Building Rapport to Generate Value in Strategic Planning

In “The Real Value of Strategic Planning”, Kaplan and Beinhocker disprove the view that formal strategy development meetings are useless and argue that there are key benefits for CEOs who devote much of their time in strategy meetings. There is some validity to the claim that lots of strategy is made in informal occasions, and formal meetings can borrow from the personal nature of informal meetings to achieve more results. The main takeaway from the article is the importance of building a personal relationship and establish rapport with the people you are meeting with. And rapport can be accomplished through both reducing the number of people in a strategy meeting and shifting the location for strategy meetings.

A key reason that formal meetings fail is that there are too many people. Kaplan and Beinhocker claim that 3-10 people are a prime amount for “real conversation” (72) to happen, and any group larger than that only seem to be engaging in “more of a slide show than a real dialogue” (72). I’ve had personal experience with this while working on an advertising pitch with a 7-person group. The initial time spent where everyone voices their opinion is excruciatingly slow and unproductive, and until someone takes the initiative to split the group into 3 2-person groups little progress is made. There is less pressure for group-think and each person feels less pressure taking up “talk space” when they are insecure about their ideas because the opportunity cost of the space is lower.

The other strategy that they proposed is to have CEO visit employees on-site instead of summoning employees to the CEO’s office. This helps build a closer personal relationship across hierarchies and build more trust because it enables employees to talk to their CEOs on familiar ground. It gives off the impression that they are presenting their work as “hosts” instead of trying to prove themselves as “guests” on foreign territory.

Given the fact that “It’s not possible to have an in-depth strategy discussion about a significant business in less than a day”, it’s a good idea to partition a lengthy strategy meeting into small meetings based on the job functions and expertise of the participants. This will enable corporations to both cut attendance at meetings to the essential members and thereby ensure the efficiency of the meetings. I have hosted production meetings while working on theater productions where some members feel like they do not have enough time to discuss certain strategies while others feel left out. Even for meetings where multiple constituents need to be present, each division could meet beforehand and then present together as a group. I believe that this is the key to preparing “prepared minds within management teams” (71).

In conclusion, the scholars who believe that true strategy planning happens over lunches and in hallways miss the true cause of efficient progress: building rapport with those you strategize with. Formal strategy meetings are not inferior in and of themselves; it is the way that they are conducted that determines the efficacy of strategic planning.