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On my non-profit blog I write a lot about strategic planning. But it’s clear that most people don’t understand what a strategic plan is or why it’s important.

Strategic plans aren’t just for big organizations. They are useful to departments, small groups, or even individuals in their personal or professional lives.

What the heck is a strategic plan?

It’s a roadmap. It lays out the vision – here’s where I want to go – and the strategy – here’s how I’m going to get there.

It’s made up of some simple parts:

• Mission: What do I do?
• Vision: Where do I see myself?
• Strategies: How I’ll get to my vision.
  • Strategy 1
    • Specific steps I’ll take.
    • Measurements: How I know I’m on my way.
  • Strategy 2
    • Specific steps I’ll take.
    • Measurements: How I know I’m on my way.
  • Strategy 3
    • Specific steps I’ll take.
    • Measurements: How I know I’m on my way.

The hardest part of a strategic plan isn’t producing one, it’s deciding on the vision, strategies, and measurements. Strategic plans can be simple one page summaries of the mission, vision, and strategies. Or they can be long, detailed specifications of the exact process. I prefer the simpler versions – they’re easier to produce and convey.

Why do I need a Strategic Plan?

The whole point isn’t to have a strategic plan, it’s to execute it. But most people go through life without a stated vision or strategies for getting there. Stating your goals (vision) and the steps you’ll take to accomplish them are a critical part of achievement.

Some Tips

Think big. It’s OK to want to conquer the world.

Get over the constraints in your vision. What would you do if you won the lottery? What do you want your legacy to be? The answers to those questions should inform your real vision and strategies.

Get input. Bring others into the process – including outsiders – to provide feedback and insight into the plan.

Share your plan and progress. If you make a plan and it collects dust on a shelf, it’s worthless. So tell people about it. Have update meetings to share your progress. Celebrate your victories. This is how you can be accountable, and without that you’re wasting your time.

I’ve been working on my upcoming talk at the eduWeb conference in Chicago next week. I’ve held workshops and given plenty of speeches… and as my colleagues at Notre Dame know, I have no trouble filling an hour or three. But I’ve never spoken at a normal conference – heck, I’ve only gone to a handful of them. So as I’ve been finishing up my slides, I’ve kept notes on what I believe will at least keep my audience awake for the hour.

1. Shorter is better.

I’m presenting at 4:30pm, so everyone will be eager to get out of there. So I’m shooting for 40 minutes. That way, if there are questions we’ve got time and people don’t feel like missing out. As has been oft repeated, “nobody ever wished for a longer speech.”

2. Funny is good.

I almost always prefer a funny presentation to a serious one. I’ve sat through boring presentations that were chock full of good information from a knowledgeable speaker. It’s hard to stay awake. But if you can get people to laugh, they’ll pay more attention as they wait for the next joke.

3. Funny pictures work, too.

4. Cliches, aphorisms, slogans, and quotes are OK.

If you walk away spewing nothing but slogans, at least you’ll remember something I said. They’ll come out in your client meetings, they’ll come to you when you’re eating your corn flakes. It’s great to have some meat behind them, but the quotes will be what you remember. And that’s ok. Especially if people attribute them to you.

5. Don’t do live demos.

If you were a flask-carrying man, you might consider making a conference drinking game: every time a live demo goes badly, take a nice long swig. I can’t count how many times a presenter was frantically trying to get the wireless connection to work, mis-typed something, or discovered a bug right in the middle of the talk. Practice helps, but it’s worth remembering Murphy’s Law.

6. Do something truly memorable.

We sent four colleagues to SXSW 2009 and when they came back, they told us about the memorable stuff. A guy making a point with a few hundred feet of string. People demonstrating sweet new tech toys. Free stuff. The parties.

Since I’m not giving anything away and don’t have any cool toys to show off, I’m hoping to make memorable points. I’ll try to tell interesting stories. In any case, I’ll try not to bore the pants off the audience… though that would be pretty memorable, too.

I have a confession: there are entire days – maybe weeks – when I don’t actually do any work.

Yeah, I show up at the office, go to meetings, do paperwork, and read, write, and forward a lot of emails.

But that’s not work.

In a typical day, I spend about five hours in meetings. These are client/project meetings, team meetings, production meetings, one-on-one staff meetings, weekly check-ins, and so on. The outcome of most of these meetings is a list of notes and action items. These action items then go into my to do list or are lost on paper because I never got around to typing them in. By all accounts, I am tremendously busy and my boss seems pleased with how much I appear to accomplish.

But in these five hours of meetings, I rarely do any work. My boss could hire a garden gnome to sit in meetings, crank out project agreements, and respond to 90% of the emails I get. Most of this isn’t work – it’s describing work. Too often we are measured by task completion and our very presence. We forget to measure value and quality.

One of my least favorite responsibilities is going back and forth over a project agreement. Project agreements aren’t work – they are talking about doing some work later. That is, let’s detail work that may or may not take place in weeks or months. (And since our agreements aren’t contracts, they don’t mean a whole heck of a lot anyway.)

Work is not the passing of time at the office. Work is about adding value and making a difference. Every morning, I drive about 45 minutes to the office and think about what I can do to create value that day.

Blogging and consulting with our clients are great because I’m helping educate others. Creating different strategies are fine, but only if we actually follow through on them. I don’t even mind writing policies or position descriptions because those will eventually enable others to do work and create value.

Nothing chafes me more than looking back on a full day, feeling exhausted from the fray of office life – and not having any sense of accomplishment. My goal, each day, is to make a connection between the work I did and some good that will come of it.

It shouldn’t be hard to do when your employer is working to change the world.

This afternoon I led a workshop for an industry association for amusement operators – the folks responsible for creating, selling, supporting, and maintaining jukeboxes, arcade games, pool tables, and other coin-op stuff. They’re a really interesting crowd, but they don’t pull any punches. They’re busy people and expect you to cut to the chase.

This was the second time I’d presented for AMOA, and I wanted to share some of my materials. There’s a slide deck and a few sheets on writing for the web, project cost worksheets, and a quick web strategy worksheet.

Thanks to everyone in the session today – you guys were a lot of fun!

View How to Take Your Website to the Next Level >

Today, I joined the good folks at eduStyle.net as a contributor to their blog. I’m really excited about offending even more designers and developers than I do during my day job.

Check out my first post, Web Design is the Fastest Way to Ruin a Website:

Web designers and developers are an arrogant bunch. We’re personally invested. We pour ourselves into the work. We call it an “art.” And we tend to flip out when clients want to ruin it.

Read Web Design is the Fastest Way to Ruin a Website >

A few years ago, I spent a week and a half on vacation for the winter holidays. I left my computer at home, having made the decision to disconnect and enjoy my time away. I felt nagging urge to check my email. There were withdrawal symptoms. After a few days, I found myself much more relaxed.

The Rev. Hugh Page, Jr. writes a blog for first-year students at Notre Dame. He recently taught a class about contemplation and the first year experience, in which he introduced the idea of building time into ones day for contemplative activities.

From his post, at http://fys.nd.edu/Deans_Blog.html:

I also assigned some rather interesting praxis oriented assignments such as:

• A Technology “fast” – turning off cell phones, computers, and other devices and taking a ninety minute meditative walk
• Contemplative sketching and photography exercises
• Walking the Prayer Labyrinth at St. Mary’s College
• Using poetry and the writing of aphorisms as a means of recording general impressions about personal growth and life
• Wandering the “stacks” of the Hesburgh Library
• Using the techniques of artistic composition to “frame” intellectual interests and objectives
• Identifying contemplative role models
  

Since my vacation experiment, I’ve wondered how I could introduce this into my daily life. I want to use it as a way to recharge. I want to reduce the guilt I feel when I leave my cell phone at home and am entirely disconnected. Most of all, I want to remind myself how important my life is outside of work and the Internet.

Have you integrated such activities into your life? What do you do?

In a conversation about web companies, we compare ourselves to Google.

If you’re talking branding, Nike is sure to come up.

For product development, it’s Apple we admire.

If you’re a marketing blogger, you want to be Seth Godin.

The list goes on and on.

They are outliers. They are the greatest of success stories in a million ways. And it’s not fair to hold yourself to that standard. You don’t have what they have and didn’t fight their battles to win their positions. You can’t follow the exact same trajectory.

Perhaps instead of comparing yourself to those companies now, you should look at their beginnings. As Jim Collins did in Built to Last, what did those companies do to become great?

This is an excerpt from Seth Godin’s post, Is Effort a Myth?. I’m thinking about this a lot – that parts I already do and the parts I don’t.

With that forewarning, here’s a bootstrapper’s/marketer’s/entrepreneur’s/fast-rising executive’s effort diet. Go through the list and decide whether or not it’s worth it. Or make up your own diet. Effort is a choice, at least make it on purpose:

1. Delete 120 minutes a day of ’spare time’ from your life. This can include TV, reading the newspaper, commuting, wasting time in social networks and meetings. Up to you.

2. Spend the 120 minutes doing this instead:

• Exercise for thirty minutes.
• Read relevant non-fiction (trade magazines, journals, business books, blogs, etc.)
• Send three thank you notes.
• Learn new digital techniques (spreadsheet macros, Firefox shortcuts, productivity tools, graphic design, html coding)
• Volunteer.
• Blog for five minutes about something you learned.
• Give a speech once a month about something you don’t currently know a lot about.

3. Spend at least one weekend day doing absolutely nothing but being with people you love.

4. Only spend money, for one year, on things you absolutely need to get by. Save the rest, relentlessly.

If you somehow pulled this off, then six months from now, you would be the fittest, best rested, most intelligent, best funded and motivated person in your office or your field. You would know how to do things other people don’t, you’d have a wider network and you’d be more focused.

This is great advice, but I’m less interested in the “six months from now” part and way more interested in the “effort” list. Those are things I enjoy and want to do more of. I want to spend that weekend day, blog, read, exercise, etc. If nothing else changed but I got to do more of those things, I think I would be happier.