Printable Version of Topic

Posted by: Newsfeed

http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/22/reinventing-your-business-wikipedia-style/

Fortune
The Wikimedia Foundation turned the conventional approach to setting strategy on its head by opening its process completely to its community of volunteers. By Chris Grams, contributor (ManagementInnovationeXchange) — The term “strategic planning” 7hellip;

Posted by: thekohser

Oh, http://strategy.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&limit=100&type=block&user=Philippe+%28WMF%29&month=&year=?

Posted by: thekohser

Wow, I am surprised that CNN-Fortune published my comment:

Posted by: Somey

Well, let's be clear on this - even if the process had been "open," they would never have allowed themselves to be obligated to heed the results of that process when setting actual "strategy." Or more accurately, they would naturally have heeded the process if it confirmed what they'd already decided they wanted, and then they could have just thrown the rest of it out like yesterday's garbage.

Having said that, it's important to note that their "strategy" amounts to the following:

Now, if you were a "strategic planning consultant" and you handed something like this in to your client, your client would be fully within his rights to throw you out of his office and possibly even sue you for misrepresentation and for wasting his/her time.

To be fair, the words "movement priorities" link to http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_Priorities, which contains a fair amount of actual content. Essentially, they want to:

The fact that they've shown little capacity for doing any of those things in the past (other than "increase participation" during the explosive-growth phase of 2005-2006) doesn't mean they shouldn't at least be trying to do them now, but it does seem to suggest that the strategy is more reactive than pro-active - which is to be expected when you allow user participation, and disallow participation by critics.

But more relevant to the topic at hand, this is (again) not the sort of thing a business would want to see from a strategic planner. All of these things would fall under the heading of "common-sense assumptions" for a typical business - after all, you wouldn't expect your strategic plan to contain recommendations like "let's lower our profitability!" or "let's make our customers really angry at us!" or "let's ignore the negative things people are saying about us in the media!" or "let's not bother trying to keep up with our competition!" What you do want to see is, let's expand into these foreign markets, but not these others, or let's focus on Product Line A, at the expense of Product Line B which has been profitable in the past but will soon become technologically obsolete, and so on. You want a bit more specificity, in other words.

Long story short, this is not a "strategic plan" so much as a "vague outline of what we'd like to see happen, in general terms." It could be used as the starting point for an actual strategic plan, but I doubt they'll want to bother with the necessary details.

Posted by: carbuncle

Lack of details can be resolved with normal editing of the strategic plan.

Posted by: Milton Roe

It's not their fault, since at the end, they were naturally forbidden to add the final kicker:

*MASSIVE PROFITS

They had to leave that one to Wikia.