By Rich Horwath

There comes a time in both our professional and personal lives when we must make a stand. Through all the swirling complexity, change and challenges we face, we must at some point assert ourselves and set our bar of standards. This means refusing to be engulfed in the comfortable molten lava of mediocrity that flows through many lives and organizations. It means accepting the accountability and responsibility that go hand-in-hand with excellence. And in business, it means working every day to generate strategic insights, using those insights to set direction and then fiercely executing strategy with both mental agility and perseverance.

If you’re not content being with the majority of managers dog paddling around in the tactical end of the pool, then it’s time to commit yourself to becoming a better strategist. This path to becoming a highly strategic manager begins with understanding the seven sins of strategy and the action steps to avoid them.

Sin #1: Substituting Planning for Thinking. Since thinking is hard work, it’s not uncommon for managers to fall back on strategic planning in an attempt to shape the direction of their business. However, this ignores a crucial distinction—strategic thinking involves the generation of insights—strategic planning involves the application of the insights into an action plan. Relying on strategic planning without strategic thinking is tantamount to an organizational lobotomy because the essential thinking function has been excised. This results in tired, old tactical plans leading to marginally incremental improvement at best while stifling the organization’s potential.

Action: Provide managers with the knowledge base and terminology clearly distinguishing strategic thinking from planning and provide them with tools to facilitate that thinking.

Sin #2: Lacking the Discipline to Say “No”
Strategy involves the intelligent allocation of limited resources. “Intelligent allocation” requires us to make trade-offs and focus those resources. Too often, because tradeoffs involve risk, we take cover in the status quo and don’t make any tradeoffs at all. While not making tradeoffs and not saying “no” to areas of resource allocation may limit short-term vulnerability, it is often a sure sign of long-term weakness.
Action: Identify your resources – capital, talent and time – and begin detailing how they are allocated, including your time. Any surprises? How is this allocation different from past months/years? Does it reflect the changing market trends and customer needs?
Writing down the significant resource allocations (including what you spend your time on) is an objective way to begin measuring whether or not they are returning the requisite value for their investment.

Sin #3: Not Preparing to be a Strategist
Before you can develop great strategy, you first need to develop great strategists. While most organizations provide developmental programs on leadership, communication skills, product marketing, etc., very few organizations have provided their managers with a roadmap to enhancing their strategic thinking capabilities. As successful organizations continue to grow, the need to decentralize strategic decision-making becomes more important in order to leverage market dynamics and evolve customer needs in a timely fashion. Improved strategic thinking means that managers will invest more resources in the right activities (key initiatives driving corporate success) and fewer resources in the wrong activities (urgent but unimportant initiatives), leading in theory and practice to greater revenue, profitability and productivity.
Action: Provide managers with periodic training and development programs on strategy and strategic thinking skills sets that are tailored to their level of responsibility within the organization. Just as professional baseball players refresh their fundamental skills each year during spring training, managers should also refresh their business planning skills on an annual basis.

Sin #4: Employing Bumper Car Strategy
Not investing the time in a sound strategy development process results in bumper car strategy—the organization mindlessly changing directions each time it’s bumped into by a marketplace issue (competitor activity, customer complaint, short-term fad, etc.)
Anthony Zuiker, Executive Producer, CSI, CSI: Miami and CSI: New York – all three of which are among the top 10 shows on TV – said, “The thing I’m most proud of is that we didn’t react to the competition. Some of the other crime shows have added labs and are doing more forensics, and there have been all kinds of knockoffs watering down the market, but we’ve held true. You need to evolve, but you don’t need to evolve defensively. That’s a classic mistake.”
Action: Invest in a strategy development process that is simple, concise and effective. Set aside one day per quarter for a “Strategy Tune-up,” when the team assesses the key business issues and assumptions to gauge progress.

Sin #5: Allowing Budget to Dictate Strategy
One of the most entrenched practices in organizations of every size is to allow the budget to dictate the strategy. Most managers will readily admit that it’s a faulty premise but often they are unwilling to try and turn this “aircraft carrier” of a process around. Constricting the creative strategy development process at the outset with a page of budget numbers can close off avenues that might fundamentally enhance the business in ways not previously explored.
Action: Leave the budget numbers in the folder during the initial strategic thinking sessions. Once your team has had the opportunity to comprehensively think through the business and generate strategic insights, bring the budget numbers in during the strategic planning phase to help prioritize the initiatives.

Sin #6: Not Linking the Strategic Plan to Action
One of the great ironies is that the organizations that do invest their time in strategy development often don’t have an effective way of then using that plan on a daily basis to drive the activities of their teams. They’ve invested time, energy and money into thinking that sets strong strategic direction, only to have that direction evaporate over the course of the year due to the “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” phenomenon.
Action: Transform your traditional narrative strategic plan into a StrategyPrint—a concise, two-page blueprint for your business. Page one contains the insights your team has generated regarding the market, customers, competitors and the organization itself. Page two contains the action plan, aligning the goals, objectives, strategies, tactics and metrics. The simplicity and brevity of a tool such as the StrategyPrint allows managers to easily update it on a daily basis, making it a functional real-time strategic plan.

Sin #7: Not challenging business as usual
At the heart of strategy is resource allocation, so at the heart of a strategic manager’s work is their ability to effectively allocate their limited resources. When a manager has had success, it is common to continue to allocate resources in the same manner that led to that success. However, as the context of the business changes in the form of market trends, evolving customer needs, new competitor offerings, etc., the resource allocation formula that led to that success will need to be renewed.
Action: Take time during the quarterly Strategy Tune-up sessions to evaluate the assumptions on which resource allocation decisions have been made. This will eliminate the business-as-usual mindset that causes many successful managers to be cast into business purgatory.

Be on guard for the seven sins of strategy, for repentance alone won’t guarantee business salvation. Salvation will come to those with a dedication to strategic thinking excellence.

About the Author:
Rich Horwath is an author, professor and speaker who helps management teams develop their strategic thinking skills to achieve competitive advantage. He is the president of the Strategic Thinking Institute, a former Chief Strategy Officer and professor of strategy at the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management. Rich is the author of four books including his most recent, “Strategy Espresso.” For more information, contact Rich at (847) 756-4707, or to receive a free copy of his monthly e-publication Strategic Thinker, visit www.strategyskills.com

San Francisco has always been at the forefront of the green movement, especially now with hybrid taxis, a ban on plastic bags, a solar-paneled convention center, a solar-paneled scoreboard at AT&T ballpark and scores of hotels, restaurants attractions and tours doing their part.

The San Francisco Convention & Visitors Bureau (SFCVB) calls this ardor for the environment "ecothusiasm" and has developed a new section on its Web site, www.onlyinsanfrancisco.com/green, to show visitors, meeting planners and businesses how to take their own “ecothusiasm" to a deeper shade of green.

"San Francisco is on the cutting edge of the environmental movement, it's really part of the city's personality.  Our new Web pages provide resources and information for everyone who wants to learn about what they can do to join this worldwide effort," says Joe D'Alessandro, SFCVB president and CEO.

A new blog on the SFCVB site, Eco411, contains ideas and information about planet-friendly businesses and activities.  Links to the Mayor’s office and San Francisco’s Department of the Environment provide readers with information about the City’s commitment to reducing everyone’s carbon footprint. 

For visitors, there's a section on "Green Your Trip." The city's extensive public transportation system is highlighted as a way to save money while saving the planet and getting around like a true San Franciscan.

The "Green Your Meeting" section provides information about the award-winning Moscone Center, one of the world's most environmentally responsible convention centers. Meeting planners will find resources and tips for increasing attendance while reducing impact.

The "Green Your Business" is designed for SFCVB members and any business that wants to take the next steps by pursuing best practices and certification programs.

The Center on Ecotourism and Sustainable Development (CESD) is proud to announce the publication of the new edition of Ecotourism and Sustainable Development: Who Owns Paradise? by CESD Co-Director, Dr. Martha Honey.   First published in 1999, Who Owns Paradise? has been highly acclaimed as the most comprehensive study of both the theory and practice of ecotourism.  In the new edition, Honey updates her original chapter-length case studies on Costa Rica, the Galapagos, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Kenya, and South Africa, and  adds a fascinating new chapter – the first ever analysis of ecotourism in the United States.  In the three opening chapters, Honey examines how ecotourism emerged in the late 1970s as a reaction to growing concerns about the negative social, environmental, and economic impacts of mainstream tourism.  By the early 1990s, ecotourism was said to be the fastest growing sector of the tourism industry, and today, it is reportedly growing three times faster than the industry as a whole.

 The new edition, which took four years to complete and involved a team of some dozen researchers spread across all the case study countries, marks a major rewrite of the original book.  “It is stunning how much ecotourism has grown over the last decade,” says Honey.  “I quickly found that I couldn’t simply do a new edition by revising statistics and dates.  Rather, whole new concepts, trends, and terms have recently emerged within the field of ecotourism.”

 This edition covers, for instance, the growth of ‘green’ certification programs that measure environmental and social impacts of tourism businesses and the emergence of travelers’ philanthropy as a form of development assistance flowing from tourism businesses and travelers to social and environmental projects in host communities. It also examines new varieties of ecotourism such as voluntourism (holidays that include service projects), agritourism (which encompasses protection of family farms, the Slow Food Movement, and organics), and sustainable tourism (which incorporates some of ecotourism’s principles and good practices into mainstream tourism businesses).   

 The new volume describes recent ecotourism events, most importantly the United Nations’ International Year of Ecotourism in 2002 which, Honey argues, signified that ecotourism had “evolved from a good idea in the 1970s into, by the new millennium, a global economic tool for poverty alleviation and environmental protection.”  The most important current development, says Honey, “is ecotourism’s response to the threat of global warming. This includes adopting new technologies and architectural designs that reduce dependence on fossil fuels and the promotion of credible carbon offset programs to mitigate the impacts of air travel by providing funds to protect forests and support the development of clean energy.”

   Honey is no detached academic or armchair travel writer.  Rather she is fully engaged in the topic, as co-founder and Co-Director of CESD, a policy oriented research center with offices in Washington , DC and at Stanford University .  She also served for four years as Executive Director of The International Ecotourism Society (TIES).  Prior to TIES, Honey observed firsthand the emergence of ecotourism while living and working for two decades in Tanzania and Costa Rica as a foreign correspondent .

 The book, published by Island Press and bearing the CESD logo, is the first in a new series of CESD books. The second in the series, Ecotourism and Conservation in the Americas by Amanda Stonza and Dr. William Durham will be published later in 2008 by CABI Press. Dr. Durham, a professor of anthropology at Stanford University, is co-founder and Co-Director of CESD.

Island Press Executive Editor Todd Baldwin says pre-publication sales of the new edition have been brisk and he predicts the new edition will be as popular as its predecessor with academics, environmentalists, development agencies, journalists, and ordinary travelers.  

Order online at www.islandpress.org.

“Each year, the public's interest in responsible tourism grows,” says Jeff Greenwald, Executive Director of Ethical Traveler, and co-author of the group's biannual report. “This report helps travelers who choose to use their tourism dollars to support human rights and the environment.”

In alphabetical order, the 2008 list of the world's most ethical travel destinations according to Ethical Traveler is:

• Argentina

• Bolivia

• Bulgaria

• Chile

• Croatia

• Costa Rica

• Estonia

• Namibia

• Nicaragua

• South Africa

“For this report, we use publicly available data to rate the world's developing countries based on their commitment to environmental protection, social welfare and human rights.” says Christy Hoover, co-author of the report.

Data sources include the United Nations Development Program, UNICEF, Columbia University and Yale. The full report can be viewed at www.ethicaltraveler.org/destinations

Ethical Traveler is an international alliance of travelers who believe that travel can be a powerful tool for international goodwill and cultural understanding. The group seeks to harness the political and economic clout of tourism to support human rights and the environment. Ethical Traveler is a project of the Earth Island Institute.