Strategic planning: challenges for the new year

We have turned the page, it comes to be said, with the beginning of this new decade. Leaving 2009 behind with a very heavy financial crisis that reshaped global economic logics prompts us to see the transition as a new starting line, as having given a clean slate to the past and being ready for new challenges. But will this really be the case?

If we exclude the now globally shared awareness that “nothing will ever be the same again” there is still little that is certain. We are aware, however, that the international scenario presents completely different rules of the game than in the past. The goal must therefore be to re-start but with proper lucidity and objectivity, such that for the coming months and years (since a decade behind us also means a new decade to be faced) a sound strategic planning is defined.

What challenges for 2010?

This term is not a stylistic element used by consultants to season their reports to clients in the best possible way, but rather a good norm for the company that today, and for the future it is about to face, must have a “navigator” suited to the path it intends to follow. The long-term vision is a necessary tool to be able to compete with the new target players.

Approaching international markets (by international we mean those outside the European Union, since European countries are now to be configured as a domestic market) presupposes a major evolution in business culture combined with a need for extraordinary finance. Facing new markets is in fact an operation that comes out of the routine of the enterprise, out of its ordinary context, and presupposes a series of elements that will inevitably change its physiognomy.

Many companies, in the previous decade, forgot that without a well-defined plan (and we are talking numbers here) it becomes difficult to achieve tangible results. And, also complicit in the crisis, we have seen fine experiences inevitably founder on distant rocks, victims of a failure to conceive the optimal path. Next, the myth that only large companies can and should do strategic planning must be dispelled. Even a small company has the task of plotting a course of action consistent with its structure, capabilities and goals.

While the above is agreeable, it is also true that approaching foreign markets remains one of the few solutions (along with product and process innovation) that our companies can exploit in order to compete in the global market.

But the sum of the factors inevitably leads us to the consideration of many entrepreneurs, who say “our company does not have the size and structure to invest in a path of internationalization consistent with the complexity of the target market.”.

So what to do about strategic planning?

We are convinced that, markets that are as complex as they are fundamental for the development of our enterprises, markets such as India, China, Vietnam, Brazil, and others that even in times of crisis have been grinding out sensational GDPs, should be approached through aggregations and integrations of our enterprises. The effort of some of the national institutions is already bearing good fruit (I am thinking of ATIs for building temporary networks with pioneering purposes), but it is only a first step. Will and perseverance are indispensable elements, on the part of the enterprises themselves, in the constant drive to suppress individualism toward the exacerbation of a force to be pooled to pursue the goal. Octagona, together with Scouting India, is ready to assist you in this.

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