Making Sense of Strategy

Let’s talk about strategy.

Ah, strategy – It’s one of those words that are so common in our language, we rarely even think about what it means.  What is a strategy?  What’s the difference between a strategic and tactical decision?

If I asked you right now, could you tell me the strategy you’re using in your business to get the best results from everything you’re doing?  Every business has a strategy, whether they know it or not – it’s just that some are more highly developed than others.

For example, some businesses sole strategy is “Show up and hope for the best.”  Others run with a “Keep doing what I’ve always done, and to hell with anything else” approach.  Sometimes, these can be surprisingly successful, and be in place for YEARS before the inherent problems with them begin to show through in the business.

Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself… Before we can talk about how to create a powerful strategy (or set of strategies), we need to define it.

Over the next week, I’m going to break down what strategy is (and isn’t), and then look at why it’s VITAL for you to spend the time and effort to really nail down the strategy for your business.  Then, to close out this series of posts, I’m going to do my best to show you why a new client focused strategy is sub-optimal no matter what you want from your business.[1]

What is strategy?

One of my favorite definitions of strategy is that it is “The intersection between vision, core beliefs, and competencies.”

Now, that’s a pretty meaningless phrase, unless we break it down.  So let’s do that.  Just a quick warning:  We’re going to venture into “Theory-Land” for the next couple of posts to break down the elements of strategy. It’s important theory, though, so it’s well worth paying careful attention.

Once we’ve defined the elements of strategy, we’ll return to your business, and look at ways that you can set or refine your existing strategy.

In the meantime, I want you to think about your business strategy over the next couple of days.  Give yourself a really honest appraisal of how long you spent explicitly crafting your strategy, and how much you’ve changed it over the past few (months/years/decades) to reflect changes in the  marketplace.  If you have an explicit strategy, are you happy with it?  Is it the optimal strategy for your market, your skillset, and your client base?

One note on this exercise – Almost nobody can do this without flinching a little bit.  The point isn’t to feel bad about what you haven’t done, but rather to get your mind working on ways to start getting better starting today.  There’s no point in engaging in pointless self-recrimination, but it can be very profitable to reflect on your current strategy and what you might do to either bring more value to your clients, make it easier for them to deal with you, help them understand the value of what you bring to them, or any number of other areas that we’ll explore on this site together.