The Big Lie of Strategic Planning

All executives know that strategy is important. But they fear developing a strategy that involves placing bets and making hard choices. As a result, they engage in the more comfortable process of preparing a comprehensive plan—with goals, initiatives, and budgets. This planning process is a terrible way to create strategy.

That’s the view of Roger Martin, former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and one of the world’s leading thinkers on strategy. Martin argues that managers and companies fall into comfort traps when developing strategy. In this webinar he discusses

• the problems with most strategic planning processes and clear rules for avoiding bad strategy;
• how to focus on cost-based thinking, which makes decisions based on costs and resources, not customers, opportunities, or true strategy; and
• the use of standard frameworks that prevent organizations from making good strategy choices.

Producing better business results starts with a better way of developing strategy. To learn what’s wrong with today’s strategic planning processes and to chart a new, better course for strategy development, watch this on-demand webinar with Roger Martin and HBR