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The day-to-day nuts and bolts of career development are about a far more persistent yet mundane type of future awareness. Anticipation is an important key to understanding business. And anticipation is the means of getting control of everyday management.
Recently I spoke with a quality assurance director. He was telling me how he uses strategic thinking in his department. He's responsible for all the materials used in manufacturing at his company; and that includes manufacturing that may be hired out to other companies. To efficiently check all incoming materials at all manufacturing locations, he needed to know where the ingredients came from before they were shipped. Otherwise he was left to checking paperwork at the receiving dock. To get ahead of the shipments he needed an extensive log of all the supplier companies his company used as vendors. He found that his purchasing department already had such a log.
But, that wasn't the end of it. He anticipated that distributors would at times switch their suppliers; therefore he went to each distributor and requested a list of their suppliers for the ingredients he was purchasing. With that list he could audit all the sub-suppliers and know in advance the quality of their products. He had contacts at each of those companies if problems arose. Basically, he anticipated problems and set up a system to resolve those problems quickly as they arose.
The key to strategic thinking is to see how things move along in a progression. If you can look backwards and see how the current situation developed and then attempt to anticipate the next steps, you've become visionary. With this type of historical vision, you can compare present circumstances with previous circumstances, looking for differences that might need attention. The strategic part is to build a plan that uses the vision and the analysis for best results.
© by Todd Royer. All Rights Reserved.
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Todd Royer has been writing for the internet for 2 years. He has helped hundreds of people with their professional growth. If you would like a free subscription to Career Development Weekly, click here: http://ui. constantcontact.com/d.jsp? m=1101053082339&p=oi
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