WANT YOUR COMPANY TO MOVE FORWARD? STOP LOOKING BACK!

As business leaders strive to move their organizations forward, they continually rely on past experience to generate strategic plans for the future. While this seems like the logical thing to do, some business experts say it may take more than experience to get your company where you want it to be.

All businesses have at least one common goal -- they all strive to move forward. With this goal in mind, business leaders continually rely on past experience to generate strategic plans for the future. While this may seem like a good idea, business consultant Pamela S. Harper says it may take more than experience to get your company where you want it to be.

To guide our decisive action as business leaders, we tend to look back to past experiences backed by quantifiable market and financial data," Harper says. While experience and data are vital to designing effective business strategies and initiatives, they may not be able to move your company forward in todays world. What happened yesterday may no longer be a reliable guide to what will happen today, yet alone tomorrow."

Harper also asserts that when devising a strategic plan, many businesses overlook certain issues, such as the organizations structures, alliances, supply, and outsource relationships -- all of which are pertinent to the plans success. Too often, we underestimate these issues during strategic thinking and make common but mistaken assumptions about our organization as it exists in reality," she says. This then leads to a mysterious and costly buildup of persistent organizational problems when it comes time to execute a plan that data and experience suggested should have worked."

To avoid this unnecessary gridlock," Harper suggests that business leaders devise a new approach not based entirely on past experiences. She says, Gridlock is not confined to traffic, but neither is the ability to map out new routes. When you face a business challenge that is important enough, it can be a triggering event that makes it worthwhile to adapt a new approach to your organizations unique reality."

Through her experiences as an internal and external consultant to leaders of entrepreneurial, mid-sized, and Fortune 500 companies, Harper has identified the seven common roadblocks that snarl business performance as well as the keys to unlocking them. Her strategies have helped leaders transform their business initiatives into high performance results.

You can learn more about how to create an effective plan to move your company forward in Pamela S. Harpers book, Preventing Strategic Gridlock®: Leading Over, Under, & Around Organizational Jams to Achieve High Performance Results (Cameo Publications, $19.95, ISBN 0-9715739-4-8). For a review copy, please contact Paula Duncan at 1-866-372-2636 or send an email to marketing@cameopublications.com.