Blogging from the CRT Offsite
June 9, 2010
Contribued by various members of the CRT Community
This is Dave T, Terry, Lou, John, Jeannette, and Dave C, members of the Chairmen’s Roundtable (CRT), coming to you from the blogger table live at the CRT offsite meeting at the Classic Residence by Hyatt, La Jolla Village. Today was the beginning of our implementation phase for our multi-month strategic planning effort. A few months ago, the CRT made a decision to take our own advice and pause to focus on our business of helping San Diego companies more effectively by conducting our own strategic planning process. Just like many of our clients, we realized we were so busy providing our pro bono consulting services that we had not taken the time to focus and align ourselves.
What we’ve determined and reviewed so far this morning:
“ Our Mission (Why we exist)
“ Guiding Principles/Our Values (How we behave)
“ Destination (Where we are going in the next 18 to 24 months)
“ Strategies (What we will focus on across the organization)
Today’s meeting is about beginning to operationalize the plan through exploring our breakthrough model – what we will do broken down by timeframes and capabilities required to do it. After that, each team will determine their accountabilities and assign owners and timeframes. Finally, we’ll develop a scorecard so we are tracking and measuring our progress.
Here is what the bloggers got to say about our off-site during the event:
Dave:
The offsite has enabled us to bring many different points of view to bear on our most strategic issue – how to make the San Diego business community aware of our service offering. By using multi disciplinary teams we have been able to better understand our communication challenges and how to solve them.
Terry:
The offsite gave us an opportunity to revitalize our volunteer organization by having us redefine our values and our processes so that we deliver increased value to our clients. Additionally, it gave us an opportunity for all of our members, mentors, and sponsors, to get to know each other better.
Jeannette:
I’ve been with CRT for more than a year now, going to regular meetings, social events, but I had the most fun today at the offsite as I felt the games and exercises really gave all mentors and sponsors a chance to get to know each other and get clear on what is most important for our organization.
Lou:
I am most interested in how we are managing client expectations, full disclosure of the elements of our process, and improving our mentoring skills. We are getting clearer on these elements continuously and today we made significant progress.
Dave T:
Today’s meeting was an AWESOME experience. Jeff delivered our new mission and value statements. Each of our teams discussed significant issues that we’ve been working on including Client Flow, Mentor Engagement, Sponsor Engagement, and Marketing & Branding. Our branding exercise allowed us to use our skills, abilities, and brain trust to market CRT to our other teams. Very interesting…….took me back to 1st grade……filled with great ideas, nutritional information, games and ingredients designed to sell the CRT position. It really brought the brand to life from multiple perspectives and helped us get to know one another in an effective way.
John R
As a member of CRT for nearly a decade, the idea of an off-site meeting to renew our mission gave me the reassurance that the founding ideas of the group had not changed. The goal of recruiting the best the San Diego business community had to offer to mentor companies looking to realign their strategic plan had been the founding idea and still rang true today. As I survey the room and I recognize many new and old faces, I feel proud to be a part of such a credentialed group that are willing to volunteer their time to advise companies on how best to navigate these difficult waters.
Editor’s note:
Blogging is a new experience for many of our mentors and we will continue to explore ways we can capture the many ideas and rich experiences of our membership to share even more with the San Diego business community. Our strategic planning offsite was the beginning of many new ways of working to provide the most value possible to San Diego companies and their leaders as well as a reaffirming experience that our founding values and reasons for being still ring true.
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I wholeheartedly agree with the observations of this blogging team. The offsite was both inspirational and productive. I am excited about the future we are crafting for CRT and its mission to strengthen San Diego one company at a time.
Comment by Cynthia Guiang — June 9, 2010 @ 6:26 pm