1. Having a plan simply for plans sake. Some organizations go through the motions of developing a plan simply because common sense says every good organization must have a plan. Don't do this. Just like most everything in life, you get out of a plan what you put in. If you're going to take the time to do it, do it right.
2. Not understanding the environment or focusing on results. Planning teams must pay attention to changes in the business environment, set meaningful priorities, and understand the need to pursue results.
3. Partial commitment. Business owners/CEOs/presidents must be fully committed and fully understand how a strategic plan can improve their enterprise. Without this knowledge, it's tough to stay committed to the process.

 Identify a company that demonstrated a successful winning strategy or experienced a strategy failure and briefly describe the circumstances in enough detail to communicate what happened.

• Using the framework offered in the Forbes blog post above, identify the potential reason(s) why the organization experienced success (by examining how the strategy enabled the company to avoid one or more of the pitfalls that can lead to failure) or failure.
• If you think that there were other reasons beyond the Forbes list, then identify those also!