

And that brings us to our concluding point: strategy as currently practiced rarely emphasizes the

importance of community. Our experience with the Library highlights it. The social bonds created by

the innovation communities, we believe, will be integral to the Library’s continued efforts to realize

its strategic direction. It will be up to leadership to continue to foster the social environment and the

conversations in which strategic ideas are born, nurtured, and carried out.

Bruce A. Strong is an author, consultant and a founder of the Network Leadership Group, which offers coaching and
action-learning programs to help management fully engage the smarts and energy of staff and partners.

Mary Lee Kennedy partners with organizations to build strong communities that take full advantage of the
information landscape. She was director of Knowledge Networks at Microsoft, Senior Associate Provost at Harvard, and

most recently, Chief Library Officer at the New York Public Library.

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P O S T

4 COMMENTS

Brad Kain a year ago

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REPLY 0  0 

From my perspective as a technologist, I appreciate this approach to engaging and motivating an organization. There

are many parallels here to best practices in agile/lean software development. Listening to domain experts

throughout an organization is one of the most important. Any structure or collaborative process that helps an

organization define its needs can have a significant impact on the outcome whether it is a new system or a new

process. (As a caveat, I know Bruce professionally and we have worked together.)

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Creatinga Successful

PowerPoint Presentation

Academic Success Center
June 201

Many of us will at sometime or the other be called upon to prepare and give a
presentation. PowerPoint is the Microsoft Office software most often used to
prepare a professional and successful presentation.

At Northcentral, you may be asked to prepare an assignment using PowerPoint.
This presentation will offer some guidelines to creating a successful presentation.

• The following topics will be discussed:
• Preparation
• Organization
• PowerPoint Tutorial
• Writing the Script
• Graphics

• Select your topic
• Gather your sources
• Collect visual images if you will use them
• Become familiar with the PowerPoint software
• Select a layout and design

• Prepare an outline
– Introduction

– Include the problem statement or thesis statement.
– Include a literature review if required.

– Body of Text
– Supporting material

– Conclusion/Recommendations
– Reference Page

Proper APA in-text citation is required.

Microsoft Office offers online tutorials on their
software free of charge.

Training – PowerPoint – Microsoft Office

Take advantage of these short videos. Your
confidence in preparing a presentation will be
increased.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/PowerPoint-2010-training-courses-videos-and-tutorials-36e0ae1e-f8a3-45dc-9558-75adcf759d73?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

• Use text sparingly.
• Use bullet points

• Five or Six per slide
• Select your font and font size carefully.

• This is Calibri font at 28.
• This is Arial font at 28.
• This is Times New Roman at 28.

• Be consistent. Do not change font style within the same
slide.
• The software will adjust the font size to fit the

frame.

Your slides are like an outline. Use the “note” section for
assignments requiring Speaker Notes

• Visual images are helpful.
• Make sure they are appropriate to your topic.
• Make sure they are appropriate in size.

• If you change the size – keep the dimensions
• Avoid animation unless it adds to your topic.

Otherwise animation is distracting.
• When selecting your slide colors, be cautious.

Colors can change between one computer and the
next or from the computer screen to the projector
screen.

• Prepare and organize.
• Review the PowerPoint tutorials if you are unfamiliar

with the software.
• Keep text on slide minimal. Six bullet points should be

enough to get your point across.
• Choose font style and size carefully.
• Use graphics/visual images if appropriate.
• Animation can be distracting.

Questions, comments, or
feedback?

Contact the Academic
Success Center at
asc@ncu.edu.

Creating a Successful �PowerPoint Presentation
Slide Number 2
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Slide Number 10

Strategic Planning That Produces
Real Strategy

Is your planning process a competitive weapon or a waste
of time?

By Mark Judah, Dunigan O’Keeffe, David Zehner and Lucy

Cummings

Mark Judah is a Bain partner based in Sydney and a leader in the fi rm’s Strategy

practice in the Asia-Pacifi c region. Dunigan O’Keeffe is a partner based in

Mumbai and leads Bain’s Asia-Pacifi c Strategy practice. David Zehner is the

managing partner of Bain’s Australia and New Zealand offi ces and a Strategy

practice leader. Lucy Cummings is a director in Bain’s Global Strategy practice

based in Washington, DC.

Strategic Planning That Produces Real Strategy

The email arrives and your jaw clenches: It’s planning

time again and there’s nothing you can do about it. No

matter what else is on your plate, you know that the next

month or so will be dominated by fi lling out templates

and sitting through endless planning sessions. The

irony is that you have some strategic ideas you’re really

excited about but you fi gure you’ll have to work the back

channels to get them in front of the right people. Previous

experience has taught you that your company’s formal

planning process is where the best ideas go to die.

If this sounds familiar it’s because the typical strategic

planning process is not delivering what it should at most

companies. When we asked nearly 300 global executives

to rate their company’s planning process, only one in

three said that the strategy it produced met three vital

criteria: bold ambition, adaptability in the face of chang-

ing market conditions and concrete guidance for manage-

ment and the front line (see Figure 1).

In our experience, few companies have a strong strategic

planning process that is well-supported across the or-

ganization. Yet more than 60% of the executives we

surveyed said they are satisfi ed with the very processes

that lead to such mediocre strategy. Why? Some executives

may have a different conception of what a good strategy

looks like, but most have simply lowered their expectations.

They either believe their strategic planning process is

as good as it’s ever going to get, or they feel that fi xing

it would mean devoting even more time and effort to

a diffi cult and tedious process—the last thing they want

to do.

The companies that produce great strategy take a different

approach. They treat strategic planning as a critical ca-

pability that can and should be world class. It is as much

a reason for their success as continuous improvement

is for a low-cost manufacturer or service excellence is

for a high-end retailer. These companies have invested

in the people, processes and tools that allow them to

identify the most important strategic priorities and adjust

as needed to remain sharp and relevant as conditions

change. The process creates time for focused strategic

debates, dials up the cadence of decision making, and

Source: Bain survey of executives in North America, Western Europe and Asia, November 2014 (n=291)

Percentage of respondents

100%
100%

-34%

-20%

-8%
-5%

32%

Effective process with
strong design,

execution & adaptation

Poor
adaptation

Poor
execution

Poor
strategy design

Ineffective
process

All
respondents

Figure 1: Few business executives believe their strategic planning process delivers a strong strategy

Strategic Planning That Produces Real Strategy

up with big, lofty ideas that they never ground in

operational reality.

Our research suggests that separating strategic planning

and budgeting can improve the quality of strategy dra-

matically—as much as 40% (see Figure 2). That’s because
it forces leadership teams to schedule ample time for

healthy debate about customer needs, competitive dynamics

and business conditions. The most effective teams are

careful to develop processes that link strategy to budgetary

and operational planning. But the budget is always

an outcome of the strategic aspiration, not the other

way around.

Top leadership at one global resource company, for in-

stance, focuses the fi rst part of each year on strategy

development. This is the company’s chance to take stock—

to train its sights outward and debate how markets are

changing and what opportunities are emerging. Executives

then spend the next few months on the practical impli-

cations of strategy, developing detailed budgets, operational

plans and goals against key performance indicators.

engages the organization at all levels to both think stra-

tegically and translate strategy into action.

There is no one-size-fi ts-all approach. But we fi nd that

world-class strategic planning incorporates fi ve key principles.

Principle 1: Strategic planning and budget-
ing are both essential, but they aren’t the
same thing

A great strategy strikes a careful balance between bold

ambition and practical implementation, but ambition

leads the way. Too many companies confl ate strategy and

budgeting in a single process that muddies the discussion

and turns priorities on their head. Instead of the smartest,

most ambitious strategic ideas determining where the

company should invest to support both today’s growth

engine and tomorrow’s, the organization spends an

inordinate amount of time debating math and updating

budget targets, resulting in only incremental improvement

each year. At the other end of the spectrum, the top leaders

at some companies devise strategy in a bubble, coming

Source: Survey of executives in North America, Western Europe and Asia, November 2014 (n=291)

Average score out of

4.1

2.9

4.1

3.0

4.1
2.9

2
1

0
The ability to evaluate
and debate innovative
alternatives and options

Clear choices on where
to play and how to win

A bold, inspiring,
full-potential ambition

Does your company’s strategy deliver …

Strategy and budgeting separated Not separated

Figure 2: Separating strategy development from business planning and budgeting leads to better strat-
egies

Strategic Planning That Produces Real Strategy
3

Budgeting remains a top priority, but it doesn’t get in

the way of more expansive thinking.

Principle 2: Strategy amplifi es the voices of
the front line and customers

Strategic planning is traditionally viewed as the realm

of the C-suite executive. Planners and analysts set the

agenda and top executives mull over alternatives, eventually

meting out decisions that will guide action for the next

12 months or longer. The problem with this approach

is that it isolates decision makers from the customers

they are trying to serve. The company’s “doers”—those on

the front line who execute strategy—are separated from the

“thinkers”—those who make decisions. Not surprisingly,

this very often leads to strategy that lacks real customer

insight and is exceptionally diffi cult to execute.

The most effective strategic development processes

amplify the voice of the customer. They tap the best

thinking of those closest to the market by establishing

deep ties to the people on the front line who deliver the

customer promise every day. Instead of pushing a fully

formed strategy down through the organization, these

processes incorporate the voice of the customer and

translate it into a set of behaviors that the front line can

embrace wholeheartedly. This eliminates distance between

the C-suite and customers and builds the kind of orga-

nizational will that leads to strong execution.

Principle 3: Resource allocation is purposely
undemocratic

Many planning processes default to “last year plus” when

allocating resources across the organization. Planners

spread investment around democratically, divvying up

precious resources among every unit that has received

an allocation in the past with little regard to real future

potential. As each unit lobbies on its own behalf, it only

seems “fair” to reward satisfactory performance.

But a winning strategy demands ruthless prioritization;

satisfactory is not good enough. The planning process

should be biased toward defi ning the company’s most

critical future growth opportunities and purposely

allocating the largest share of dollars, time and even

talent against them. It should encourage the company

to staff “big jobs with big people”—recruiting the best

performers from the lower-value areas where they may

have become entrenched. Strategy isn’t fi guring out how

to make the most of every opportunity but a rigorous

exercise to determine how the company can redeploy

trapped resources and overwhelm the opportunities that

really matter.

Principle 4: Don’t let the earth’s rotation
around the sun determine when you make
decisions

Most strategic planning processes leave little opportunity

for free-fl owing debate outside of the annual planning

window, which is typically highly formal and jam-packed

with other priorities. Many important issues receive

minimal airtime or never see the light of day. This tends

to encourage a parallel, informal process in which leaders

make many critical decisions ad hoc, infl uenced by those

with the loudest voices—not necessarily those with the

best ideas or the most critical priorities.

Keeping pace with today’s dynamic markets requires

breaking the stranglehold of the typical annual planning

cycle. Our research shows that companies are 60% more

likely to make timely, high-stakes decisions if business

needs, not the calendar, determine the cadence of their

strategic planning process. That often means creating

a continuous, issues-based strategic agenda that runs

throughout the year. Top decision makers need regularly

scheduled opportunities for real, no-holds-barred debates

on strategic alternatives ranked by dollar value and urgency.

This avoids one-and-done thinking and promotes a more

fl exible cycle in which critical initiatives are deployed,

monitored and adjusted in real time.

One large software company discovered the limitations

of a static, calendar-based planning process several years

ago when market changes during the year created a

sudden disconnect between strategic needs and the

resources required to pursue them. A year-end shortfall

forced the company to make a number of decisions

that were both painful and distracting. The solution was

4
Strategic Planning That Produces Real Strategy

robust strategic decisions. Leadership can’t afford a

planning process layered with bureaucratic complexity

that just diverts focus from what really matters: fi guring

out how to serve customers better than the competition,

both now and in the future.

Conclusion

A world-class strategic planning capability based on these

fi ve principles eliminates the noise from the planning

process, creating essential time for debate and distilling

the agenda down to the critical issues that will truly pro-

pel the company to sustained profi tability and leadership.

However, hardwiring a strategic capability at any company

is a multiyear, multiphase process. Through our client

work and research, we have found that many companies

are still struggling with the basics. And not every orga-

nization will want—or need—to develop a world-class

capability across the board. Market dynamics, cultural

issues and other organization-specifi c considerations

will likely determine what the end state should look like

for any particular company.

A critical fi rst step is self-diagnosis: Is your strategic

planning process an annual ritual that your organization

reluctantly endures? Or is it a means to empower the

entire company—from the front line to the C-suite—

to dream big, define a mission and drive toward it

relentlessly? At a time when unprecedented turbulence

in global markets requires bold vision, world-class execution

and quick adaptation, the answer can be a game changer.

It may spell the difference between settling for satisfactory

underperformance or stretching toward full potential.

to create a process that set ambitious multiyear goals

but then institute a continuous planning forum to debate

and resolve the highest value issues on a real-time

basis—tracking, tuning and reconciling resource alloca-

tion along the way. The new process created a rolling,

decision-focused dialogue around the most critical

strategic and operational issues facing the company.

And it enabled the organization to respond to changes

in the market or competitive landscape more quickly

and effectively.

Principle 5: Leaders focus on the most impor-
tant decisions and simplify the rest

How do companies create time for a regular cadence of

strategic debate? They radically simplify the leadership

agenda to exclude many of the “business as usual” issues

that tend to drag strategic discussions into the weeds.

That means empowering the fi nance function and business

units to make decisions about budgeting and operational

issues that are important but can be handled just as

effectively by capable staff.

Companies also need to zero-base the planning process

itself. One particularly noteworthy fi nding in our research

was that C-level executives were 37% more likely to declare

satisfaction with their company’s strategic planning

process than others we surveyed. The reason: Top leaders

are very often isolated from the worst of the annual

planning ritual—the thousands of hours spent fi lling

out templates or preparing the boss for meetings with

thick binders of information. Zero-basing forces leaders

to imagine the process with a clean sheet of paper and

determine what information is truly critical to making

Shared Ambit ion, True Re sults

Bain & Company is the management consulting fi rm that the world’s business leaders come
to when they want results.

Bain advises clients on strategy, operations, technology, organization, private equity and mergers and acquisitions.

We develop practical, customized insights that clients act on and transfer skills that make change stick. Founded

in 1973, Bain has 53 offi ces in 34 countries, and our deep expertise and client roster cross every industry and

economic sector. Our clients have outperformed the stock market 4 to 1.

What sets us apart

We believe a consulting fi rm should be more than an adviser. So we put ourselves in our clients’ shoes, selling

outcomes, not projects. We align our incentives with our clients’ by linking our fees to their results and collaborate

to unlock the full potential of their business. Our Results Delivery® process builds our clients’ capabilities, and

our True North values mean we do the right thing for our clients, people and communities—always.

For more information, visit www.bain.com

Key contacts in Bain & Company’s Global Strategy practice

Americas Ouriel Lancry in Chicago (ouriel.lancry@bain.com)
Lucy Cummings in Washington, DC (lucy.cummings@bain.com)

Asia-Pacifi c Dunigan O’Keeffe in Mumbai (dunigan.okeeffe@bain.com)
Mark Judah in Melbourne (mark.judah@bain.com)
David Zehner in Sydney (david.zehner@bain.com)

Europe, James Allen in London (james.allen@bain.com)
Middle East Nicolas Bloch in Brussels (nicolas.bloch@bain.com)
and Africa James Hadley in London (james.hadley@bain.com)

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