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Five Steps to Good Strategy

Guest post by: Stephen Blakesley

Article Overview: Possibly more organizations fail because of bad strategy than those who fail because of no strategy. Bad strategy happens all the time to every organization and if left to its own means can destroy an organization. Bad strategy can be characterized by executives failing to face real problems or simply by lack of clarity. Learn how to craft good strategy.

Five Steps to Good Strategy

Strategy is a military term referring to the process of deciding the best environment, in which, your assets may be deployed to gain the maximum benefit. Obviously there is both good and bad strategy. Were that not the case there would be little demand for the book attributed to Sun Tzu, a ranking military general and strategist during the Chinese Wu dynasty, in the late sixth century. It makes sense then that if one is fighting a war or engaged in business that good strategy would be a good objective for which to strive.

What does good and bad strategy look like, is a good question? Richard Rumelt posted a good article on the subject of strategy in the McKinsey quarterly, recently. He proposes that bad strategy has, at least 4 recognizable characteristics: Failure to face the problem, making goals strategy, bad objectives, and fluff.

Failure to face the problem

All too often leaders are more interested in surface appearance and rely upon the premise that few people read or even care about fixingthe problem. So, they pen and present strategies that are surface and short-term centered. They often attempt to overwhelm those that might implement the strategy with "texture and detail," as Rumelt puts it.

Occasionally, executives will just ignore the problems and try to replace them with achievements. Theyoften replace strategy with amazing goals and hope the problems go away, but we all know, hope is not a strategy (good or bad).

Making goals strategy

Many executives are great at setting audacious goals, goals that will "take your breath away," hoping that the goals will take your mind off the need for good strategy. One great warrior we are familiar with was George S. Patton. One of Patton's favorite quotations was from Frederick the Great: "L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace." Translation: Audacity, audacity, always audacity. But George S. Patton knew audacious goals were not a strategy, but rather, a tactic. He knew that choosing where to be audacious was more important that being audacious. So do not be tempted to dazzle others with audacious goals in place of devleoping strategy.

I am sure you have had experiences where leaders attempt to overwhelm followers with goals like: If you don't have a competitive advantage, don't compete (paraphrased and attributed to Jack Welch) or Win one for the Kipper (attributed to Knute Rockne). Both are worthy goals, but alas,not strategy.

Bad strategic objectives

For those who do not believe in or understand the value of strategy, one of the most frequent ways they approach the process is to make sure the objectives are fuzzy. With fuzzy or unclear objectives you can hope that getting close to the goal will get you where you wish to go, but it will not. The most frequent way bad objectives are presented is through the planning process and simply, having too many objectives.

Instead of identifying a few of the most important goals and developing a strategy to achieve them, executives are gathering all the goals and presenting them in need of strategy. Not all goals are achieved with the same strategy and unless an organization clearly knows those that are most important, it is very likely that abad strategy will result.

Fluff

This my favorite and possibly one of the most frequently commited strategy offenses. Fluff is simply saying something that can be said in a few simple words with more and bigger words. it is using jargon to express something simple. An example given by Rumelt and I can site none better, is the bank who expresses its strategy ascustomer-centric intermediation. Look beyond the fluff and you get the banks strategy is one of simply being a bank. The customer-centric part is jargon and intermediation is a big word for taking deposits and then lending out the money. Bad strategy is often veiledby fluff. If you want to know if an exectutive team is good at strategy look at their Vision and Mission statements. They ar eboth often filled with fluff if the executive team are bad strategists. Sounds good, but what does it really mean? If you have to ask that question it is not good strategy.

So what, then, is necessary to craft good strategy. I believe there are5 important steps to crafting good strategy:

1. Carefully analyze the current condition- You can't know how to get to where you want to go unless you know where your are.
2. Vision where you want to be - Have a picture of where you want to be.
3. Understand the tomorrow is not likely to resemble today- Assuming that next year, next month, next week will be just like today is a big mistake. Accept that we live in a world where change is exponential.
4. Develop a big picture plan - Coping with a changing world requires certainty of destination but flexible plans to get there.
5. Implement tactics - engage the people, equipment and capital to reach the destination

The key to good strategy found inthese 5 points: analyze, visualize, know things change, get the big picture and implement. Follow these 5 steps to good strategy and enjoy the victories.

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Article Tags: author book, five steps, good strategy, steps, steps to good strategy, strategy



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