Description: Strategy experts, even after doing SWOT analyses, tend to focus on the O of opportunity rather than the T in threat. After all, seizing market opportunities, and turning them into a sustainable competitive advantage, is the Holy Grail of strategy making. But as the recent stream of news stories about big data breaches shows, insufficient attention to nonmarket threats can hobble otherwise market-savvy organizations. In this workshop we demystify cybersecurity, an issue all organizational strategists must consider, but due to its technically complex veneer is frequently relegated to backroom IT staff. (That is, until there is a cybersecurity crisis.) We will pay special attention to the ways in which strategists can bridge communications between senior managers, who are often more comfortable talking about markets, and security professionals, who are often unversed in the benefits of strategy, vision, and line-of-sight to overarching business goals.
Presenter: Kitty McCoy is President and CEO of Kansas City, Missouri-based Enterprise Control Systems, Inc., a firm that specializes in data security and SME business information architecture. Bringing a strategy mindset to data security issues, she is also a senior associate with the Balance Scorecard Institute. Kitty’s background also includes extensive public sector experience. She was previously Executive Director of The Kansas City Regional
Transit Alliance.
Learning Track: Advanced Theory & Practice
Description: Strategy professionals have voracious informational appetites, especially for actionable intelligence. We gather competitive intelligence, for instance, to benchmark against current competitors, or business intelligence, to interpolate from operational data. While both forms of intelligence can be helpful, they rely on past or present observations to project a linear future. Since the world doesn’t move in straight lines, a powerful alternative is futures intelligence: a way of playing with future worlds and visions so we can imagine designs, experiences, and strategies much different from those constrained by our spreadsheet comfort levels.
In this workshop we learn how to innovate using futures intelligence.
Presenter: Frank Spencer is a Principal and Creative Director at Kedge, a global foresight, innovation, creativity, and strategic design consultancy. He has worked on Strategic Foresight projects for companies such as Kraft,
Mars, Marriott, and The Walt Disney Company. He is a published author and prolific speaker, having delivered presentations and workshops around the globe.
Learning Track: Cutting Edge

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Description: Although mission statement writing has become a standard component of strategic management practice, it is regularly treated as a perfunctory exercise in wordsmithery. As a result, stakeholders not only feel uninspired, they grapple to find alternative organizational purposes, and in doing so, stir undercurrents of conflicting interest. In this workshop we reorient the relationship between stakeholders and mission. We start with two core ideas: First, every organization must identify and cultivate relationships with its stakeholders, and second, harnessing the imaginative capacities of those stakeholders is key to organizational success. We build on these ideas to show how smart organizational leaders leverage stakeholder creativity and resources to build innovative capacity while keeping the organization on track toward a deeper sense of purpose.
Presenter: Paul R. Ratoff, SMP , CMC, is president of Strategy Development Group, Inc. For the past thirty-five years he has helped a wide range of middle-market companies plan and manage their success. Paul has published numerous articles in the areas of strategic and financial management, and he is the author of “Thriving in a New
Stakeholder World, Purpose as the New Competitive Advantage.”
Learning Track: Leadership
Description: It has been said that technology is the wellspring of all competitive advantage—your organization is successful because it knows something other organizations don’t. The problem is that the half-life of organizational competency keeps getting shorter, and as a result, it’s getting harder to generate new revenue from an old technology core. Addressing this problem requires a paradigm shift. Rather than trying to increase what your organization knows, its better to accelerate how your organization learns. In this workshop we look at how modifying your organization’s learning process, especially by changing how employees interact, leads to deeper insights that you can take to market more quickly. The presenters, who respectively work as a strategic planner, an operations manager, and a technology lead will demonstrate how new collaborative work relationships helped their engineering firm get more “Gee!” from its technology.
Presenters: Vince DiPofi, Jr., Lauren Collier & Dan Vining are hi-vis leaders at SSOE Group, an international engineering, procurement, and construction management firm. Vince is Executive Vice President and Chief
Strategy Officer, Lauren spearheads SSOE’s virtual design and construction initiative, and Dan is the firm’s general manager, which includes high level responsibility for strategic and project planning.
Learning Track: Interdisciplinary Synergy
Description: In today’s hyper-competitive environment, many organizations are jumping on the Lean bandwagon. Many big manufacturers, for instance, have become famous for their relentless pursuit of higher quality at lower cost. But there is more to Lean than just systematically rooting out causes of defects and inefficiencies, and the benefits of Lean need not be confined to those who churn out widgets and gadgets.
Instead, we can think of Lean as a conceptual palette that, part science, part art, can help any organization launch strategies that do more with less. The key to success is to make the right choices about how to use this palette in your strategic context. In this workshop we quickly get up to speed about why and how more organizations are adopting Lean strategies. Then we look at a range of advanced Lean concepts that can be thoughtfully combined in order to make better strategic choices.
Presenter: Gary E. Kapanowski is a financial whiz kid at Moeller Manufacturing, a Michigan-based OEM supplier to the aerospace and aircraft industries. Certified as a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, Gary is passionate about creating cost data streams to inform strategic choices.
Gary is also on the editorial board of the Journal of Cost Management and has authored numerous articles on Lean concepts.
Learning Track: Advanced Theory & Practice

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Description: Let’s face it: Smart strategists often choose strategies that fail. We know that because organizations with smart strategists miss goals, lose ground, and even go bankrupt. While they don't do that intentionally, they also don't do it by accident: much about conventional strategy development causes, rather than prevents, mistakes. In this workshop we begin with the premise that a missing ingredient in strategic success is that strategists are primarily taught strategy-crafting techniques while strategy-appraising techniques are given short shrift. We also note that the gap is biggest when it counts the most—before a strategy is adopted. To fill this gap we look at a pre-execution strategy appraisal framework. We also look at a technology that facilitates appraisal, along with evidence that it works.
Presenter: Mark Chussil is the Founder and CEO of Advanced Competitive Strategies, Inc. and an instructor in the Pamplin School of Business Administration at the University of Portland. He’s written 3 books, chapters for
5 others, and writes regularly for Competing.com
and the Harvard Business Review blog. He has appeared in Fast
Company , Harvard Management Update , the New York Times , and the Wall Street Journal .
Learning Track: Cutting Edge
Description: What do we do when good strategy goes bad? We latch onto platitudes about macroeconomic weakness, cheap substitutes, misaligned marketing tactics, shifts in the technological landscape, and so on. And then we go back to building strategy in the same way—relying on our internal data, industry experience, and oldfashioned wits to roll out another product based on our perceived competitive advantage. In other words, we remain myopic. In this workshop we reconsider static notions of competitive advantage and the strategies we build from them. We look at how innovative organizations unfold competitive advantage based on a steady stream of 360-degree assessments.
Presenter: Seena Sharp is a recognized pioneer in competitive intelligence, having established the first US company in 1979. She is the author of Competitive Intelligence Advantage: How to Minimize Risk, Avoid Surprises, and Grow Your Business in a Changing World.
Seena is an SCIP fellow, and an inductee into ASP’s Hall of Fame.
Learning Track: Leadership
Description: In recent years much has been written about the problematic “race to the bottom,” whereby organizations taking ethical shortcuts seemingly outperform their above-board rivals. But what if organizations and individuals don’t have to choose between viability and ethics? What if we can succeed—especially in the long-term—by using sustainability as our primary guide to innovation, production, marketing, and materials management activities? In this workshop, better called a “playshop,” we get introduced to butterfly economics: a lens for designing winning strategies that honor people, our shared planet, and the organization itself. Working in small teams, participants share and adapt strategies for integrating a systemic perspective into all aspects of their business. Session objectives include building a peer learning community among adult learners, itself a method for ensuring personal sustainability, and exploring practical strategies that see the integration of environmental, social, and economic systems as an organization’s natural path to long-term sustainability.
Presenters: Martina Doleshal is Principal Consultant with Doleshal Consulting Group of Oakland, CA; her practice is informed by extensive experience in the medical diagnostics and biotech industries, including commercial lifecycle planning, product development, and strategy creation. Darshan Elena Campos, Ph.D., is a learning consultant and a Fulbright Specialist in Education. An active researcher, she focuses on educational transformation, systemic change, and the development of educational ecosystems.

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Description: Organizations across all sectors and countries use the balanced scorecard approach to track business performance against targets. Such “dashboard” applications, while often helpful, only skim the surface of what is potentially a more robust tool with much deeper potential. At more advanced levels, an organization’s scorecard shapes its management practice, builds employee alignment to vision and mission, and transforms the culture to better serve customers and stakeholders. This workshop explains how to move your existing scorecard to this advanced level, or if you are just starting, how to build and implement a 21st century strategic management system based on the balanced scorecard. Takeaways focus on how an organization can become more strategy focused, lead strategically, prioritize initiatives, measure what really matters, communicate strategy more clearly, and align employees to organization vision and mission.
Presenter: Howard Rohm, SMP, is the Co-Founder, President and CEO of the Balanced Scorecard Institute. A prolific speaker, he has taught thousands of people about performance measurement, strategic planning, balanced scorecard, and strategic management. Within ASP he is recognized as a contributor to the Body of
Knowledge, and as a Strategic Planning Pioneer. He also serves on the certification committee and the ASP board of directors.
Learning Track: Advanced Theory & Practice
Description: Traditional thinking about growth strategies poses a tough choice: Either you make big, risky bets outside your company’s core business, or you stay focused on your core business, go with what works, and hope you don’t end up as a fossil while new competitors bloom. But what if this is a false choice? What if there are ways for your company to grow its profitability by investing less money, and taking less risk, while seeing quicker returns and making customers happier? This is the question we explore in this workshop. Specifically, we learn about “edge strategies,” ways to capitalize on those profitable opportunities that often hide in plain sight. We learn how to develop the pattern recognition and other skills necessary to spot these opportunities and make the most of them.
Presenter: Alan Lewis is a Managing Director and Partner in L.E.K. Consulting's Boston office and co-leads Edge
Strategy™ services at L.E.K. He is also the co-author of the just-released Edge Strategy™ book from Harvard
Business Review Press, “Edge Strategy: A New Mindset for Profitable Growth.” He has more than 12 years of experience working on a wide variety of projects, including corporate strategy development, new product development and commercialization, mergers and acquisitions support, program management, and organizational improvement.
Prior to joining L.E.K.'s London office in 2003, Alan spent five years with chemicals multinationals Imperial
Chemical Industries PLC and INEOS. Alan received a Bachelor of Engineering in Chemical Engineering from the
University College Dublin. He is qualified as a professional engineer with the Institute of Chemical Engineers in the U.K. and holds a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of Cambridge.
Learning Track: Cutting Edge

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Description: This highly interactive “train-the-trainer” program provides a big-picture overview of how to assess a strategic environment. It provides concepts and tools to help lead teams to think strategically, align strategic objectives to action plans, and engage critical stakeholders to improve performance, ensure accountability, and manage change. The ability to focus day-to-day decisions through the lens of the total enterprise is critical to make maximum use of resources while building a competitive edge. This workshop will train each participant to take leadership teams through a fast-paced, interactive experience to apply strategic thinking skills in their organization.
Presenters: Doug Maris, SMP, has over 25 years’ executive leadership and strategy experience. As Senior
Director of Business Development he developed, launched, and led a strategic planning cycle for a large nonprofit organization with 2,200 employees and a $175 million annual budget.
Learning Track: Leadership
Description: Complex, mature, big budget organizations often produce green books that detail their strategic plans. By contrast, small budget organizations don’t have the resources for elaborate planning, and especially in startup phases, require extreme agility to cope with heightened volatility. In light of these constraints, small budget organizations often think they can just “wing it” and avoid any form of strategy development discipline.
Because this cure can be more lethal than the disease, however, the secret to successful small budget strategic planning isn’t to miniaturize what complex organizations do, the secret is to follow a model better suited to shoestring size. Enter the world of software development, where rapid prototyping is common, and throwaway experiments valued for what they reveal about the evolving interactions of people and systems. In this workshop we learn how adapting a software development mindset can lead to a different kind of strategic discipline, one that is well suited to extremely lean organizations.
Presenter: Sonali Kothari is Chief Operating Officer at Kiva.org, a nonprofit that has orchestrated half a billion dollars in microloans, empowering small entrepreneurs in 73 countries. Called the "hottest non-profit on the planet" by FORTUNE magazine, and a Top 50 Website by TIME, Kiva’s mission is to alleviate global poverty.
Learning Track: Interdisciplinary Synergy
Description: For some, the “balanced scorecard” brand is a bit old school. This is partly due to its accounting origins, and some recent critiques that it only works under “command and control” management. Today’s “sense and respond” enterprises are told to embrace performance management approaches that stimulate engagement and agility. Yet many strategy professionals find that strict allegiance to agile approaches fosters unnecessary chaos, and to organizational detriment, fails to link learning and process excellence to financial and market performance – the great virtues of the balanced scorecard. To ensure the proverbial baby isn’t thrown out with the bathwater, in this workshop we help strategists extend their existing understanding of balanced scorecard approaches. We look at a few “mods” to the balanced scorecard that can integrate disciplined strategy execution with engagement and agility.
Presenter: Dan Montgomery is Founder and Managing Director of Colorado-based Agile Strategies, which among other services provides training and facilitation in strategic agility practices. He is also co-author of The Institute
Way: Simplify Strategic Planning and Management with the Balanced Scorecard .
Learning Track: Advanced Theory & Practice

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Description: Change is the bane of every strategic plan’s existence. As soon as the ink dries, along comes a change that renders the plan obsolete. To cope, writers of strategic plans often think they just need to accelerate their revision cycle. What they really need is to stop writing altogether. Rather than pushing out wordy strategic plans, they need to learn how to create strategic models. In this workshop we learn how to quickly translate our strategic thinking into innovative, visually compelling strategic models. Borrowing good design technique, which balances creativity with rigor, we get our hands dirty as we invent business models that capture our value propositions and the business processes we need to deliver them.
Presenters: Maaike Doyer, Strategy Designer at Business Models, Inc., supports organizations with strategy, innovation, new business model design and validation. She also teaches executive MBA students in Europe and is a mentor at Startup Bootcamp. Justin Lokitz is also with Business Models, Inc., and heads the Silicon Valley and
San Francisco offices. His experience includes managing products and strategies for Autodesk and Oracle, along with several small startups.
Learning Track: Cutting Edge
Description: In this collaborative workshop we review and discuss approaches to innovation, look at how innovation strategy frameworks can be used to monitor changing business models, and consider how we may better manage the tension between short-term performance results and long-term innovation strategy. By using a uniquely designed game, participants experience the real-world decision making tensions faced by their management teams and boards. As we work together, we practice the art of team formation and collaborative leadership.
Presenter: Chris Hafner is Vice President of Strategy & Director of European Operations at London-based Newton
Consulting. He is a Fellow of the 48 year-old Strategic Planning Society where he serves as a Trustee and
Chairman of the Board. Chris is also head of the Editorial Review Board for Strategy magazine.
Track: Leadership
Description: Seasoned strategists know that it is much easier to set organizational goals than to translate those goals into executable projects which deliver concrete results. This is especially true in complex and fast-moving environments, or with projects that involve intangibles, process, and change. This is exactly the challenge that
USAID needed to tackle, and their solution was the Logical Framework Approach (LFA), an elegant way of leveraging causal thinking to connect strategic planning activities to the project management lifecycle. This workshop covers the key LFA concepts and the four critical strategic questions, and then shows how to apply them to strategic initiatives of all types and sizes in any sector. This interactive session blends solid theory with practical steps and plenty of insightful take-aways to apply on the job as well as in your personal life.
Presenter: Terry Schmidt, SMP, is President of Seattle-based ManagementPro.com. He is the author of Strategic
Project Management Made Simple: Practical Tools for Leaders and Teams, and six other books on business and life strategy. A consummate educator, Terry teaches through the UCLA Technical Management Program, and the MIT Professional Institute.
Track: Interdisciplinary Synergy

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Description: Strategic planning is an aspiring activity: we set priorities, focus energy and resources, align around common goals, and agree on desired outcomes. But measuring strategic success is often not easy, as priorities, goals, and desired outcomes are often articulated as abstract and vague ideals that are not obviously measureable. As a result, many KPIs often miss the mark, and inform only on the more obvious and less strategic elements of the plan, such as project milestones and operational efficiencies. Given the subjective qualities often inherent in missions, visions, and strategies, can KPIs be used to formulate and implement strategy? The answer is a resounding “Yes!” and in this workshop we look at how to develop meaningful KPIs that boost enterpriselevel success. We pay special attention to common KPI bad habits, learning how to replace them with good habits that will empower strategy teams. Participants will see how meaningful and strong KPIs provide insight into whether strategies are working, whether programs, projects and services are effective, and whether employees' attention is focused on what matters most to success.
Presenter: Joe is the Vice President of International Operations and Senior Consultant at the Balanced
Scorecard Institute , as well as a senior consulting associate, who has 40+ years of extensive experience in business structuring, strategy formulation/implementation including balanced scorecard use, change management, and the design/execution of innovative operational business models/solutions in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors with first-line and executive level management positions. Joe’s experiences included profit and loss responsibilities, in information technology (hardware and software), consulting, education, and publishing with the IBM Corporation, university senior management and instructor at the
Milwaukee School of Engineering, alumnus of the inaugural executive-in-residence program for technology start-ups at the Plug and Play Technology incubator in Sunnyvale, CA, and consultant/instructor with the
Balanced Scorecard Institute. Joe is certified by BSI and the George Washington University College of
Professional Studies as a certified Balanced Scorecard Master Professional and Project Manager Master
Professional as well as a certified Effective Facilitator through the Leadership Strategies Institute and a certified
Product Marketing Manager through the Pragmatic Marketing Institute. Joe has an MBA – Technology
Management – University of Phoenix and is a Doctoral candidate at the University of Phoenix.
Assignments and projects have been in numerous domestic and international locations including North
America, Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, England, France, Germany, Italy, China, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, India,
Ethiopia, South Africa, Ghana, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Puerto Rico, Federated States of Micronesia,
Guyana, Barbados and Saudi Arabia.
Learning Track: Advanced Theory & Practice

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Description: It is often said that the era of product strategies is rapidly dying, that the future belongs to service strategies, even if you imagine your revenues will come from selling tangibles. Against this evolution, the LEAD,
THINK, PLAN, ACT paradigm at the heart of ASP’s Body of Knowledge compels us to look for models that can boost our strategy-building power. This is where adopting a “service framework” enters in. For strategists, a service framework is an organization-agnostic, holistic view of who needs to be served and the services that the organization delivers. The service approach builds upon classic activities like environmental scanning, gap analysis, and prioritization, but replaces standard accountability models (such as a functional approach) that prevent cross-functional collaboration and investment success. In this workshop we look at a real world service framework and then consider how it can be used to leapfrog strategy in your organization.
Presenters: Jennifer Bigos, SPP, is a portfolio manager with Cisco Systems, Inc. She is also HR Program Manager for Cisco’s Enterprise Business Bonuses Program. Dart Lindsley is currently Senior Manager of Transformation
Planning and Analysis at Cisco Systems, Inc. Jen and Dart have both been with Cisco for more than 15 years, progressively rising in their ambit of responsibility.
Learning Track: Cutting Edge
Description: Innovative business strategy and major organizational change are often looked at as audacious or impossible to effect by the key participants who are needed to make change happen. Yet gaining active involvement of these participants is mandatory to effect change, and failure to build buy-in poses a major organizational risk. This workshop uses case studies to introduce and explore the concept of collaborative conversation as a way to solve this perennial problem. We explore business architecture model elements, design thinking, and other techniques to create an improved risk transformation environment of understanding and ownership.
Presenters: Bob Carlston is a management consultant with Virginia-based Konza Partners and serves on the board of the Business Architecture Guild. Jim Stockmal has helped numerous for-profit, nonprofit and governmental organizations effect transformative change. Jim also serves as Vice President of the Association for Strategic Planning and President of ASP’s National Capital Area chapter.
Learning Track: Leadership
Description: This interactive workshop will focus on combining research, synthesis, and collaboration to address a set of strategically relevant problems using a set of case studies. During the workshop participants will gain an introduction to Customer Experience and a crash course on its methods and tools and use this to address the case studies provided and break into teams to dive further. The teams will leverage journey mapping design framework to synthesis their work and draft a strategy for their customers. Then participants will rapidly prototype a strategic roadmap leveraging the Maga Map framework. With a complete map, the teams will discuss their strategic opportunity and ways in which to move forward.
Presenter: Scott Williams is the CEO and owner of the Maga Design Group based in Washington, DC. As an idea architect, as well as, a subject matter expert, Mr. Williams works with clients to develop strategies, marketing, and communications solutions across a wide variety of subjects including technology and operations. Maga develops new techniques for data visualization and electronic communication solutions and works with both government and commercial enterprises. Prior to founding Maga, Mr. Williams was managing director of
BrightMark Consulting and was deputy CIO for the Naval Air command (NAVAIR).
Learning Track: Interdisciplinary Synergy

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Description: The fast pace of the digital era brings a set of new questions to strategic planning: How do we capitalize on new, emerging opportunities without losing a sense of strategic direction? How do we address strategy refresh and design in a single process? What is the right cadence to develop / refresh the strategic plan?
How do we engage the right stakeholders without sacrificing effectiveness? Unfortunately, many organizations have not been able to address these fundamental questions, and some are even putting organizational agility ahead of a sound strategic planning process.
To answer these questions we need an inclusive methodology to identify and align the organization around key strategic priorities, coupled with ongoing monitoring of initiatives underway and assessment of new opportunities. In this workshop we learn how to build this alignment through a “learn-by-doing” approach. We engage with tools and solutions that facilitate effective engagement.
Presenters: Andres Mendoza Pena and Sean Ryan are partners at Chicago-based A.T. Kearney, where they work in the Strategy, Marketing and Sales practice. Andres is particularly experienced in U.S.-Latin American business, and startups. Sean primarily focuses on consumer products, healthcare, chemicals, high tech, and financial services.
Learning Track: Advanced Theory & Practice
Description: The term “strategic alignment” is regularly repeated in strategy circles, and understood to be a highly desired state in which everything the organization does advances a smart, coherent strategy. While the concept is simple, achieving it is not, especially as strategy, and the work needed to execute it, becomes increasingly complex. To tame this complexity, organizations need a steady process for managing their strategy lifecycle, as well as technological tools to facilitate it. In this workshop we examine a readily understandable fivephase approach to achieving strategic alignment. It includes discovering, envisioning, targeting, strategizing, and operationalizing. We also gain practice moving through the phases, including the use of enabling technology.
Presenter: Gary Cohen is CEO of Minneapolis-based CO2 Partners, LLC, an executive coaching firm. Gary is also the author of Just Ask Leadership: Why Great Leaders Always Ask the Right Questions.
Learning Track: Cutting Edge
Description: Conventional wisdom holds that established organizations are losing ground to start ups that disrupt their markets.
There may be some truth to this.
Armed with good intentions and mandates about “the right way to do things,” mature organizations often kill their employees’ creativity.
In this workshop we train our focus on a key resource that established organizations have and that startups typically lack: a deep reservoir of people.
Based on the simple idea that great ideas come from people, rather than organizations, we look at a pragmatic, proven method to resuscitate an organization’s creative flow—one that can help established organizations outinnovate startups.
Presenter: Yoram Solomon, PhD, is the founder of Dallas-area Large Scale Creativity, and author of Bowling with a Crystal Ball: How to predict technology trends, create disruptive implementations and navigate them through industry . He is also an elected member of the Plano Independent School District Board of Trustees, where he helps oversee the education of 55,000 students.
Learning Track: Leadership

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Description: You have a defined strategy. Great. Now comes the execution…and that’s where things can break down. Alignment and coordination are difficult enough with machine parts, but in your organizational machine, the parts are people – diverse, imperfect, fallible people. How do you ensure executional excellence when functional needs conflict and personalities collide? In this workshop, you will discover scalable tools and techniques to address such personnel challenges, enabling you to collaborate effectively with even those people that give you the biggest headaches.
Presenter: Brad Barbera is an author, speaker, trainer, and consultant in the field of innovation and product development. His book Keep Innovation Simple - Stop Playing Catch-up and Start Leading in a World of Constant
Change , brings thoroughly researched evidence-based principles to the field of innovation, while making the reading of a business book actually entertaining. With over twenty-five years of experience creating hundreds of new products and services, Brad has been bringing his experience and research to leaders of businesses and nonprofits as the Founder and Principal of Pi Innovation LLC since 2009. He is a certified New Product
Development Professional (NPDP), has served as the Executive Director of the Product Development and
Management Association (PDMA), and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Visions magazine. He’s also a competitive stair climber and a moderately competent chess player.
Learning Track: Interdisciplinary Synergy