Research for sources on strategic planning

01 Feb 2021

I’m undergoing a strategic planning process at my nonprofit, and also at two of the nonprofits for which I’m a board member. I’m familiar with different approaches to strategic planning, but I feel that I need to go deeper into the subject.

Here is my starting point:

I’ve been using Traction - by Gino Wickman

I’ve been implementing Traction by Gino Wickman at my nonprofit as part of our own internal growth and development. I’ve found that some element of Traction fit nicely in a strategic planning process: defining the organization’s core values, a 10 year goal, a core focus, marketing strategy. It’s a good tool and I will continue to use it. It is has great value in focusing our work and daily operations.

But for strategic planning purposes, it has its limitations.

I found the Blue Ocean Strategy - by Renée Mauborgne, Kim, W. Chan

Another resource I’ve come across is Blue Ocean Strategy, which has been around for some years now, but I hadn’t read it before, or considered it for my nonprofit work. It’s been fun figuring out how to apply it and make it work. I’m not finished with it, but so far, what I’ve found that it presents interesting premises that are worth adapting to nonprofit work.

I’ll share more on this as I work on it. Subscribe here if you don’t want to miss it.

Sources of sources

My next step was to find the best resources from which I can learn from about nonprofit strategic planning. How to find them?

I thought these are good places to start:

  1. Harvard Business Review. They have great essays. Mostly focused on the for-profit paradigm of “strategy”, which tends to refer to beating your competition for market share. But still, I found some good essays.

  2. Harvard Business Must Read collections. There is a collection on strategy! This may be the best way to get a short list of the top HBR essays on strategy. But it may leave out any essay on strategic planning for the nonprofit’s needs.

  3. Google results from “strategic planning syllabus”. The goal here is to see what books are being used by professors teaching strategic planning. It didn’t really turn out any useful results because these syllabi are not available online. The few that I could find on the internet where pretty old and didn’t offer any resources that weren’t listed on Amazon.

  4. Syllabi of courses on strategic planning from the top 5 masters degrees in nonprofit management. Same results as previous source.

  5. Syllabi of courses on strategy from the top 5 MBAs. Same results as previous source.

  6. Amazon best-seller books on “strategic planning” and “nonprofit strategic planning”. Amazon did offer many results on books. Because there were many, it was difficult to know which are more valuable.

  7. Coursera courses and their syllabi. I did find this course on Strategic Planning and Execution from UVA’s Darden School of Business. I enrolled. At first glance, I didn’t see a syllabi with a list of books or articles to read, but mostly videos to watch.

Next steps

  1. Compile a complete list of sources I found on strategic planning for nonprofits. DONE - Here it is
  2. Study each source and share my findings and thoughts on each.
  3. Create and share a short list of the most valuable of sources.

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