(CLP) Programs

Appleton Greene corporate training programs are all process-driven. They are used as vehicles to implement tangible business processes within clients’ organizations, together with training, support and facilitation during the use of these processes. Corporate training programs are therefore implemented over a sustainable period of time, that is to say, between 1 year (incorporating 12 monthly workshops), and 4 years (incorporating 48 monthly workshops). Your program information guide will specify how long each program takes to complete. Each monthly workshop takes 6 hours to implement and can be undertaken either on the client’s premises, an Appleton Greene serviced office, or online via the internet. This enables clients to implement each part of their business process, before moving onto the next stage of the program and enables employees to plan their study time around their current work commitments. The result is far greater program benefit, over a more sustainable period of time and a significantly improved return on investment.

Appleton Greene uses standard and bespoke corporate training programs as vessels to transfer business process improvement knowledge into the heart of our clients’ organizations. Each individual program focuses upon the implementation of a specific business process, which enables clients to easily quantify their return on investment. There are hundreds of established Appleton Greene corporate training products now available to clients within customer services, e-business, finance, globalization, human resources, information technology, legal, management, marketing and production. It does not matter whether a client’s employees are located within one office, or an unlimited number of international offices, we can still bring them together to learn and implement specific business processes collectively. Our approach to global localization enables us to provide clients with a truly international service with that all important personal touch. Appleton Greene corporate training programs can be provided virtually or locally and they are all unique in that they individually focus upon a specific business function. All (CLP) programs are implemented over a sustainable period of time, usually between 1-4 years, incorporating 12-48 monthly workshops and professional support is consistently provided during this time by qualified learning providers and where appropriate, by Accredited Consultants.

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Executive summary

Strategic Planning

Planning has been around since early man had to decide to plant crops or move on and collect what nature provided. Strategic planning has been with us for a much shorter time. In the military, strategy and tactics were part of the same plan. Strategy described the overarching objectives and tactics detailed how the strategy would be realized. A strategy could be eliminating your enemies capabilities to supply armament to their troops, while a tactic could be to destroy the transportation network.

Following WW II, strategy and strategic planning were put to the sidelines. The economy was expanding to fulfill the market with consumer demands that had been pent up during the war years. Factories were humming and consumers were buying. Strategy was condensed to get as much as you could to market and business would do well. Factories changed from making planes and tanks to making cars and trucks. Food shortages and rationing were things of the past. Farmers were growing as much as they could and were improving yields year over year.

During the 1950’s and 1960’s, Strategic Planning became a control tool for the Department of Defense to utilize in trying to control the large contracts that they managed. Strategic plans were, therefore, mainly financial and schedule driven exercises that could span years of design, development, and manufacture of complex military equipment. As a result, Project Management was developed as a controlling function and project management departments were formed in the military support community.

Over time, the industrial community realized that the markets had changed and that they need to react to the normal economic climate. Gone were the days of demand outstripping supply. Now your products and services had to be recognized as valuable. Public companies needed to respond to stockholder desires, and private companies needed to respond to owner desires. And most stockholders and owners wanted to be assured of a bright future for their companies and for themselves. This necessitated a need for future planning, better known as Strategic Planning.

However, this strategic planning quickly became mired in the need for financial budgeting and scheduling. The planning became a look into the future that was all too uncertain. Uncertainty is not what one desires in planning. Many businesses backed away from the strategic part of the planning cycle, giving it lip service at best, and instead focused on the near more certain term. This removes the fear of the unknown from their plans, but also removed the future from them.

Strategic planning is stuck in the past. Most companies still use it as a tool to generate financial information which are only used to monitor actual financial performance. The predictions of future non-financial performance are vague and ill defined. In the case of public companies, they primarily are tied to quarterly performance. For most public companies quarterly results are paramount. Stock prices and executive compensation and livelihood ride on these numbers. With private concerns, financial performance is more personal. Lower profits might translate to lower personal compensation.

Although strategic planning is predicated on establishing future goals and developing strategies to achieve their goals, most companies feel lost when they try to analyze the future. They all have plenty of examples where forecasting has been wrong and resulted in negative outcomes. Sales forecasts are overly optimistic. New product release dates are late. Operational performance is less than promised. All of these lead to missed promises, unhappy customers, and poor financial performance. The future is uncertain. And because it is uncertain, many people tend to ignore it. They will prepare forecasts that are wrong, and they will “update” them as new data makes the errors obvious. They handle the uncertainties of the future by adapting to them as they become more certain. Yet they will not plan strategically because the future is uncertain.

Many companies do try to ascertain the future and model their companies to what they see as that future. But this has been found to be insufficient. Why is this so? There are three reasons: one, the future view is too short sighted; two, the views tend to be more tactical than strategic; and, they do not start with the personal goals of the leadership.

Why are the views so short sighted? The key metric for companies has migrated from producing a great product or service that customers would buy and would come back for more, to pure financial performance. The earnings have become the be all and end all of evaluating a company’s performance. This is the key for all public companies and dictates the price of the company’s shares for public companies. We are witnessing a change in the perception of what makes one company better than another. There are also investors that look at the stock market as a place to make money on buying and selling stock, rather than as an opportunity to invest for the future. The result is that leadership in public companies must live up to short term pressure, or see the stock prices drop, and potentially losing their jobs. This phenomenon is not limited to public companies. Private companies feel the same pressure to increase earnings, at a reduced level. In both cases, this pressure for short term earning, typically one or two quarters, makes long term strategies irrelevant.

A corollary of taking short term views is that planning tends to be short term, or tactical. There is no grand strategy to be a market leader or be number one or two in the industry. The only goal is to increase earnings usually made by increasing revenue, decreasing costs, increasing market share, or selling to new customers. Sales and marketing plans are developed which answer the question, “What will we do this quarter?”. The race to meet or exceed the projections for profit are so great that strategy is often ignored.

Any strategy needs to address the personal goals of leadership. The goals of leadership and the company must be congruent if they are to be successful. After all, if the leadership goals cannot be satisfied with the company’s goals, the company goals will not be realized. The importance of having the same long-term goals is most apparent in private companies. These tend to be smaller than most public companies and the leadership is most often the owner who profits when the company is profitable. However, profits are not the only goal. The owners have other obligations that public leadership normally does not. They have family to care about, now and tomorrow. They have legacies that they wish to establish. There are family members that need to be trained to be future leaders. Fulfilling these obligations is their primary motive for business success once the basic revenue needs to support the family and its lifestyle have been reached. In some cases, they are more important than revenue. For the private company owner, there are legacy issues and how they support their communities. Many private businesses are the largest employer in their area and keeping the business solvent open and employing community residents is of paramount importance.

Public companies are realizing that they also have obligations beyond those to shareholders. They have obligations to various other stakeholders including employees, suppliers, customers, and their communities. In this day shareholder activists promote their views and companies must react to them. The general cry for equality, equal treatment, diversity, and inclusion are beyond the increase earnings goal and companies need to craft strategies that not only ensure the company’s financial success, but also the companies social and community success.

The futures for both private and public companies are similar if not the same. Both have to take a longer and more strategic view if they want to be successful. Planning needs to be more long term with short term tactics supporting the longer-term goals. More and more companies in the public sector are announcing that they will no longer provide quarterly estimates of profitability. They are aligning corporate goals with personal goals, the aim being to bring a better alignment between corporate and personal targets. They are realizing that if they wish to enable their companies to be long lived, they need to look out five to ten years, and then make strategic plans to ensure those targets are met, and develop tactical plans for the nearer term, one to two years.

Similarly, private companies are realizing that their long-term horizon is much longer than the typical private one. Their strategic plans may have to be twenty-five or more years in the future. They have to wait for future generations to mature before they can join the firm and begin to develop into the next generation of leadership. They can expand more slowly than public companies as they do not have shareholders betting on short term stock values.

Both private and public companies are realizing that long term, true strategic planning is necessary, and the industry leaders are beginning to do that.

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Curriculum

Strategic Planning – Part 1- Year 1