Make Time for Strategy Formulation

According to Marakon Associates, top management spends less than three hours a month discussing strategic issues or making strategic decisions.

Marakon measured what everybody already knows:

• A typical company’s senior executives spend less than three days each month working together as a team
• In that time, they devote less than three hours to strategic issues.
• Moreover, these three hours are seldom well spent.

Strategy discussions tend to be diffuse and unstructured, only rarely designed to reach good decisions quickly.

BOTTOMLINE: Marakon suggests the following seven techniques for exploiting the valuable time executives spend on discussions concerning strategy:

1. Deal with operations separately from strategy
2. Focus on decisions, not on discussions
3. Measure the real value of every item on the agenda
4. Get issues off the agenda as quickly as possible
5. Put real choices on the table
6. Adopt common decision-making processes and standards
7. Make decisions stick