The Strategy Management Process

Your board doesn't want a vision. It wants a plan it can sign.

Most strategy dies in the binder. The plan is written, presented, and admired, and by March nobody in the building can recite it. The Strategy Management Process is the fix: six phases, six weeks, one artifact a week, ending in a boardroom with a signature — from a team that signed first.

Situation. Framework. Business Plan. Deployment. Cadence. Boardroom. Each phase produces one page a director could read in ten minutes, and each page is the raw material for the next. Then the same six phases stretch across the calendar year and the thousand days of a private-equity hold, so the number stays likely every year after.

The whole process runs on one company — Ironwood Process Components, five plants, nine hundred people, fourteen months into a sponsor's hold — with every number reconciled from the first chapter to the last. You need a number, a date, eight people, six weeks, and the willingness to say no in writing.