Hoshin Kanri is a seven-step strategy deployment method that connects an organization’s long-term direction to annual objectives, team priorities, measurable targets, and accountable owners. Also called Hoshin planning or policy deployment, it gives leaders and frontline teams a shared system for deciding what matters and translating it into action.

The method combines breakthrough objectives, two-way catchball conversations, the Hoshin X matrix, and the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle. The result is not a static annual plan. It is a recurring management rhythm for aligning resources, reviewing evidence, solving problems, and learning from execution.

Corporate strategy sets the overall direction of an organization: which businesses and markets it will compete in, how resources will be allocated, how the portfolio fits together, and what tradeoffs leadership is willing to make.

Those choices matter because business can be tooth and claw. In tooth-and-claw corporate competition, strategy helps the organization win the war for focus without treating every tactical move as a separate battle. A strong strategy aligns structure, resources, and execution before competition exposes the gaps.

Who is Kanye West? A musical genius, a passionate campaigner, or a spontaneous communicator whose unplanned words can outrun their intent? Celebrity outbursts make vivid examples, but the underlying risk applies to any organization: a message sent without a plan can damage trust before anyone has time to correct it.

A strong communication plan replaces improvisation with clear audiences, messages, owners, channels, timing, approvals, and feedback. It helps a team prepare for and prevent disaster during everyday work, campaigns, and crises, when speed matters but accuracy matters more.

I’m writing a post about Airbnb, from an Airbnb.

Ironic yes, but not unlikely.

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“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” wrote George Santayana. Business mistakes are rarely that dramatic, but the principle still applies: someone has already tested a similar idea, process, or organization and left clues about what worked.

Greek philosophers were not management consultants, but their arguments about truth, virtue, failure, and reason map surprisingly well onto business. These nine thinkers offer practical ways to question assumptions, improve processes, manage risk, learn from setbacks, build stronger cultures, and make better decisions. The stranger stories make the lessons easier to remember.

BizOps, short for business operations, is the operating layer that turns strategy into decisions, owners, metrics, and repeatable work. The case for it is still simple: PMI’s 2018 Pulse of the Profession reported that organizations waste 9.9% of every dollar because of poor project performance, and a Broadcom / Harvard Business Review Analytic Services survey found that 89% of executives said BizOps could significantly improve decision making by improving collaboration between IT and business teams.

That matters even more now that operations teams use automation, analytics, and AI agents to make decisions closer to the work. This is why execs swear by BizOps in a modern org: advanced decision making plus checklists turns strategy into follow-through. A strong BizOps function gives leaders one place to connect strategy and operations, test whether initiatives are working, and turn the answer into workflows people actually follow.
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Customer success metrics usually tell you where an account is right now. A customer health score can show risk, engagement, sentiment, support load, and account value. That snapshot matters, but it does not show whether the customer is moving toward the outcome they actually bought your product to achieve.

That is where customer success vectors are useful. A customer success vector adds direction and magnitude to your customer success KPIs: where the customer is today, where they need to go, and how quickly they are moving toward that desired outcome.

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Product-led growth changes the customer success job. Instead of waiting for an account manager to create every next step, customers discover value inside the product, adoption data shows where momentum is building, and the customer success team turns those signals into repeatable expansion plays.

The best product-led customer success metrics connect that motion end to end: acquisition, adoption, retention, and expansion. They inform product-led expansion growth strategy, reduce customer acquisition cost, improve customer lifetime value, and build expansion revenue without losing the human workflows behind customer outcomes.

Value capture is the whole point of an acquisition. Companies will spend more than $2 trillion on M&A this year, and most of that capital will fail to do what the deal memo promised. Harvard Business Review puts the failure rate at 70 to 90 percent. Deloitte’s 2025 M&A study found 47% of executives admit their last deal underperformed expectations. The work that separates the winners from the losers is not the deal. It is the four operating decisions that follow it.

When the strategy is wrong, the cleanest version of acquisitions like Daimler Chrysler and Sprint/Nextel stick to a balance sheet for a generation. When it is right, you end up looking like the Apple of acquisitions: dozens of quiet bolt-ons, a clear thesis, and compounding value year after year. The difference comes down to four levers that drive roughly 80% of the value capture in successful deals.

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In the book The Balanced Scorecard, by David Norton and Robert Kaplan, it is noted that 90% of organizations fail to execute their pre-set strategy.

This is a concerning statistic when you consider that, for a majority of companies considered successful, an emphasis is placed on having formal and pre-established systems to inform, manage, and meet their strategic obligations.

In this sense, can we not infer executing business strategy = business success?

To bridge this gap between strategic ambition and business performance, Process Street has created a Strategic Planning Template, which you can use – for free – right away!

By executing the steps given in this template you will not only develop good strategy, but the delivery of this strategy will also prove successful.

Click here to access our free Strategic Planning Template!

But to accommodate this template, you need to have a solid understanding of strategic planning itself.

In this article, I’ll discuss what strategic planning is, the different strategic planning models – with an emphasis on the Cascade Strategic Planning Model -, why strategic planning is important, and more.

Click on the links below to read through:

• What is strategic planning?
• Strategic management vs strategic planning: What is the difference between these 2 terms?
• Why strategic planning is important
• What are strategic planning models?
• Use Process Street’s strategy planning template to document your strategic plan
• Strategic plan outline: Framework, structure, and governance
• Other strategic planning models and how you can implement them via Process Street

Let’s jump straight to it!
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