Strategic Thinking and Business Strategies:  Coaching First Australia

Strategic Thinking

Strategic thinking is not rocket science; it simply requires you to collect different information about your organisation. By using this information, with the right models, enables you to really understand what happens in your organisation.  Put simply:

 or

 = What we could be doing instead?

Strategic thinking can also be summarised in three sets of four questions:

The Big Questions

1. What business are we in?
2. What is our strategic intent?
3. What makes us unique?
4. What is important to our success?

1. How do we create value for our customers and ourselves?
2. Where are the greatest areas of opportunity?
3. How much money do we want to make?
4. What do we have to do to sustain optimum levels of performance?

1. What needs to be done to get the most out of our organisation?
2. What gets priority?
3. Who will do this and by when?
4. What is the best way to complete the steps?

Within this process are the insights that will help you make sense of your organisation and prepare it for tomorrow’s challenges.

We can show you how to do this.

Business Strategies

Too often business strategies have been associated with only one facet of business – the financial aspects.  This requires returns on everything - investment, capital, labour and material; a very short sighted and one dimensional approach.

Our approach is to have strategies in the four key areas of the business:

• Financial
• Customers
• People/employees
• Internal processes

Now let us define these four areas:

• Percentage return on net profit
• Percentage return on capital
• Percentage return on total assets
• Percentage income turnover
• Percentage reduction in costs

• Number of new customers
• Number of customers lost
• Results of customer surveys
• Number of new products introduced

• Developing a coaching culture
• Succession planning for every position
• Exit strategies for senior personnel
• Staff turnover

• Number of compliance breaches
• Number of improvements
• Number of old processes eliminated

Business Strategy =

A broad course of action to be taken to achieve a specific business objective.

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