How you can improve your strategic thinking

What is strategic thinking?

• Think ahead, identify trends and devise strategies to take advantage of opportunities.
• Understand the range of issues and variables that impact company’s success and applies these to decision making.
• Recognize vulnerabilities and competitor threats.
• See farther into the future.
• Think globally.

To improve in strategic thinking, ask yourself:

• What do we do best?
• What could we improve?
• How can we turn our strengths into opportunities?
• What obstacles do we face?
• How can I challenge current assumptions about what we do?
• Who will be our competitors five to ten years from now?
• How will people use our products/services in the next ten years?
• How will new technologies affect our markets?
• What discoveries or trends in other fields will be useful to our business?
• How can political and economic changes affect our business?
• When did I last take steps to turn strategic vision into reality?
• With whom should we partner to increase our competitive advantage?

Train your strategic thinking

• Ask your manager for feedback on your understanding of business trends and global implications
• Work to articulate the business issues of your team. Ask others to challenge your assumptions and projections.
• Research a key competitor, analyze their products, presente recommendations for dealing with them at a staff meeting.
• Collect data on your customers and what their needs and requirements are. Analyze what competitors are doing in respond to customer needs.
• Discover how different units are working and how each might benefit from solutions and technologies that overlap.
• Develop a forecast for the business future of your team or unit. Ask for feedback.
• Develop a strategic plan to take advantage of the global business implications of your products/services. 
• Identify a business problem or deficiency in your unit and write a plan to solve it. 
• Think four years ahead and identify what different industries will have moved into your markets.
• Get involved in a cross functional group and look at the business from different points of view.
• Challenge your strategic thinking. Ask yourself if you are maintaining a balance between futuristic thinking and present need for accomplishments.