This newsletter is a regularly published communication for clients, friends and associates of LBL Strategies, Ltd. It provides timely news, articles and information on planning technology product development and updates. 

Note from the Editor…

Autumn is upon us here in Chicago and the Cubs are looking like the NL’s Central Division champions…finally! Here at LBL we welcome a new “free agent” to our team. He is Dr. Earl Young. Young has long been friend and a respected colleague of ours and within Chicago’s university business education community. Welcome Earl!

For most organizations this time of year is busy with budget setting for the next fiscal year. In this issue we take a brief succinct look at the importance of evaluating past performance when setting priorities for the future. To steal shamelessly from baseball…this is the “second season” for board and staff strategic action. Together they must take the field and work to evaluate current strategies in light if what has been achieved (and not!), refine their key strategic initiatives for the coming year and assign financial resources required to make them happen. This is crunch time in an organization’s strategy management cycle and having the right set of metrics makes a critical difference in how decisions will be made.

We offer up an article from BoardSource by a fellow Illinoisan Peter Brinkenhoff entitled “Generating Change.” In it Peter cites six important trends facing the nonprofit world when it comes to the shifting sands of generational change in the workforce. We appreciate Brinkerhoff’s framing of the issues and offering up key questions organizations should ask themselves to prepare for these changes over next ten years. We hope you find it informative and enlightening.

Finally, we are excited to announce our collaboration with the Association for Strategic Planning (ASP / www.strategyplus.org) to deliver LBL’s certificate program in strategy management online. Heretofore our program has been “MBA focused” and university-based taking a full semester. We are working with ASP to adapt content and delivery to provide the professional strategic planning consultant community with a web-based option meeting their needs. We will be launching the program in 2008 and provide more details in our January newsletter. Stay tuned!

As always we welcome your questions and feedback by emailing us at rfaulkner@lblstrategies.com. Go Cubs!

© 2007
LBL Strategies, Ltd.

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Included in this Edition:

• Editorial / Thoughts on Evaluating Strategic Performance
• New Sheriff In Town
• Generating Change
• Chicago ASP Event

Editorial

'The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley'

Often paraphrased as 'The best-laid plans of mice and men / Go oft awry' this poem by Robert Burns in 1785 was included in the Kilmarnock volume also known as Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. As the legend goes, Burns wrote the poem after, as the poem suggests, turning up the winter nest of a mouse on his farm. (From Wikipedia/2007) Read More>>>

New Sheriff In Town

 LBL Strategies, Ltd is pleased to announce the addition of Dr. Earl Young to the fold as our Director of Education and Training Services. Dr. Young’s distinguished career as a university educator includes being Professor Emeritus for Management at DePaul University where over the course of 25 years he taught strategic management, operations management, and quantitative techniques while designing and introducing graduate and undergraduate curriculum in management and service management, quality management, operations strategy, innovation management and operations auditing. Prior to teaching at DePaul University, Dr. Young taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the State University of New York at Albany, where he taught business policy and operations management. Read More>>>

The "Web" and web applications are the information tools of today. Younger generations expect maximum access having grown up (literally) using the web while those of us (ahem) of older generations adopt increased use as we find valuable tools that support the work we do. No matter what point on the generation spectrum you find yourself the web is increasingly where work gets done and our information resides.

The following article by Peter Brinckerhoff addresses this as one amongst many important “generation” issues impacting the world we work in. Thanks to our good friends at BoardSource for allowing us to reprint Peter’s important ruminations and questions about change in generations. This is essential information for any organization to pay attention to in their next planning effort. Enjoy…   

Generating Change  By Peter Brinckerhoff, President, Corporate Alternatives, Inc. Springfield, IL

Reprinted with permission from the September/October 2007 edition of Board Member, Volume 16, Number 5, a publication of BoardSource, formerly the National Center for Nonprofit Boards. For more information about BoardSource, call 800-883-6262 or visit www.boardsource.org. BoardSource © 2007. Read More>>>

 Join Us October 23rd

The Chicago Chapter of the Association for Strategic Planning is kicking off its fall schedule of downtown “over lunch” speaker events and the first promises to be outstanding.  Dr. Mark Frigo, Professor of Strategy at the Kellstadt Graduate School of Business, DePaul University, will present What’s Missing in Your Strategic Plan: Lessons from Return Driven Strategy.  The event will be held October 23, 2007 from 11:30-1:30 at DePaul University’s Conference Center located at 1 East Jackson. Click “Read More” for complete details on the event, Dr. Frigo and the Chicago Chapter of the Association for Strategic Planning.