Social Enterprise Strategic Vision or Confusion
Enterprises, as their beacon to the future, need to craft their visions for the next five years. Unfortunately, change is happening at a blistering pace such as shifts in economy; shifts in local and global market; emerging technologies; climate change; economic upheavals from developed countries affecting developing countries. Furthermore, the internet revolution spawning new business models and replacing obsolete models. These are rather to heady for those who are running social enterprises.
Large enterprises, on the other hand can afford to have a team of highly paid and highly educated strategic planners armed with MBAs and PhDs, and probably working with think-tank partner organizations to jointly craft a large enterprise's strategic direction blueprint.
Social enterprises, on the other hand, may also be crafting their own strategic direction, but most probably, without the help of highly paid and highly educated specialists on strategic planning. Social enterprises, more specifically, the social entrepreneurs are left to themselves to craft their vision armed only with idealism and limited information and with a lot of guesses. The best that a social enterprise can do is to assess its current situation using the SWOT analysis tool and come out with strategic actions based on the outcome of the analysis.
However, relevant information on macro and micro economic, political, technological, social trends that will affect the social enterprise in the future will be a bit difficult to secure. An honest internal assessment of the social enterprise will also be quite difficult to secure which would require a more objective approach and can only be provided by an impartial outside consultant.
Due to rapid changes, limited resources for planning, and the tendency to focus on short term outcomes would discourage strategic planning by social enterprises, more so, its execution. This situation might influence planners of social enterprises to become wary of planning for the next five years to ten years. They might say that "the plan will not be relevant when the time comes" or "we are going to be off-course or if we set our sights too long" or "we will miss nearby future opportunities if we rigidly stick to our 5 year plan."
If ever a long term strategic plan will be crafted, this might only serve as press release materials for the enterprise profile and website information. Planning and execution will still happen on a daily basis which is simply shortsighted and tends to be reactive rather than purposive. The social enterprise positioning will unfortunately be dictated or swept away by the vagaries of circumstances in the milieu that it operates. The enterprise will be like a "ship without a rudder." If this happens vision then becomes confusion.
Large enterprises, on the other hand can afford to have a team of highly paid and highly educated strategic planners armed with MBAs and PhDs, and probably working with think-tank partner organizations to jointly craft a large enterprise's strategic direction blueprint.
Social enterprises, on the other hand, may also be crafting their own strategic direction, but most probably, without the help of highly paid and highly educated specialists on strategic planning. Social enterprises, more specifically, the social entrepreneurs are left to themselves to craft their vision armed only with idealism and limited information and with a lot of guesses. The best that a social enterprise can do is to assess its current situation using the SWOT analysis tool and come out with strategic actions based on the outcome of the analysis.
However, relevant information on macro and micro economic, political, technological, social trends that will affect the social enterprise in the future will be a bit difficult to secure. An honest internal assessment of the social enterprise will also be quite difficult to secure which would require a more objective approach and can only be provided by an impartial outside consultant.
Due to rapid changes, limited resources for planning, and the tendency to focus on short term outcomes would discourage strategic planning by social enterprises, more so, its execution. This situation might influence planners of social enterprises to become wary of planning for the next five years to ten years. They might say that "the plan will not be relevant when the time comes" or "we are going to be off-course or if we set our sights too long" or "we will miss nearby future opportunities if we rigidly stick to our 5 year plan."
If ever a long term strategic plan will be crafted, this might only serve as press release materials for the enterprise profile and website information. Planning and execution will still happen on a daily basis which is simply shortsighted and tends to be reactive rather than purposive. The social enterprise positioning will unfortunately be dictated or swept away by the vagaries of circumstances in the milieu that it operates. The enterprise will be like a "ship without a rudder." If this happens vision then becomes confusion.
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