Shannon Smith, CEO Abundant Power

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From the course by University of Virginia

Strategic Planning and Execution

237 ratings

University of Virginia

Strategic Planning and Execution

237 ratings

Course 4 of 5 in the Specialization Business Strategy

Avoid the pitfalls of strategy planning and execution with the tools and skills from this course. You'll learn the pillars of strategy execution--analysis, formulation, and implementation--and how to use the 4A model to effectively approach strategy execution. Finally, a panel of leaders from entrepreneurs, nonprofits, and industry, share their expertise gleaned from years of successful strategy planning and execution.

From the lesson

Practical Perspectives

This week we welcome guest speakers from a range of industries, from startups to nonprofits, to share their expertise from years of successful strategy development and execution. They'll communicate their best tips to help you develop your strategist's toolkit. We're also fortunate to be joined by Darden's Dean Scott Beardsley, whose 26 years with McKinsey informs the concrete tips he shares to improve strategy development and execution.

Welcome to Our Guest Speakers0:45

Shannon Smith, CEO Abundant Power2:43

Byrne Murphy, DigiPlex9:55

Carolyn Miles, Save the Children8:02

Rick Edmunds, Strategy& PwC10:59

Bob Hugin, Celgene7:19

Rick Paschal, Darden '895:29

Sunil Ghatnekar, The Coca-Cola Company2:51

Jerry Peng, Tranlin, Inc.10:15

Meet the Instructors

Michael Lenox
Senior Associate Dean and Chief Strategy Officer
Darden School of Business
Jared Harris
Samuel L. Slover Research Chair in Business Administration
Darden School of Business
Scott Snell
E. Thayer Bigelow Research Professor in Business Administration
Darden School of Business

My name is Shannon Smith, I am the CEO of Abundant Power Group.

A company I started in 2009, we're based in Charlotte,

North Carolina, prior to that I was in finance for

most of my career after graduating from Darden in 1990.

Our strategy at Abundant is based

on two factors that we approach it with internally.

One is implementation into product development, and

the other is scaling and marketing.

So we have two buckets of strategy that we focus on,

implementation and development, and then scaling and marketing.

Because we're in an industry that is evolving and new,

we tend to only look at strategy in one year increments.

So why do we look at strategy in a one-year increment on a short-term basis?

Our industry is a new industry, it's providing deep analytics for

buildings to the whole building ecosystem and

because of that, and because of the nature of the market we serve,

there are a lot of things that are still new and undiscovered.

And what I don't want, or what we have not wanted to do as a team,

is have too much inflexibility in our approach.

In fact, we tend to look at strategy from a fast fail perspective.

We prefer to iterate, get to the market, have our customers react to what we're

providing to them both at the technical level and even on the messaging level.

And then reiterate quickly and pivot all parts of our organization around that and

so, in that framework, going too far beyond 12 months can be a little silly.

The tools I like to use that I have kept from business school

a primarily five forces analysis.

But I would say that, imporrter, but what I really like the most,

is once I've developed the strategy, and because we're in this an emerging

industry, we all look at competitive pivots and fails.

So we're very, clear about competitor strategy in what we're doing.

We believe that there been a lot of false starts

by competition and there's certain DNA out there that we can learn from.

We want to be clear about what our distinctive capabilities are visa a vie

our competition and the messaging that they our using versus our messaging.

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