Strategic planning

Going for the Gold

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In the spirit of the Olympic games, the media is full of inspiring stories featuring passionate and committed Canadian athletes focused on the achievement of excellence. That achievement comes with multiple rewards, including the high honour of Olympic gold, given for outstanding athletic performance.

Gold-winning strategies are not the domain of Canadian athletes alone, however. Every year, the online publication Canadian Business highlights and gives awards to the Best Managed Companies in Canada. For the fifth year in a row Napoleon Grills, a used-to-be-small manufacturing company located in Barrie, Ontario, has hit the list as a gold winner for outstanding business performance.

Click here to read about gold-winning Napoleon Grills.

The article shows that this is no typical Canadian business success story. When reading this piece in view of our studies, it becomes apparent that Napoleon Grills has implemented numerous elements that could have been pulled directly from our textbook on strategic human resources planning.

This particular company been able to put its ‘big picture’ corporate strategy into daily practice. While the end goal is the production of a high quality Canadian product, that goal is achieved with the combination of:

  • effective leadership;
  • sound corporate culture;
  • high levels of employee engagement;
  • future-focused succession planning;
  • a commitment to excellence.

Most importantly, the article highlights the need for a clear and consistent strategic vision that drives every decision, every contact, and every product that Napoleon Grills makes.

A gold winning performance indeed!

 

Discussion Questions:

  1. From your reading of the article, identify and explain the link between the organization’s vision and its success to date.
  2. If you were the Human Resources director for the Napoleon Group of Companies, how could you ensure that the company continues to be successful through the succession management process?
  3. Identify and apply the seven steps of “Strategic Planning Process” from your text book readings to this article.

 

Sleep time. Dream time.

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Her message is simple and powerful – Get some sleep.

Click Here to Watch a Video

After viewing this clip, you may be thinking, “What has this got to do with HR professionals and strategic planning?”  The answer lies in the power of giving organizations time for dreaming.  Especially when those organizations invest in the creative processes of shaping their own mission and vision.  Strategic planning should not be the production of a management checklist.  Rather, it should arise from the power of creative thinking.

When are our thoughts the most creative?  When we are given time to rest and to dream.

As Ms. Huffington states, we are in a society that seems to value the sleep-deprived state of one-upmanship.  Organizations, reflective of this society, seem to be caught up in the busy-ness of the business.  How much time is spent resting instead of doing, in order to allow for big picture thinking, planning and looking out for the future?  There seems to be far too much emphasis on a frenetic goal oriented checklist that narrows our work-life focus into the minutia and drains us of organizational life.  Getting ‘stuff’ done becomes critical so that we can prove our busy-ness worth in comparison to each other.

What gets lost in all of this frantic detail driven activity?  The ability to see and create mission, vision, and values, which come from, and enable, big picture clarity.

Organizations are living creations, made up of valuable human energy that ebbs and flows in natural rhythms.  All living things need to rest so that they can be re-filled and re-charged in order to meet new challenges in positive ways.   At the very least, let’s give ourselves a break and start building in some ‘organizational dream time’ on that checklist.

Maybe, we should sleep on it first.

Discussion Questions:

  1. How much time in your workday is devoted to thinking and not doing?
  2. When you are tired, how would you rate your ability to be creative?
  3. When are you most creative and productive within your workday?
  4. What is the value in being sleep deprived?