What’s New

By Dave Tovissi
Vice President and General Manager
HARMAN Luxury Audio

As leaders, we all need to take the time to establish and iterate our strategic plans. I read an article in the Harvard Business Review that referred to a survey which asked 10,000 senior leaders about strategic planning and if they take the time to properly assess and develop plans for success. 97% of the survey participants stated that being strategic was the most important leadership behavior to their organization’s success. However, 96% of those same leaders said that they lacked the time for strategic thinking.

I am pleased to share that the HARMAN Luxury Audio Group is not part of the 96% of leaders who don’t make the time for strategic planning and self-reflection. Last month, we brought together over 50 stakeholders from across the globe to our Northridge, California campus for two days to review how our product portfolio, marketing support, customer service, and supply chain is impacting the sales to our customers.

We kicked off the meeting by reviewing our CY22 goals and objectives. Whilst we had another year of strong growth, we also recognized that we did not meet all of our business and strategics objectives. Without sharing all the candid conversations and spirited debates, we all agreed that we needed to modify our strategic plans to align to the new challenges that we are all faced with.

Strategic planning doesn’t require week long sabbaticals from our busy schedules. We just need to clear our minds of all the internal and external voices, emails and pressures that often consume our time. As productivity expert David Allen puts it, “You don’t need time to have a good idea, you need space . . . it takes zero time to have an innovative idea or to make a decision, but if you don’t have psychic space, those things are not necessarily impossible, but they’re suboptimal.”

To help free the psychic space for our stakeholders we made sure we allocated time for the participants to brainstorm in smaller groups. These groups were tasked with resolving how to accomplish some of the CY22 objectives that we failed to achieve 100% attainment of.

I am confident that our customers will see the output of our strategic planning sessions very soon. We are committed to providing you with the most innovative products on the market. We will continue to educate you and your staffs on our products as we break down the barriers in our supply chain to improve the on-hand availability and the speed to replenish inventory when an unplanned large order consumes our stock.

If you have thoughts or comments on how we can be better partners to you, please send me an email at david.tovissi@harman.com.