Tag Archives: Strategic management

6 Attributes of an effective strategy

in Leadership, Strategy

company strategy map

Picture credit: Martin Oberhäuser

At its essence, strategy is a guide to behavior. And, when communicating your strategic intent, the most important goal is conveying your unique aspects and advantages with specific and engaging words.

This is hard. But, if you’re not being challenged at coming up with an effective strategy statement, you’re not trying hard enough. Because It is a real challenge to translate strategy into execution, this is something we must continually work at, that is, communicating strategy. Research has found that only %14 of employees understand their company’s strategy and direction.…

3 fundamental lessons about change that strategists must understand

in Strategy

change

“You must accept the things you cannot change, have the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” – Serenity Prayer

Like you, in my neck of the woods, I’ve observed that business leaders have a complete disregard for the forces of change in the world and much less in their industry. They understand their business very well, but not what is changing or will change their business.

And if they think they have an idea of what is changing, they adopt a “wait and see” approach and look at their competitors for direction.

Basically, their business acumen is non-existent. They base their strategy (if any) on luck and hope. And you know very well that luck and hope is not a strategy. They obviously think that because they’ve “been doing this for a long time” and it has worked for them thus far, that they somehow control their fate.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Three fundamental lessons about change are of paramount importance (from the book The Strategist):…

Innovation posts of the week: Fire all the managers

in Must reads of the week
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An analogy for using the Blue Ocean Strategy framework

in competition, Innovation, Strategy

If you’re a strategy guy, I’m sure you’re familiar with the , where you set out to create new value by not competing but rather creating and capturing new demand (new market) where you’re the only guy holding the flag.

In a nutshell, here’s what Blue Ocean Strategy proposes:

blue ocean strategy red versus blue

Sounds pretty damn good. But, the problem is it’s difficult to imagine and do. Worse yet, is it’s difficult to understand if you’re someone who’s not a CEO, strategist, consultant or marketer. To tackle this problem, I thought I’d uncover the hidden truth behind some of the key ideas of the approach.…

What is strategy? Part deux

in Strategy

what is strategy

“Anyone can plan a campaign, but few are capable of waging war, because only a true military genius can handle the developments and circumstances.” – Napoleon Bonaparte

There’s was a last week, and I thought I put some more thought into it and clarify my point of view that strategy does require planning, but only to prepare your mind.

? I’ve talked about this before and defined strategy as:

The essence of strategy is not to carry out a brilliant plan that proceeds in steps; it is to put yourself in situations where you have more options than everyone else. Instead of going for A as the single right answer, true strategy is positioning yourself to be able to do A, B or C depending on the situation.…

Your competitive advantage: make people happy

in Strategy, Success

competitive advantage comes from making people happy

A key to implementing a kick-ass business strategy is , this is shifts the rules to your advantage.

One of the most important pillars of any great business is making your customer happy. Yet, it seems to me that businesses are only focused on what they want, but not what their customers want. Profit over brand is a ruling mindset! If you find yourself in a market where this is the case, make it your mission to compete by making your customers happy, and make your competition irrelevant.

Your competitors will be trying to figure your strategy out and since they can’t think of making customers happy as a strategy (it’s not logical?), they won’t be able to compete! They’ll think you’re out of your mind.…