Strategic planning: challenges for the new year

We can say we've turned a page with the start of this new decade. Leaving 2009 behind, with its extremely heavy financial crisis that reshaped global economic logic, encourages us to see the transition as a new starting line, as if we've wiped the slate clean from the past and are ready for new challenges. But will it truly be like that?

If we exclude the now globally shared awareness that “nothing will be the same again,” then certainly there is still little. However, we are aware that the international scenario presents completely different rules of the game compared to the past. The objective must therefore be to restart, but with proper clarity and objectivity, in order to define a sound strategic plan for the coming months and years (given that a decade that has passed also means a new decade to face).

What challenges for 2010?

This term is not a stylistic element used by consultants to best season client reports, but rather a good practice for companies that, today and for the future they are preparing to face, must have a suitable “navigator” for the path they intend to follow. Long-term vision is a necessary tool to be able to compete with new key players.

The approach to international markets (by international, we mean those outside the EU, as European countries should now be considered an internal market) presupposes a significant evolution of entrepreneurial culture combined with a need for extraordinary finance. Entering new markets is, in fact, an operation that goes beyond the company's routine, its ordinary context, and involves a series of elements that will inevitably alter its characteristics.

Many businesses, in the preceding decade, forgot that without a well-defined plan (and we're talking about numbers here), it becomes difficult to achieve tangible results. And, partly due to the crisis, we've seen excellent ventures inevitably founder on distant shoals, victims of a failure to conceive the optimal path. Furthermore, the myth that only large companies can and should engage in strategic planning must be dispelled. Even a small company has the task of drawing an action line consistent with its own structure, capabilities, and objectives.

If what has been said is shareable, it is also true that the approach to 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 consider many entrepreneurs who claim, “Our company does not have the size and structure to invest in an internationalization process consistent with the complexity of the target market.”.

So what to do about strategic planning?

We are convinced that complex yet fundamental markets for the development of our businesses, markets like India, China, Vietnam, Brazil, and others that have generated sensational GDP even in times of crisis, must be approached through aggregations and integrations of our companies. The efforts of some national institutions are already bearing good fruit (I'm thinking of ATIs for the creation of temporary networks for pioneering purposes), but this is only a first step. Willpower and perseverance are essential elements on the part of the companies themselves, in the constant action of repressing individualism towards the exasperation of a common force to pursue the objective. Octagona, together with Scouting India, is ready to assist you in this.

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