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Good business management benefits all types of organizations, not just huge multi-national, for-profit corporations. The only way to remain relevant in today’s ridiculously fast marketplace is to become more entrepreneurial. But, true entrepreneurship isn’t just an act of magic — it’s all about strategic planning.

Strategic planning is designing a desired future for your association and developing strategies for realizing it. The planning process gives an association important guidelines for making everyday business decisions and creates a template against which all such decisions can be evaluated. Strategic planning asks three simple but very important questions.

• Where is your association going?
• What are the kinds of environmental factors that may affect how you do business?
• How will you accomplish your goals?

If you’re a eager to get in on the innovative strategies that make entrepreneurs successful, take a look at their strategic plan. It’s a great way to learn more about business management. And, crafting a strategic plan isn’t as intimidating as it seems. It’s actually a very logical, linear process that includes the following phases:

1. Start by conducting a needs analysis/situational audit.
2. Make certain assumptions.
3. Formulate a strategic summary that outlines all the conclusions reached and provides a template that can be referred to later.
4. No strategic plan would be complete without a comprehensive contingency plan.

Just How Effective is Your Organization?
In the first phase of strategic planning, it’s important to begin by learning about and understanding your association’s history and the major events that have shaped it. Just how effective is your association? "Organizational effectiveness" is best determined after completing a thorough needs analysis/situational audit. The audit must consider an association’s organizational theory and design, which is where knowledge of the association’s history becomes important.

What does organizational effectiveness mean to associations? Some would argue that effectiveness is subjective, and that it will depend on a number of factors, including the industry and local marketplace in which the organization exists. Actually, there are two official, alternating viewpoints on what constitutes an effective organization. The systems-resource approach views the organization as a social system operating in an environment with scarce resources. Here, effectiveness is the degree to which an organization successfully acquires scarce and valued resources and how it interacts with its surroundings.

A second and more recent viewpoint on organizational effectiveness is the stakeholder approach which focuses on the satisfaction of "stakeholders" or the various groups, both internal and external, that can affect or be affected by an organization’s performance. For associations, stakeholders — or strategic constituencies — are people who have some link to the organization, some connection or stake in what is accomplished.

Why Organizational Structure Matters?
Organizational design is essential for association management. Consider the ubiquitous organizational chart. The segmentation or departmentalization of activities is what forms a system. As open systems, organizations must exist in continuous exchange with their environment to survive. Organizations enact and modify their environments by selecting and changing strategy and changing organizational design. At some point, an association probably cannot achieve its mission without a simultaneous change in organizational structure.

An association’s structure consists of patterns of coordination and control, workflow, authority, and communications that channel member activities. Ultimately, the effectiveness of the structure depends on how managers create and modify these patterns. They do so by creating and modifying these patterns to achieve effectiveness. The elements of structure are what create a work environment. And, those elements are based on the purpose of the organization. Associations continually redesign their organizational structure by responding to marketplace pressures, advanced operating technologies, new goods and services, changing goals, and many other changing circumstances.

A study published by the International Association of Business Communicators Research Foundation, titled Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management, describes two types of organizations — mechanical and organic. The mechanical organization is centralized, formalized, stratified, less complex, and does not allow most employees to participate in decision making. Organic organizations are decentralized, less formalized, less stratified, more complex, and facilitate participation in decision making.

To be effective, association leaders must understand the direct relationship between an organization’s form or structure and its model of communication. The communication system — a key strategic management element — is symmetrical in organic organizations and asymmetrical in mechanical organizations. The organic structure, because it is conducive to shared decision making, becomes critically important if the association is to adopt a two-way symmetrical model of communication.

Marketing — An Essential Part of Strategic Planning
Strategic planning would be ineffective without a clear marketing plan. Before you develop a marketing plan for your association, you should be able to answer the following questions.

• Who are your customers?
• What is your customer profile?
• What do you offer stakeholders or members?
• How competitive are your prices, dues, or fees?
• What is your channel strategy for getting your products/services to the end user?
• What’s the mix? Consider the impact of e-commerce on your association.

People First, Strategy Second
The motto of the successful association executive - worthy of inscription on his or her office wall - should be: "People first, strategy second," to paraphrase Charan and Colvin from a Fortune magazine article. The manager’s role then - and formidable challenge - is to be both accountable to higher level leadership for work results and dependent on subordinates and other team members to make these results possible.

Solid leadership is characterized by several important management qualities. Managers have to set performance objectives and identify the actions needed to accomplish these objectives. It’s not enough to just divide up the work to be done. Efforts have to be properly coordinated before the desired result can be achieved. Effective managers lead by directing and coordinating the work efforts of others. Maintaining control and monitoring performance are important, too. Their absence could adversely affect the outcome of desired objectives. In the end, results should be compared against objectives as a measurement of success. Then, if it’s necessary, corrective action can be taken.

Managers are essentially communicators. Much of their work is performed face-to-face, verbally in formal and informal meetings. They spend the majority of their time getting, giving, and processing information. To be effective, an association manager should be able to understand, integrate, interpret, and explain complex situations. Effective managers who are good leaders help employees understand and find common ground for performance. They either already know how or can easily learn what it takes to inspire and influence those they lead.

Managers should give association employees a voice in how things are managed since they know better than anyone how to improve processes, customer service, quality, waste reduction, and efficiency. Good leaders listen.

Remember, employees will only accept ownership for problems when they participate in finding the solution. Effective managers assume their employees want to help solve problems and communicate with them fairly, openly, and regularly. Then the manager turns employees loose to work out solutions.

Why Job Satisfaction is So Important?
In association management, attitudes are important because they result in behaviors. Job satisfaction among employees is, therefore, critical to the success of any organization. Successful organizations that recognize the importance of job satisfaction are willing to spend fortunes compiling and evaluating job satisfaction data.

Association managers should be concerned about five aspects of job satisfaction from the employee perspective:

1. The nature of the work. Is it interesting?
2. Quality of supervision. Is technical help and social support available?
3. Relationships with coworkers. Are they harmonious and respectful?
4. Promotion opportunities. Do they exist? What will it take to advance?
5. Pay. Is it adequate and equitable? Is it competitive?

Performance, a summary measure of the quantity and quality of task contributions made by an individual or group to their work unit and the association, is at the heart of goal attainment. Though job satisfaction alone is not a good predictor of work performance, well-managed rewards can have a positive influence on both satisfaction and performance.

Who’s Keeping Score?
Accounting tracks and reports the economic activity of an association. Since accounting monitors performance indicators using a language system that association managers must know, it is important to become familiar with an association’s accounting framework and its use of financial statements and reports in decision making.

Accounting can also be a powerful tool for coordinating, motivating, and evaluating employee activities. From a marketing standpoint, accounting basics are also important in preparing a competition analysis that asks:

• What other companies or organizations does the association compete with?
• What do you know about them?

Do You Know Your Purpose?
A mission is how an association differentiates itself from the competition. To write an effective mission statement, the following questions must be answered:

• What function(s) does the association perform?
• For whom are these functions performed?
• How are these functions fulfilled?
• Why are they fulfilled?

The answers usually relate directly to the markets the association serves.

You’ll Need to Be a Visionary
You’ve just entered the second phase of strategic planning. Have you considered some of the external forces that may have an impact on your association? It’s not enough to consider just the short-term possibilities.

What makes strategic planning strategic is asking yourself some of the following questions:

• What is the impact over the life of the plan?
• What will be the impact of governmental actions like deregulation or trade policy?
• What about sociological/demographic issues that may affect the association’s work force or mission?

External environmental issues often involve general principles of law that affect the industry the association serves. You will probably work closely with legal staff at some point on an important issue. The best way to prepare for this is to understand how attorneys work.

Economics — the Bottom Line
What do you assume will happen with technological or economic/financial forces? Consider economic issues such as energy costs, interest rates, foreign currency exchange rates, and inflation.

Managerial economics applies economic theory and scientific decision tools to solve managerial problems. Economics — the study of the bedrock of the capitalistic business system — is fundamental knowledge business managers must have. Making assumptions about your association’s culture asks you to consider what you value and how you expect to operate in accordance with those values.

Let’s Not Forget Ethics
Many associations have a code of ethics that describes the organization’s values. This code is generally closely tied to the organization’s mission and vision, and relates directly to its culture. The code of ethics, which is key to how things are done in the association, must be communicated clearly and regularly and must have some relevance to employees’ values.

Another Layer of Self-Reflection …
As you enter the third phase of strategic planning, you’ll need to take a closer look at your association’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats — both now and in the future. This time, you’ll need to rely on more than your initial assessment, which was based on informal opinion and judgement.

Quantitative analysis is the scientific approach to managerial decision making using research and statistics to make informed decisions. Association leaders should understand and use quantitative methods — research and statistics — to shape strategic direction by asking the following questions.

• What are your key success factors?
  If you were to start your association from scratch, what would you need to be successful?
  
  
• What are the competitive advantages and disadvantages?
  What are they, both now and in the future?
  
  
• Do you have goals and objectives?
  What are your measurable, achievable, time-duration goals and objectives?
  
  
• Have you considered your strategy?
  How will you achieve these goals and objectives?
  
  
• What are your tactics or action plans?
  These are the bite-sized activities you will need to accomplish your strategies, goals, and objectives. Most strategic plans fail because they are grandiose and without workable tactics.
  
  
• Have you estimated your return on investment?
  If you do all the above, what will you achieve?

You’ve Got to Have a Back-Up Plan
"Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug," Mary Chapin Carpenter sings about contingency plans. The final phase of strategic planning considers how you anticipate the unexpected and still achieve your association’s plan.

In today’s complex, fast-paced world, an association’s success depends on going back to the basics of tried and true business management. Using strategic planning as the framework, the necessary elements of business management fall logically into place.

The Fundamentals of Business Management
There are 10 tried and true elements of business management that associations simply must have in place to be successful:

• Strategic planning
• Organizational theory and design
• Marketing theory and practice
• Organizational and individual behavior
• Accounting basics
• Business law
• Managerial economics
• Ethics
• Quantitative analysis, and finance

Causes for Failure

What separates people who are on the fast track from people who get left behind? As reported in Fast Company magazine, the Center for Creative Leadership, in Greensboro, North Carolina, surveyed 62 executives at blue-chip service and manufacturing companies. The study found three primary reasons why talented people fail:

1. They don’t adapt during transition. They are so resistant to change that they can’t or won’t alter their behavior, and subsequently, fail. Other people get tired of this rigid inflexibility.
2. They are difficult to work with, often insensitive, manipulative, and overly critical.
3. They fail to lead in a team-centered way.

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