So, Your Business Strategy… Well… Sucks! Now What are You Going to Do?
Strategy is a unique game plan designed to gain a position in a specific market. It is unique because it takes advantage of a company’s specific strengths while minimizing or neutralizing its weaknesses and exploiting the weaknesses of its competitors.
OK, “no duh”. Obviously, this is easy to say but very hard to do. Strategic development is complex because markets are fluid; they change rapidly and they change all the time. This is what the military refers to as the “fog of war”.However dense the fog, a plan does need to be developed, tested, implemented and revised as circumstances dictate. As I see it, there are six steps in developing a business strategy:
1.Development of a concise mission statement
2.Articulating a clear vision
3.Developing a hypothesis of how to achieve that vision
4.Testing and revision of the hypothesis
5.Implementing and executing the strategy (the outcome of the hypothesis)
6.Tuning the strategy as circumstances warrant. Unfortunately, where most business strategies go awry is in three areas:
1. The mission/vision development is either skipped or is so broad and full of feel good fluff that it means nothing to the employees or the customers.
2. The business jumps directly from its strategic hypothesis right to implementation. Thus skipping the appropriate due diligence that would dramatically increase the odds of success.
3. The business spends far too much time on the due diligence. Getting stuck in paralysis by analysis and thus missing out on the opportunity.
Strategy can be an elusive and slippery thing to manage. It takes the view from 40,000 feet through to the subatomic particle approach to develop. It takes team thinking and acting like a general manager. And it requires constant, dispassionate evaluation and adjustment.
Before a company can develop a strategy, it must articulate a vision for itself. The vision that will guide and focus the business must address three questions:
1. Who are we?
2. Where are we going?
3. How are we going to get there?
A vision needs to be exclusive rather than inclusive… this is the essence of focus. If the vision includes too much in an effort to be all things to all people, it will become unwieldy – or worse, meaningless. Including too much in a vision is probably the single biggest mistake that companies make when drafting a vision statement.
