INTRODUCTION

Get the Strategy You Need—Now

What’s your competitive advantage? Who are your key customers and stakeholders? How will you respond to disruption in the marketplace? Do you have the capabilities in place to succeed, and are your people aligned? Are you planning for the future—the right way?

If these questions make you sweat, you’re not alone. Setting a strategy that will help your organization or business unit succeed while responding to new competitors and changes to your industry is daunting. Assessing potential threats while creating new ways to grow is a difficult balance. Choose the wrong strategy, and you can stumble—or worse, go out of business. But find the right strategy and you can stand out to your customers and last for years to come.

But where do you start? And what do you need to think about? How do you decide where and how to compete, gain buy-in from your stakeholders and employees, and ensure your strategy is executed properly?

Whether you’re retooling your organization’s existing strategy, creating one from scratch as a startup, or outlining a plan for your specific business unit, this guide will help you think about your business in the right way to create a strategy specific to your needs. You’ll discover questions to ask and advice to follow to define a well-thought-out strategy, test it before implementation, and communicate it effectively for others to execute.

The Benefits of Smart Strategy

There’s no one, universal definition of strategy, but for the purposes of this book, you can think of strategy in the way that Stephen Bungay, Director of the Ashridge Strategic Management Centre, states in chapter 2: “Strategy is about what we are going to do now in order to shape the future to our advantage.”

Setting a strategy gives you an active role in planning for your company’s future. Without it, too many of your actions will be focused on the short term—reacting to every potential threat, meeting goals that may not have long-term impact, and focusing too much on the day-today operations and problem solving. What’s more, without an eye on the big picture, you may miss the larger shifts in your industry—shifts that require early planning in order to respond and thrive.

Having a clearly thought-out and communicated strategy also allows decision making across your organization to align, so everyone is moving in the same direction. Leaders and employees alike can then prioritize the correct projects and initiatives, focus on the right metrics, and invest in the most crucial areas. And they can make smart changes in response to new competitors or stakeholder interests.

And it isn’t just organizations that need a strategy. Business units also need to have such principles and fundamentals in place. While your company may decide that setting up a new office in Tokyo to expand its international presence is part of its global strategy, your business unit may then need to assess if its products and offerings need to change amid new competitors in the Japanese market. Either way, understanding the steps to setting a strategy, communicating it to your employees, and executing it will be critical for leaders at any level.

What This Book Will Do

From Michael Porter’s five forces to agile approaches, how we’ve thought about strategy has transformed and shifted over time. But this book will not focus on any one specific school of thought. Rather, it will explore the practice of setting your strategy, so you can work with your leadership team to formulate the approach that works best for your unique capabilities, circumstances, and industry.

This guide will help you set a strategy for your organization or business unit by explaining the basics of what strategy is, helping you to lay the foundation for strategic discussions, walking you through what to think about when formulating your strategy, testing it before implementation, communicating it to your employees, and finally executing and learning from it.

• What is strategy? The first section in this book helps you understand the basics of strategy, starting with the difference between strategy, implementation, and execution, and how each relate to both corporate and business strategy. It then debunks five common myths about strategy and explains how strategies, objectives, and actions differ, so you’ll understand how these work together in your strategic planning sessions.
• Laying the foundation. Before you lead a strategy discussion, you and your leadership team must have some basic understanding in place. The first two chapters outline four strategic styles that correspond with the predictability and malleability of your industry and describe a variety of approaches to making strategic decisions. Chapter 6 looks at the specifics of the strategy offsite, offering tips and advice to ensure a productive conversation. The last chapter in this section helps you think carefully about your stakeholders, understanding both what you want from them and what they want from you, so you can take that into account in your strategy formulation.
• Develop your strategy. Once you’ve established the basics, you’re ready to dive into your strategic discussions. The first chapter of section 3 provides approaches to think about strategy creatively—through contrast, combination, constraint, and context. Next, Roger Martin, author of Playing to Win, provides five key questions to consider, what he calls the “strategy choice cascade.” In chapter 10, you’ll learn about common competitive threats, so you can face potential uncertainty as you develop a path forward, and in chapter 11, futurist Amy Webb explains how to think about the long term—looking long past the standard five years ahead. Strategy should always be changing, though, especially as fast-growing platform companies have more and more influence in many industries. Chapter 12 helps you understand how these companies may affect your business and whether (and how) you should adjust your approach. The section closes with a look at purpose, and how you can incorporate it into your strategy.
• Test your strategic choices. It’s hardly feasible to assume that a new strategy will work seamlessly. Before you move your plan forward, you need to test it, and section 4 helps you to do just that. Chapter 14 provides ways to pressure-test your strategy, including helping you to build situational awareness, taking an outside-in perspective, and war-gaming. The next chapter helps you identify where you may be falling victim to your own cognitive biases in your strategic decision making. Then, you’ll assess what capabilities you require to be successful by identifying what your organization or business unit should do differently, and defining how to build the skills, knowledge, and processes you need to carry out these changes. Last, you’ll look at your organization or team’s strategic alignment to make sure that your people are able to support the strategy.
• Communicate your strategy. Any plans you make will go nowhere if your people don’t understand them. Communication—and communication in the right way—remains critical to successful execution. Section 5 begins by outlining how to explain your strategy to your people, particularly given that with a new approach often comes change. Next, you’ll discover how to help your team understand your strategy and its priorities by contrasting what they will be working on with what they won’t. Last, you’ll learn how to conduct these conversations across cultures, especially since diverse talent can have different points of view on competition and the market.
• Execute the strategy and learn from it. The final section in this book helps you to execute and adapt your strategy as necessary. The first chapter explores how strategy and execution are linked, and explains how to examine gaps in execution, learn from them, and adjust your strategy accordingly. The next chapter identifies common execution traps to avoid. You’ll then learn the risk of putting too much focus on metrics—specifically quarterly numbers—and how that can take your strategy off course. Finally, the concluding chapter of the book emphasizes that becoming an expert strategist won’t happen overnight—it requires practice. Roger Martin provides tips for how you can improve your development process as you revisit and adjust your strategy, so over time you can become a more confident and more accomplished strategist.

While the steps outlined in this book are not rigid in their order, it’s important not to skip over any of them. Without laying the right foundation, your discussions are unlikely to prove fruitful. Without testing, you’re likely to stumble in unforeseen ways. And without effective communication, it’s highly unlikely you’ll see your strategy executed well, whether you’re leading the entire organization or a business unit.

Above all, it’s important to remember that a strategy is never static. Your plans will require frequent assessment, adjustment, and refining. According to Martin, “competitors don’t wait for your annual strategy cycle to attack, customers don’t wait for your annual strategy cycle to shift their preferences, and new technology doesn’t wait for your annual strategy cycle to leapfrog yours.”¹ Lead your company into the future by thinking about your strategy regularly—starting now.

NOTE

1. Roger L. Martin, “Three Quick Ways to Improve Your Strategy-Making,” hbr.org, May 22, 2014 (product #H00TEP).