Not THAT kind of “winning’, but the kind of winning that gives you the right to charge more and earn higher margins than your competition. Stephen Lynch’s blog post from Results.com is a great primer on what it takes to build a high-performance and sustainable business strategy.
I like how Stephen says so much with his short blog post and I thought you and your team would find it of value.
Thank you Stephen for allowing a re-broadcast your blog!
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Do You Have a Winning Strategy?
Research from the Harvard business school shows that 90% of strategies fail due to poor execution. This assumes your company even has a real
strategy. Many companies claim to have a strategy, but usually all they have done is a meaningless exercise in financial goal setting.
We all want to grow, but growth is not a strategy. We all want to be more efficient, but efficiency is not a strategy. We all want to continuously improve, but improvement is not a strategy. Strategy is not about being better than your competitors either.
Bigger, better, faster, is not a strategy!
What is strategy then?
Strategy is about establishing a meaningful point of difference in your industry that you can preserve. Nothing lasts forever of course, so you need to keep innovating and re-establishing your point of difference.
Strategy requires tradeoffs. You cannot be everything to everybody. You cannot just blindly copy the moves of your competitors and hope to win. You have to figure out what to say “YES” to, and what to say “NO” to. You make clear cut choices about how you will compete in the future; and then allocate your time and resources accordingly.
Are you looking at least 3-5 years into the future?
Some people challenge me on this and say that it is impossible to predict what will happen in 1 year, let alone 3-5 years, and that planning that far into the future is a waste of time.
I always smile and share this quote from Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, Time Magazine’s businessperson of the year in 2012.
“If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people, but if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. We can’t realize our potential as people or as companies unless we plan for the long term.”
I think we can all agree that Jeff leads a company at the forefront of a rapidly changing industry. Perhaps we need to spend less time staring down at our shoes, or glancing sideways at what our competitors are doing, and start looking more toward the horizon!
Balance short-term with long-term
Short-term is about improving your current core business, and meeting the needs of today’s target customers. Short-term strategy is about “improving what is”. Most people understand this.
Long-term is not about performance improvement. It is about forgetting the past and reshaping your business to compete more effectively in the future. Long-term strategy is about “creating what will be”. This is what Bezos is talking about, and what many business leaders fail to address.
Balancing these two opposing concepts whilst operating your business is one of the great challenges of strategic leadership.
Do you have a winning strategy?
Here is a brief introduction to the process we take our clients through to help them create their strategies.
How well can you answer the following questions:
- What is your vision for the future? (your compelling long-term goal)
- What competitive forces will determine how your industry is likely to play out in the coming years (competitors, new entrants, substitute offerings, suppliers, customers) – and what moves do you need to make to address the trends in these areas?
- What macro forces will impact your business environment (political, economic, social, technology) – and what moves do you need to make to address the trends in these areas?
- What geographic areas do you plan to serve, and how will you access those locations?
- Who is the ideal target market customer for your brand?
- What is your target customer trying to achieve, and how will you address this need (now and in the future)?
- What core activities will you perform (now and in the future)?
- What non-core activities will you stop doing?
- How will you strategically position your brand in the marketplace?
- What benefits will you offer?
- What blunt overt promise will compel your customers to take action?
- What key strategic moves do you need to make within the next 3-5 years to position your firm for future industry success?
- What goals and milestones will measure your success along the way?
- What is the current reality that you must deal with?
- What projects will you implement in the coming quarter to address your current reality and/or move your business in your chosen strategic direction?
- What Key Performance Indicators will track and drive the success of your current business model?
We capture a summary of their decisions on a One Page Strategic Plan.
For the original blog post, please click Here.