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OPEN MINDS Management Newsletter

Learn about new business models and the latest management best practices in our monthly, how-to guides on trending issues. Knowing the market—and knowing how to manage your way to success in that market—are two different issues. For thirty years, we have shared our field-tested models developed by our senior advisors and case studies that illustrate the challenges and tips for success.

August 2021 Issue
Making Strategy Work: A Structured, Staffed, & Budgeted Approach: The OPEN MINDS Management Newsletter, August 2021
So You Have A Strategic Plan
What Next?

“Implementation is more important than strategy formulation. It should not be a question of developing a strategy and hoping it works, but of developing a strategy and following a logical plan to reach it. Creating the execution plan is difficult but certainly necessary and productive.”
Lawrence Hrebiniak, Professor Emeritus, Department of Management, The Wharton


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The OPEN MINDS Five-Step Cycle For Strategy Implementation

An executive survey across multiple industries indicated that while 67% of leaders believe their organization is good at crafting strategy, only 47% would say the same about implementation. Only 10% of organizations surveyed achieved 67% of their strategy objectives, while 36% achieved between 50%-67% and 54% achieved less than half of their objectives. And the


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If You Don’t Measure It, You Won’t Implement It: Setting Strategic Plan Metrics

As management guru Peter Drucker said, “What gets measures is what gets done.” The surest way to ensure implementation of the strategic plan is to translate the plan objectives into quantifiable metrics and to hold executive team members and managers and staff at all levels accountable to achieving those metrics. The question our team at


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The Devil Is In The Details: What Goes Into Your Strategy Implementation Workplan

“Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work”
Peter Drucker
What makes a strategy happen? Executives of the “best executing companies” attributed their success to the degree to which strategy is incorporated in day-today organizational operations, with good alignment with the organization’s business model (this was a global leadership survey published in Why Good Strategies Fail:


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Are Your Staffing Plan, Budget, & Operations In Tune With Your Strategic Plan?

Successful implementation of an organization’s strategic plan depends on many factors—having a data-driven strategy, monitoring performance against metrics, having a well-defined process and action plan, appropriate level of executive attention, communication, and collaboration. But one key issue is the inability of an organization’s human capital to change in order to make the plan successful. If


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Beyond The Strategic Plan: Keeping Leaders Engaged In Strategic Implementation

The chief executive officer and other members of the C-Suite often consider the job done after the strategic plan has been approved by stakeholders and shared with managers and team members. They go back to business as usual and expect that someone else will figure out plan implementation without articulating who needs to do that,


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How To Measure Progress & Course Correct Your Strategic Action Plan

Implementation of the strategic plan has to be an iterative rather than a rigid process, as should the evolution of the strategic plan itself. In order to achieve strategic objectives, leaders need to be willing to adjust their course, adapt to unforeseen changes in the landscape, and—if necessary—to modify the objectives. However any deviations from


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The EHR’s Role In An Increasingly Complex Behavioral Health Provider Ecosystem 

Behavioral health and human services providers, like their clients, must face and overcome new challenges every day. From a business operations perspective, agencies face increased compliance requirements and must provide substantial care documentation and outcomes measures to governmental regulators. Failure to do so can result in material impacts to the organization’s revenue, a dangerous result


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