Karen Mooney

Strategic Planning Meeting Participants from left to right:
Steve Yerington, Karen Mooney, Dave Schau, Terry Nichols, Marc Whitman, Doug Martin, Wendell Wuestenberg, Tom Sturms, John Tuthill, Ron Lehne, Dan Darland, Tony Manatt

Some of you may be familiar with the term strategic planning, but for those who are not, strategic planning is making plans for the future based on opportunities or threats that might be up the road. The process takes a little bit of knowledge about our business and our employees, and little bit of imagination about the possibilities for the future. Recently a group of W.Q.I. managers got together for a full day meeting about planning for the future of Wendling Quarries. Most of you probably don’t know that Wendling has been using strategic planning, in one form or another since about 1993.

At the most recent meeting, we took a bit of a different approach from what we have done in the past. With the help of George Varchola from Eastern Iowa Community College, we examined our operations based on a list of categories: Leadership, Strategic Planning, Customer & Market Focus, Human Resources Focus, Information Analysis & Business Results, and Process Management. The goal was to look for ways to improve Wendling from many different angles. We even looked at ”impossible” questions to try to find answers to them.

Strategic planning will be an on-going process at Wendling, not just one meeting. There may be opportunities for many people to get involved at one point or another, and your ideas and suggestions are always welcome. Our plan is to continue to examine how we do things here at Wendling so we can all be the best we can be.