Mandates can come from a number of sources. As you suggest, subsidiary companies may have non-negotiable corporate objectives they must meet. Likewise, a company's board of directors may establish similar guidelines or the mandates may simply emanate out of the wishes and desires of a company's ownership. Regardless of the source of mandates, you must take them into account in conjunction with the Strategic Planning process. The best approach is simply to have a discussion at the beginning of the process with the appropriate stakeholders and identify any mandates which exist. All planning team members should be made aware of the mandates so that potential conflicts can be spotted and resolved during the planning process. In some cases, mandates may be unacceptable to the team. Discussion and resolution is critical, even if "executive privilege" is invoked. In many cases you should incorporate the mandates into the company's Goals (Page 6.2 in the Simplified Strategic Planning process).

You should recognize up front that you won't have perfect information, but that perfect information is not critical to developing your plan. This being said, you should be able to create reasonable estimates. The two most common methods used in estimating a company's market share are 1) a top down approach., where a broad, unfocused industry size is obtained from some public source (i.e., trade association, industry publications, or published market studies), and then it is cut back by each of the focusing attributes in the market segment definition until it represents the market you are pursuing; or 2) a bottom up approach, where most of the competitors (or alternatively most of the customers) in a segment are identified with the amount of business they do in the segment, and these amounts are summed to estimate the total size of the market. It may be possible to corroborate the findings with non-competitive co-suppliers to the industry. The focus on market segments that the Simplified Strategic Planning process brings should allow you to attain more precision each year. Do not fall into the trap of letting the process bog down or even stop because you feel you cannot assemble perfect data.

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