Strategic Planning: The More Things Change...

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Strategy  

Ask strategic leaders about the challenges that they currently face and they may well talk about the impact of AI, the need to improve employee engagement, and uncertainty around the economy and social factors.

They may well reference tight margins, increasing competition, customer expectations and, depending on industry, shifting regulatory requirements. Hopefully they’ll also talk about the importance of contributing to society and the need for an effective leadership succession plan.

Developing and implementing the right strategies in the current environment isn’t easy. But then, it’s never been easy. And I would argue that the strategic challenges that business leaders face today are fundamentally no different than the challenges that virtually all of their predecessors faced. The details may be different; the underlying issues are the same.

Strategic challenges
If we go back 20 years, 50 years, 100 years or even longer, organizations may have looked different, but the challenges would have been remarkably similar to what we see today. Technology would have been industrialization, computerization, or something similar rather than AI. But the challenge of advancements in how work gets done would still have been consuming executives.

Similarly, those previous generations of leaders may not have been talking about employee engagement, but they …

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