Nordic Soul. American Engine.

Results.
By Design.

The Leader’s Handbook to
Effective Managerial Planning

Tested in 62 countries.

Complete manuscript · currently with publishers

Readiness · Strategy · Execution

Strategic Planning3–5 years
Business Planning12 months
Quarterly Operating Planning90 days

The premise

Most business plans fail long before anyone tries to execute them.

Effective Managerial Planning is a step-by-step framework that moves a leadership team from understanding the business and the people in it, through strategy, to delivery.

After thirty years advising leadership teams in 62 countries, I have come to think that is rarely a failure of intelligence or effort. It is a failure of sequence.

Read the opening → The Foreword, in full

A room in Oslo

I once asked twenty-five of the largest veterinary practices in Scandinavia what we could offer that our competitors could not. Discounts, they said. Longer credit. Then a long silence — so I asked how many of them had a business plan. These were owners employing forty or fifty people.

One hand went up. His plan was a spreadsheet.

We taught them the discipline instead. A quarter of a century later, some of those planning cards are still on the wall.

The book

A method, in order.

Effective Managerial Planning is a step-by-step framework that moves a leadership team from understanding the business and the people in it, through strategy, to delivery.

A plan is only ever as honest as the organisation making it. So the work happens in two halves — and the order is not optional.

Coming soon Results. By Design. — book cover
112,300 words · 13 chapters · 117 figures

Be told when it publishes

The manuscript is complete and with publishers. Leave an address and you will hear once, when there is a date — not before.

Part One

Leading with Integrity

The six pillars any planning process rests on. Each closes with a ten-dimension readiness assessment, scored individually before discussion — so the spread across a leadership team becomes the diagnosis.

  1. Leadership
  2. Strategic capability
  3. Business structure
  4. People development
  5. Organisational performance
  6. Culture

Part Two

Making Strategy Work

The full planning cycle, from readiness to a signed plan and the rhythm that keeps it alive. Every stage closes with a completion checklist that gates the next.

  1. Understanding the method
  2. Readiness and information gathering
  3. Stage 1 — Strategic planning
  4. Stage 2 — Business planning
  5. Stage 3 — Quarterly operating planning
  6. The business plan
  7. Keeping the plan alive

The idea

Nordic soul. American engine.

Two traditions answer the question of how organisations succeed. Each carries a fatal gap the other fills.

The Nordic tradition

Trust rather than control. Flat hierarchies rather than tall ones. The conviction that people given autonomy and treated as adults will outperform people managed as risks. It takes the long view and treats culture as infrastructure.

Left alone, it drifts

The American tradition

Rigour, the discipline of choice, ruthless prioritisation and clear accountability. A refusal to confuse activity with progress. It asks hard questions and demands measurable answers.

Left alone, it burns people out

The organisations I have seen endure across decades, rather than quarters, are the rare ones that marry the two. This book is that marriage, written down.

Inside

Built to be used, not only read.

Every chapter closes with something to do: a scored diagnostic, a completion checklist, or questions written for a leadership team rather than a reader alone.

0Chapters
0Scored dimensions
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0Countries behind it

Six readiness assessments

Ten dimensions per pillar, scored alone before the team compares. The disagreement is the finding.

Completion checklists

Each stage is gated. You cannot move to the next until the last one is genuinely finished.

One continuous worked example

Northmoor Group, a composite consumer business built from real planning rooms, followed across five chapters from strategy to the quarterly rhythm.

Reusable instruments

The one-page strategic planning card, the nine-section business plan, the stage-by-stage information requirements, the responsibility model.

Try it

Try one pillar. It takes ninety seconds.

Work through the ten questions under any pillar and watch your own assessment of the organisation come to life. It is the instrument itself, not a demonstration of one — and as the book argues, seeing is believing.

Then bring your leadership team. One person scoring alone tells you how you see it; the assessment does its real work when a whole team completes it separately and the answers are put side by side. Put your team forward for the study and you get your team profile back, along with the conclusions worth discussing together.

Fifty leadership teams, each member scoring alone, and a report showing every place they disagreed — without naming who said what. Free for the first fifty →

Pillar One Readiness Assessment — Leadership 1 = weak · 5 = strong
Note.
0 of 10 answered
0/50

A plain text file. Nothing is sent anywhere.

Get the printable set

All six assessments as editable files, plus the team comparison sheet that turns individual scores into a conversation — and the Strategic Planning Card template that the scores eventually feed.

One email when there is something worth sending. No list sharing, unsubscribe any time.

The gates

Nothing moves until the last stage is finished.

Every chapter of Part Two closes with a completion checklist. They are the reason the method holds — you cannot skip ahead to the appealing part. All seven are here, 157 items in total. Tick as you go; your progress is remembered on this device.

0 of 0 complete
Saved on this device only. Nothing is sent anywhere.

The instruments

Every instrument, ready to use.

A handbook is only useful if you can put it to work on Monday. These are the working tools from the book — each one shown as it appears, and available as an editable file.

Get the editable set

Every instrument above as an editable PowerPoint or Excel file, plus all six readiness assessments and the team comparison sheet — ready to customise and use with your own leadership team, or with your clients.

One email when there is something worth sending. No list sharing, unsubscribe any time.

Not just a book

A complete system, ready to run.

Most business books stop at the argument. This one comes with everything needed to put it into a room: a facilitator’s manual that runs the method session by session, fifty blank templates, and thirty-nine of them completed as worked examples – all from one company, Northmoor Group, the composite that runs through the book.

All fifty templates from the Facilitator’s Manual

The Facilitator’s Manual

Seven sessions, from the pre-work through readiness, three planning stages and the quarterly rhythm. Each with an agenda, the tools in the order the book uses them, what must not be compressed, the failure signals, and a gate that says what must be true before the team moves on.

16,100 words · 69 gate checks

Fifty templates

Every instrument the method uses, as a blank sheet ready to print — the six pillar assessments, PESTLE, SWOT, TOWS, Five Forces, Blue Ocean, the Strategic Planning Card, the cascade, the departmental action plan and budget, the budget consolidation, the Key Issue action plan, the quarterly scoreboard and the facilitator’s debrief.

Print, or use your own

Thirty-nine worked examples

The same templates completed to a best-in-class standard, all for one business — Northmoor Group, the oral care company whose planning runs through the book — so a facilitator can show a client what good looks like before asking them to produce it.

One company, followed from strategy to the quarter

The origin

Where this came from.

Thirty years ago a man walked into a training room in Dayton, Ohio, and handed me an idea I have been refining ever since.

Clay Mathile owned The Iams Company. He was its President. There were ten of us in that room, and we had been there barely five minutes. On paper he had nothing whatsoever to gain from spending the afternoon with us.

He was, in many ways, the opposite of the stereotype of the visionary leader — not theatrical, no grand pronouncements or sweeping gestures. What he had was an absolute refusal to let the important be displaced by the urgent. He built the systems, the habits and the rhythms that kept the organisation fixed on what mattered most, even when the operational noise of a fast-growing global company was deafening.

A business does not drift to greatness; it plans its way there, deliberately, and together. Clay Mathile · 1941–2023

In his hands this was never a planning methodology — it was a management philosophy. The plan was not the point. The discipline it created, the conversations it forced, the decisions it clarified, the alignment it built: those were the point.

In the thirty years since that room in Dayton I have carried his model into boardrooms on five continents, kept faith with its fundamentals, and modernised it for a world that moves faster than his ever did. This book is the continuation of his legacy — his idea, brought forward, and handed to you.

Clay Mathile
Clay Mathile · 1941–2023
Owner and President of The Iams Company

CCPP

Clay Mathile’s framework

  1. Customers — who you serve, and how well you know them.
  2. Culture — how people behave when nobody is watching.
  3. Products — what you actually sell, and why it wins.
  4. People — who does the work, and whether they can grow.

Get these four right, keep them aligned, and everything else in the business gets easier. CCPP is the frame a leadership team builds its Beliefs around — one conviction in each of the four domains where strategy actually succeeds or fails.

The author

Bo Brønserud

Bo Brønserud

I have spent thirty years helping business leaders turn strategy into results, advising and visiting clients in 62 countries across five continents. I learned strategic planning at The Iams University in Dayton, Ohio — the company Clay Mathile built — and then spent the rest of my career testing what I learned against reality.

I owned and managed the Nordic distributorship for Iams and Eukanuba and sold that business in 2000. As Group Managing Director of VetPlus I successfully managed the company’s worldwide sales via subsidiaries and exclusive distributors. In every position I have ever held my focus was always whether the plan would survive contact with a real organisation.

I am Danish, I was trained in execution inside an American company, and I have worked in the United Kingdom since 1989. I have spent my whole career standing between those two traditions. This book is what that taught me.

Today I am co-founder and managing partner of Ngage Consulting, working with ambitious leadership teams around the world.

  • BasedYork, United Kingdom · and Denmark
  • ConsultancyNgage Consulting
  • LanguagesDanish, English

Working together

The book, facilitated.

Some teams work through the method themselves. Others would rather have someone in the room who has run it a few hundred times.

The full planning cycle

Five facilitated workshops across the planning year, from readiness through to a signed business plan and the review rhythm that keeps it alive.

For leadership teams

A readiness diagnostic

A single session built on the six assessments. Everyone scores alone, then we look at where the team disagrees with itself — which is usually the most useful hour of the year.

A day, or half a day

Talks and workshops

On why plans fail before execution begins, and on what the Nordic and American traditions of business each get right — and each get wrong.

Conferences and offsites

Get in touch

Publishers, media and leadership teams.

The manuscript is complete and available for review. I am also glad to hear from leadership teams who want to work through the method, and from anyone who would like to know when the book is published.

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