Design of a Guideline for a Strategy Process of medium-sized Companies

Companies with a clear, documented strategy perform better than their competitors without a strategy. Nevertheless, the strategy process confronts medium-sized companies (250-3,000 employees) with major challenges while many of them do not have a clear strategy process. Reasons for that can be the focus on operations and thus lack of time and resources, missing methods knowledge, or the underestimation of the value of a strategy. In times of a structural change in an industry, as we see it currently for example with the electrification of the automotive industry, a strategy becomes even more important. The automotive supplier industry alone employs around 150,000 people just in medium-sized companies in Germany. This paper aims to design a guideline that supports medium-sized companies to define their long-term goals and in the implementation of their derived strategy. Based on a literature review and 16 expert interviews a guideline was developed that contains templates to document the strategy process and a process model including checklists to fill the templates. The guideline was initially evaluated against the defined success factors in a medium-sized company.