Just about all of us would agree that strategic thinking is vital to the success of our businesses over the long-term and yet at the same time just about all of us will, on a daily basis, have a lot of other pressing tasks that make dedicating the time to think about our businesses strategically an easy thing to postpone.
Here's the kicker--as executive coach Chuck Carringer points out, strategic thinking doesn't happen by accident or by convenience. It's rarely urgent and there will always be something more pressing that makes it easy to say "I'll get to this next week or the next." As we know, if we make a habit of saying that it will never in fact get done.
While still early in the new year, a great new habit for your consideration would be to put windows of time on our calendar to think about our business, rather than in our business. We'll use our simple strategic framework of comparing our intent to our outcome, understanding the inevitable gap, and then asking ourselves what we learned from the gap. If we make this a discipline, we'll be competitively head and shoulders above those who are so busy today that they fail to plan for tomorrow.
Clark Twiddy, President of Twiddy & Company, is the author of our Leadership Corner, published on our blog the third Tuesday of each month. He can be reached at ctwiddy@twiddy.com.
