Building a Strategic Plan for Your Life and Business

iUniverse, Inc.

Contents

Preface..........................................ixIntroduction.....................................xiiiSuccess All Around You...........................1Strategic Plans..................................11Self-Assessment..................................30Building Your Life Plan..........................41Creating the Plan................................62Strategic Plan by Example........................84Vision...........................................100Goal.............................................118Strategies.......................................124Objectives.......................................135Initiatives......................................142Road Maps........................................146Projects.........................................150Building Your Strategic Plan.....................153Living the Strategic Plan........................161Practice the Strategic Plan......................172Conclusion.......................................185Works Cited......................................193

Chapter One

ACHIEVING YOUR GOALS CAN be as simple as being lucky and being in the right place at the right time. Sounds easy to do, right? Get born into the right family, have parents who work hard to get you a job as a child actor, have grandparents who worked hard and built a multimillion dollar company. It sounds like a simple way to realize your vision and goals, right? Well, that may work for a small portion of the population, but what about the rest of us, who are not able to be reborn into the right family? To reach your goals, you have to be smarter and make the right strategic decisions in life.

We all have visions of who we want to be and how we want our life to play out. At a young age, we are bold and feel that we can do anything we set our minds to. Turn on a TV or drive down the right streets, and you can see success. You see the big houses in the neighborhood and the nice cars; you hear stories about how celebrities and others have unlimited access to resources. Many of these superstars started life as humbly as you did. For reasons known only to them, they found a way to become successful. If you sat down with them and asked them how they did it I am sure they would not say it was handed to them or that they inherited their lot in life, right?

Many of us live our lives reacting to life and all the hurdles and obstacles that come our way. You become so good at dodging the little challenges in life and are careful not to make too many waves when things are going well. When you take the approach of only reacting to life's hurdles, this isn't necessarily going to help you achieve your vision. By reacting to life, you are not in control of the vision; you are not defining the vision and defining your strategic plan. You are letting your environment, your peers, and the challenges that life throws at you set your vision. By doing this, your chances of achieving the vision you set for yourself dwindle significantly.

At one point in your life, you, like many people, had an idea or plan of what you wanted to do, and maybe some unforeseen event came up and messed up all your plans. Think about what you do for a living. Is the vision you had in college or as a young person the same vision you have today? You planned on going to grad school but just couldn't afford it; you wanted to become an MD but didn't get into medical school. So you settled for something else. Now evaluate where you are today and fast forward your life ten years.

• Would you be satisfied with your life as it is today?

• Are you making the money that you need to meet your vision and goals?

You might have accomplished a number of goals but still feel the sense of emptiness, that there is more you can do. Even when you accomplish goals, the odds are that soon after the accomplishment you will feel unsatisfied. This goes back to your childhood. Think back to your dreams as a young person; you might have envisioned a romantic and idyllic life. You had plans of doing great and wonderful things that seem out of reach to you now. The news flash is that they are still in reach if you want them. You can still accomplish what you want; you have just become overwhelmed by the harsh realities of life that have hacked your thinking. When you were young, you thought that life should be enjoyed, and you dreamed of early retirement and a life of success and perhaps fame.

So what changed? Did you forget about the road you wanted to take? Were the challenges of life too difficult? Or did you just not know the right steps to take during your journey? The reason you are not accomplishing your vision is because you are on a strategic plan that is not in alignment with the vision you want. You are on an ad hoc strategic plan that may or may not get you to where you want to go.

Consider the vision you had as a child versus what you have become.

• Is what you are today in alignment with the childhood vision?

• Are you getting what you want out of life?

• If you are not, then what is different? Did you have a happier outcome in mind?

• Did you have a vision with more money or more fame or picture yourself as a better person?

• What did you envision versus what you are getting out of life?

You most likely had the happier scenario. You were full of hope and optimism. As a child, there was no limit to what you could accomplish. In school you had a choice, which could have limited your success. You were told in school that you could achieve anything you wanted. And if you did not do well in school, you sealed your fate to earn less money, live a less happy life, and limit your potential. What the education factory did not take into account was that education is not the only strategic plan you can follow. There are other strategic plans that can get you to your goals. Those around you may set the ceiling and helped to limit your thinking, but you don't have to let that stand in your way. Your fate is not sealed; you still have the same opportunities to make the right decision, which you didn't the first time. At the time, you could not know any better; at that age you were not a strategic thinker—and all the greats are strategic thinkers.

You were not a strategic thinker because at that age you did not know how to think strategically. You got your information from your parents and from friends, teachers, and others in your circle of influence. The problem with listening to those around you is that if they are not strategic thinkers, then you are not learning how to think strategically. You are making the decisions not based on your vision but on the vision of others, which differs from yours. Always consider the source and filter the information that is being given to you. There could be an ulterior motive behind the information you are getting. A parent or friend could influence your decision to study abroad because they want to be close to you, but studying abroad was something that was in alignment with your vision.

Life Stages

The person you are today is not the same person you will be in six months, twelve months, or ten years. The biggest difference is your age, but there are many other differences. The state you are in today is the current state; these are all the things about you that make up who you are today. Depending on the environment and decisions you make, you will gradually move to the future-state you.

As previously mentioned, the future state can be driven by your vision of who you want to be or you can go through life letting your environment and others dictate your future state.

Life Timeline

Draw on a piece of paper a line with an arrow going from left to right. Draw on that line your life as you saw it from a teenager or young adult. Put down your school, what you wanted to accomplish in life, who you wanted to help, and even when you planned on retiring. Take a look at the life timeline and think about how you would feel if you were able to accomplish all those things you wrote down. The answer is obviously pretty good that these are your goals and dreams.

Now draw that same arrow from left to right and write on the arrow where you are today.

• Did you not get the scholarships you wanted and are now deep in financial debt? • Did you finish school but get the wrong degree? • Did you have a family before getting your career underway? • Do you need to have two jobs to make ends meet?

• How close are you to your retirement?

Your current state should be pretty eye-opening and, if you are someone who had big aspirations, could be pretty painful. This is your life, what you have accomplished thus far, and you are not where you want to be. You used to have big dreams and ambition but have not been able to realize them.

Take a look back at current-state timeline and determine where you went wrong.

• What decisions did you make that were not strategic?

• Did you make those decisions on your own, or did you have someone help you make the decisions?

Think back to the life you envisioned. Will the steps you are taking today get you to that final state? My guess is that some will and others will take you farther from the vision. Only you can answer why you are focusing on the steps that lead you away from your goal. Perhaps you don't know how to, or perhaps you feel emotionally attached to what you are doing; only you know the answer. The sad part is that you are smart enough to accomplish the goals, but what you are lacking is the ability to think and execute strategic decisions about your life. To determine what you need to focus on can be difficult; there are so many moving parts to life. You need a framework you can work from to build a formula for your life.

Regardless of who made the decisions, they were wrong. Now focus your attention on the future-state vision of what you want to be; is this a valid future state or future vision for you still? If so, how far off are you from achieving the goals you outlined for yourself? If you want to stop making the wrong decisions, then you have got to start thinking strategically from now on.

• Commit to yourself that you are going to be a strategic thinker.

One thing that is constant in life is change. Change can be good or change can be bad. There is a great deal of satisfaction when you accomplish something that has merit and value. Think back to your childhood. What did if feel like learning to tie your shoe? I recall trying many times and failing, but with more practice I became very good at tying my shoes. When I figured out how to repeatedly do it there was a great deal of satisfaction. Think about the little things in life that still give you that satisfaction.

Do you have a talent or skill that others do not? Are you able to wow your friends by being able to curl your tongue or do a cartwheel? Getting a sense of accomplishment is built into the fabric of our beings. We are always looking for the sense of satisfaction from what we do. That same feeling of accomplishment never goes away; we are always looking for that feeling that gives us the satisfaction. The goals may change, but the fundamental high we get never changes.

As you get older, accomplishments you once had as a child become less and less defined. You were told that if you did well in school, you would have great success—or if you learned to hit the golf ball straight, you would be ready for the PGA tour. As you matured, you realized that things might not be as clear-cut as you once thought. There are so many choices to make and paths you could be focusing your time on.

• What path do you choose?

• What choices are going to get you to the goals that have set out in your mind?

• How will you find a way to assess the present, define your future, and build the plan to get there?

Strategic Plans

"SIMPLY PUT, STRATEGIC PLANNING determines where an organization is going over the next year or more, how it's going to get there and how it'll know if it got there or not" (McNamara, 2011). There is more than one single approach to building a plan. "There are a variety of perspectives, models and approaches used in strategic planning" (McNamara, 2011). One of the tenets of this book is to think strategically but act tactically, and we are going to include some of the more tactical elements to the strategic plan. For the purpose of the book, we are going to define the components of the plan as "vision, goals, strategies, objectives, initiatives, road maps, and projects" (Scott, 2009). For our purposes, we will focus on these components to create our life plan. As we mentioned before, there really isn't a pure version of a strategic plan. There are many derivatives, and we chose these attributes from the strategic-planning process. The goal is to get you to think about your planning in a different way. In thinking differently about your planning process, you will build the "secret sauce" you can use over and over again to build your success.

In the plan, we have an attribute called vision. Vision is the idyllic or future state of where we want to be. Vision is a more descriptive way to describe what we are trying to accomplish with our strategic plan. While there is no formalized methodology for building a strategic plan, it is possible to take a systematic approach. The strategic plan includes road maps. We can tie in other strategic plans into a single vision. A strategic plan that links in other strategic plans is multidimensional. The higher-level vision is a sum of the parts, as there are many strategic plans linked together. Figure 6 shows a multilevel strategic plan and demonstrates how you can use the composition of other strategic plans to define your future-state vision.

The strategic plan is a tool, and the end result is a plan we can follow to meet our vision or goal. Like any plan, the strategic plan should have a logical starting point. It should have qualitative and quantitative objectives to define what the success criteria are. We need to know when we are successful and when we are not so successful. The plan must also support the vision we are setting out to achieve. The strategic plan should start out at a high level and progressively move to more and more detail.

To successfully create a strategic plan, you must alter your current-state way of thinking from tactical to strategic. You must become a strategic thinker. Starting work on your strategic plan will force you to organize your thoughts in such a way that details become less of a priority and you will start focusing more on strategic initiatives. The more strategic plans you create, the better you will be at thinking strategically. Creating your strategic plan will take many iterations or tries before you are able to create one that has a realistic vision with goals that are in alignment with the vision. Once you are successful with your strategic plan you can become the architect of your life.

By creating your own strategic plans you are using the tools that the greats are using even as we speak to build the future-state world we will live in. By creating your own strategic plan you will be one of the strategic thinkers who pore over the visions of how the world will operate. To get to that level will take some time, but it is not outside of your reach. The best way to start thinking strategically is to start taking control of the future state of your life. Start with the simple, mundane, day-to-day activities. By creating strategic plans even for mundane visions and goals, you will learn the valuable lesson and over time start to think strategically. Your strategic plans might be simplistic to start with, but over time as you create the vision they will become a plan or strategic plan to help you achieve the vision. The vision could be a simple vision such as being healthy, or you might have something more complex like running a successful business.

You can use the strategic plan to test what you do on a daily basis. For example, if I eat junk food every day and do not exercise, are these strategies in alignment with my vision of being at a healthy weight?

The simple answer is no, but until you put it in that context it is hard to rationalize not eating the junk food because it tastes so good. A strategic plan can help with such rationalization.

Can you see yourself being the strategic thinker? Are you able to see beyond the day-to-day and think about the vision and big picture? As you transition into a strategic thinker, you are the one who can drive direction in the world. You can be the one who owns the vision and ultimately the plan to meet the vision. You can be successful just like all the greats. Just look at all the greats in this world; they had a vision of becoming someone or creating something that we never could have imagined. They had the ability to see the future and created a plan to get them to realize the future goal. The architects and strategic thinkers in life are right now architecting your future world. They are designing the cars you will drive, the homes you will live in, the future social media, and the books you will read. They are creating the strategies that you will soon be following.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Building a Strategic Plan for Your Life and Businessby John M. Hawkins Copyright © 2012 by John M. Hawkins. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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