GDA's Strategic Planning

...Gain 100% Agreement on the Long Term Organizational Plan

“If you don’t know where you’re going then any road will get you there,” or so the saying goes.  Your business is made up of managers whose collective experience could define a business direction that would yield unprecedented success. An experienced strategic planning facilitator from Growth Development Associates, Inc. (GDA) can focus those resources, their experience, and their visions to produce a strategy and a tactical map that details where you want to be and how you’re going to get there.

GDA’s Strategic Planning –“perhaps the most complete, most demanding … most magnificent business process I have ever encountered”

The structured Strategic Planning Session process available from GDA has been described as the most comprehensive, breakthrough planning methodology that participants of the process have ever seen.  The key differentiators between this product and others readily available from consultants worldwide include the integration of the structured planning components, the role quality and interaction of the facilitators, and the patented output-tracking document produced by GDA at the conclusion of every session.  The wonder is that the activity is delivered in just three days.   

The session involves the senior executive and his or her direct reports plus key cross-functional executive representatives for three consecutive days in an off-site planning environment.  The planning team will develop and gain 100% agreement on the organization’s:

• Mission
• Objectives
• Obstacles
• Action items
• Responsible Parties

The benefits of a GDA facilitated Strategic Planning Session are enormous.  The two most quoted benefits includes a powerful, focused direction with detailed tactics, and a deep sense of team trust and commitment.   Other benefits include:

• Executives and their direct and indirect teammates achieve unanimous agreement over the direction, strategies, and tactics of the business.

• Each functional area is refocused on its role as an integrated part of a whole, and acquires new and renewed assurances of support from the other departments.
• Any walls born out of reporting structure, politics, lack of communication, differing measurement systems, or administrative systems are replaced with forward-looking teamwork.
• GDA facilitators are also trained consultants, sales managers, and instructors, and are frequently called upon by the group to “break role” in leading a discussion around sales strategy, management process or business plan recommendation. 

Call GDA at 800-966-4321 for more about Strategic Planning

Strategic Planning can be combined with Managing Performance and Mentor to implement a complete and proven performance management culture.

1. Who should attend Strategic Planning? Ideally this session must represent the senior executive leadership. The highest C-level executive ultimately responsible for strategic direction and tactical implementation should attend this event… even if they will assign actual action items to other subordinate managers.    
2. GDA also offers a Tactical Plan Workshop.  What is the difference?  GDA’s Tactical Plan Workshop is focused on this year’s execution of strategic initiatives, and provides a balanced methodology to integrate the essential infrastructure component needed to achieve these initiatives.  GDA’s Strategic Planning Workshop has a long-term focus on establishing and documenting a clear mission, goals, objectives and obstacles, so that the executive team can adopt and track action plan items and responsibilities to overcome these obstacles.
3. What makes GDA facilitators so special?  The GDA facilitator plays three key roles in the success of the process.  As an “outsider” with twenty-five years of in-field experience, the GDA facilitator skillfully probes, pushes, pulls, and incites the interactive discussion without bias, emotion or political fear.  As a scribe, the facilitator frees the participants of note taking and future discrepancy of perception.  Further, GDA facilitators are also trained instructors who understand the importance of pace, timing and entertainment value.  This becomes particularly critical during a demanding three-day process like Strategic Planning. 
4. Last year’s strategic planning session was little more than a fire drill.  How is this any different? Critically important to the ultimate success of the Strategic Plan itself, is the documentation prepared in a GDA copyrighted format that fosters execution of the plan.  GDA’s documentation of the session includes every point, cross-referenced to the specific objective, obstacle or action item it references, and a personal section (also cross-referenced) that reformats the action items in date sequence for each participant.  Unlike most strategic plan documents that are completed and filed in the bottom drawer for the remainder of the year, this document is structured for accountability and use. 
5. What GDA customers have used GDA’s Strategic Planning offering?  Past customers include Hewlett Packard, Ingram Micro, GE Capital ITS, RetroBox, The Foster Group, Taylor Technologies, American Express, Howard University Medical Center, and the ProMedica Health Care Alliance.  Hewlett-Packard found GDA’s strategic planning, demand generation strategies, consultative selling, and quantifying benefits methodologies so effective that after training its own sales force, HP provided funding and marketing for GDA to teach the same skills to its resellers across the country.

Companion Product

GDA’s Managing Performance is a logical companion to Strategic Planning.  GDA customers use output from the Strategic Plan as input into the personnel management tools developed in ”Performance”.  This outstanding GDA offering incorporates the three most critical skills needed to effectively manage and develop employees, Performance Planning, Development Planning and Counseling Employees.