Day One Lineup – June 20th (Thursday)

Welcome to the conference 2024 with my guest Eddie Yoon. Your company (or client) has been successful. It has a history of positive results that have brought it this far. However, the leaders are concerned. There are some changes coming which mean that its core product offering needs to be re-examined. The old ones may not be relevant or even exist in the mid term, or even short term. Left unaddressed, the scope of these changes could ultimately mean the end of the company. This is the time to take a brutally honest look at what customers will want, and how the company can address unwanted needs.

Welcome to the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2024 with my guest Dr. Mythili Kolluru. You are in the weeks leading up the start of a strategic planning process, and you want it to generate an awesome strategic plan. However, your colleagues are not thinking strategically. Caught up in a whirlwind of fires and emergencies, they don’t have time to spend thinking about a future that is more than six months away. How do you get them to appreciate the range of skills needed to engage in the process, even at the lowest levels of the organization?

Welcome to the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2024 with my guest Amie Devero. You have been to a few strategic planning retreats either as a host or a participant. You have noticed they can go one of two ways… Either they are inspiring and almost miraculous on one hand, or boring dull affairs on the other. You want to know why. However, you haven’t found the secret sauce that makes one event compelling and the other stifling routine.

Welcome to the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2024 with my guest Adrian Morey You have been around enough executive teams to know that long-term plans which include multiple initiatives are a problem. History shows that they often don’t deliver in terms of cost, time and benefits - not according to books like “How Big Things Get Done” which describes projects like the Sydney Opera house, The Montreal Olympics and the Panama Canal. You don’t want your company to join this list, but you need to create a long-term strategic plan. How can you ensure that it doesn’t end up becoming an embarrassment…or worse?

Welcome to the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2024 with my guest Dr. Geci Karuri-Sebina. You work in a large bureaucracy. Fortunately, the executive team has put together a ground-breaking strategic plan that shows imagination…an element in very short supply in the organization. You are inspired, but feel a growing sense of anxiety because the plan may not survive the culture of the company. As they say, culture eats strategy for breakfast. And imagination appears to be a tasty snack for a bad culture.

Welcome to the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2024. Your company has always done short-term planning on a 3-5-year time horizon. But this year, leaders have decided to provide the long-term strategic plan several stakeholders have asked for. The effort was supposed to start a month ago, but now you feel as if you are scrambling. You just don’t know where to start. The truth is, you have never been to a retreat planning for a 15-30-year horizon and there is no book written on exactly what to do.

Welcome to the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2024 with my guest Thays Prado. You are about to launch a long-term vision and strategy process. But you have a big concern - as you look at the list of participants, you don’t see an imaginative person in the bunch. Maybe they are stuck in old ways. Not willing to try anything new. Or just comfortable with the way things are. In any of these cases, you have a big problem because a strategic plan requires some imagination.

Welcome to the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2024 with my guest A. Cecile Watson. You are a company Chairman of a board and you have become frustrated at the level of discourse taking place in meetings. It seems as if board members are deep in the organization itself, helping to tun things on a daily basis. Something about this doesn’t seem right…but what can you do to intervene?

Welcome to the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2024 with my guest Craig Wallace. You are a member of the strategic planning team, but your company has always had a problem implementing its plans. People work hard, but they only seem to be focused on today’s problems, never on the ones which require foresight. Everyone knows you should be planning and executing long-term plans, but how can you intervene to prevent the usual obstacles from getting in the way?

Welcome to the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2024 with my guest Eva Tomas Casado. You are someone who must communicate a new vision of the future to an audience. They are not executives - but ordinary people who have never attended a strategic planning offsite. Unfortunately, all you have are some charts. And spreadsheets. These work fine in an audience of MBA’s but this won’t work for other workers. How do you proceed?

Welcome to the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2024 with my guest Peter Compo. In the past your company has made some bets on the future. It decided to pursue a single course of action, without really considering what might happen if things didn’t go exactly as planned. Now there is another strategic planning session scheduled and some participants are wary. They don’t want to end up failing so badly. The idea of using techniques that futurists use has been rejected by a few. You see that using scenarios in the strategy would help to prepare the company for a greater range of possibilities. How should you engage the team?

Welcome to the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2024 with my guest Dr. Riel Miller. You have been in many discussions about the future in your company, most of them dealing with short-term problems. Your executives are quite skilled at handling emergencies. However, conversations about futures more than 3 years away are only done casually, by the way, maybe over a few drinks. There certainly is no written plan, just a bunch of opinions and complaints. As someone who cares about the future you want more robust discussions to take place. However, you are concerned that it could devolve into something ridiculous. And waste everyone’s time.

Welcome to the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2024 with my guest Dan Bruder. Your executive team has produced a great strategic plan. It’s long-term, visionary and will introduce game-changing results for all involved. However, the plan requires staff to be deeply engaged. With the retreat just ended, you know that this means more than sending out a PowerPoint deck. But she’s not sure what will actually be required.