Business Consultant Pamela S. Harper Reveals a Proactive Approach to Keep Your Company Competitive

Companies face changes daily. These changes include those you can anticipate, those you cant, and those that sneak up on you and surprise everyone. Too often, when change happens, business leaders take a reactive approach when they need to be proactive. The truly successful companies continually adjust to remain competitive and prevent reactionary measures from bogging them down.

Glen Rock, NJ (PRWEB) August 11, 2004 -- Companies face changes daily. These changes include those you can anticipate, those you cant, and those that sneak up on you and surprise everyone. Too often, when change happens, business leaders take a reactive approach when they need to be proactive. The truly successful companies continually adjust to remain competitive and prevent reactionary measures from bogging them down.

Every change that occurs impacts the assumptions at the base of our strategic planning and thinking," says author and business consultant Pamela S. Harper. When companies dont deal with changes in a proactive manner, they increase their risk of running into strategic gridlock. Harper defines strategic gridlock as the mysterious paralysis that occurs when persistent organizational problems snarl business performance." To avoid being blindsided and keep your plans on track, you need to respect, recognize, and learn how to identify all three types of change during planning and throughout execution, and then adjust appropriately along the way. In her book, Preventing Strategic Gridlock: Leading Over, Under & Around Organizational Jams to Achieve High Performance Results (Cameo Publications, $19.95, ISBN 0-9715739-4-8), Harper helps executives identify and manage the three types of change, as well as identify the major milestones and critical success factors for their strategic plan.

You can never anticipate when changes will occur or what they might be, but most people realize that they do occur, and sometimes at the least convenient times. Most companies use contingency planning for predictable emergencies." However, contingency planning has its limitations. Business conditions continue to change in unpredictable ways, so were forced into strategies weve never used before to maintain or increase our competitiveness. The risk of 'creeping strategic gridlock is particularly strong in businesses where people dont perceive that they are going through massive change," states Harper. Businesses can never know whats going to happen as a strategic plan unfolds, but they can build in a process for monitoring and adjusting to the different types of change so the strategy or initiative remains on track.

Pamela S. Harper helps business leaders transform their strategies into high performance results by identifying seven roadblocks that stall success and the keys to unlock them. Founder and president of Business Advancement, Inc., Pam bases her in-depth knowledge of the impact of organizational issues on business growth on her 20 years of internal and external consulting to leaders of entrepreneurial, middle market, and Fortune 500 companies.

For more information or a review copy of Preventing Strategic Gridlock: Leading Over, Under & Around Organizational Jams to Achieve High Performance Results, please call 1-866-372-2636 or send an email to Amy@cameopublications.com.

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