Facilitating the Development of an Evolving Senior Executive Team Towards "Disciplined Growth" and Shared Ownership of a Business Strategy

I have been directly involved in the development of strategic plans for almost 25 years. Across several companies that I have worked for, we have often hired the so-called strategy “experts” to lead the strategic planning process. This is the first time I believe we have completed a process that has resulted in a strategic plan that can be implemented, is owned by the business leadership team, and will give us real competitive advantage.

When we first began a series of strategy development meetings designed and facilitated by Gary Myszkowski, given my past experiences, I was initially skeptical that we would arrive at a plan that was valuable. Over the course of 6 months, Gary designed and facilitated a series of meetings, pre-work assignments, and follow up work that fully engaged the best thinking of our leadership team, supplemented by Cisco’s in-house strategic business subject matter experts.

At the completion of our meetings, we have made some courageous decisions to significantly adjust the focus of our business, redefine our competitive position, and develop a plan through which we can aggressively grow the global revenue of the business. The plan allows us to better focus our efforts with accountability to meet the growth expectations of John Chambers and the top management of Cisco. Most importantly, the Cisco – Linksys leadership team shares a common mindset about the key elements of the strategy and has a strong sense of ownership and accountability to drive the implementation of the strategy.

Gary did not do our thinking for us. He facilitated our meetings in a flexible way to ensure that we discussed the right issues at the right time, in ways consistent with our style, and kept us on track to arrive at a clear end result and accountabilities for moving ahead.

###   2008   ###