I joined Analog Devices,
a mid-sized semiconductor company, in June of 1986. I initially reported to Jerry Fishman,
the Group Vice-President of the Components
Group. Jerry was in effect the Chief Operating Officer of Analog and is
currently (2000) its President and CEO. My title was Group Director, Quality and
Productivity Improvement. One of my first assignments from Jerry (based partly on my previous experience in strategy consulting while at
Bain & Company) was to facilitate
the Group's Strategic Planning process as we embarked on the preparation of the
1988-1992 Strategic Plan.
At that time, ADI updated its strategic plan
once every five years and spent the ensuing years in its
implementation. With the departure of those "good-old-days,"
Analog, like most other companies today, has moved to more frequent strategic plan
updates and currently uses what is essentially a continuous strategic planning process.
I also had a dotted line reporting
relationship to Ray Stata, the company's visionary co-founder, and then its Chairman,
President and CEO (following my promotion to Vice President, this became
the solid
line and the one to Jerry dotted). His first assignment for me was preparation of the Quality Improvement Process (QIP) Five Year Plan for integration
into the strategic plan. Out of these two assignments, the first balanced
scorecard emerged in 1987.
The strategic planning process at Analog was a
massive effort, to say
the least: it extended over an 18 month period and involved several
hundred of our business and product line managers (Analog then had around
4500
employees worldwide). To assure cross-functional integration, we utilized
existing groups such as the Technology, Manufacturing, Human Resources and Marketing
Councils as well as ad hoc groups and Strategic Planning
Councils. We also created Product Strategy Task Forces (PSTF's as they
were called) to provide
cross-divisional integration. All of these groups had broad functional and
divisional membership.
Like many organization's, Analog's
written strategies quickly became dead documents. Even finding old copies
turned out to be a major chore. So learning from
the past, we formally acknowledged that the benefit would be derived from the
strategic planning process itself, not any resulting output documents. Instead, we relied on verbal presentation to all employees and tight integration
of the plan into the ongoing annual business planning process. The written documentation was limited to a four page
flier (see the relevant part below).
The plan was completed in the fall of 1987, approved by the Board
of Directors on January 29, 1988, and rolled out to the
entire Corporation on March 1, 1988. That event was an all day
strategy meeting attended by over 500 Analog Devices managers from around the
world. This was followed by a similar session in Europe (February 23-24,
1988) for managers who were not at the US rollout.