Business strategy should set direction, alignment and focus with the entire capability and energy of your business striving to win. It will be reflected in how you position the customer value you deliver at any point of time, but strategy is continuous and often emergent. You will develop a competitive posture, a way you compete to win, that draws your strengths to the surface each and every day, and allows you to always outcompete everyone in your chosen marketplace.
Foundations of Strategy:
Four key points:
Undefeatable strategies lie firstly in the process you adopt to create those strategies. It is about the conversations, analysis, brainstorming, innovation and active discussions you create in your business in considering how it can deliver greater customer value than anyone else. It is very much about your business’s ability to change and embrace new value propositions whilst leveraging yesterday’s offering. At one level, it may be about seeing tomorrow in a way that no one else does, and at another having an absolute clear vision on what you do better than anyone else. And doing it day after day after day without failure whilst always improving, the mantra always being better every day.
Secondly, undefeatable strategies are built to fulfil the purpose for which your business exists. Vision and mission statements are not purpose. Knowing, or creating if you do not have one, the purpose for which your business exists is critical to your business’s enduring success. Purpose must deliver meaning and also underpin value and direction. The right purpose can be all-powerful in underpinning the long-term success of your business.
Third, strategy is the glue that keeps your business and everyone associated with it aligned, working as a single team for the common outcome, and focused day after day on those matters that will deliver greater customer value than anyone else. Can you and everyone in your business list now five things to be done daily to ensure your business outcompetes the market and delivers greater customer value? Are the same? If not, you do not have a strategy.
Fourth and finally, strategy is built on two cornerstones:
- Building the organisation that will deliver your strategy. Do not create a strategy and expect your business to deliver it, it won’t happen. Yes, develop a strategy that will allow you to deliver greater customer value but more importantly create and build the organisation that will be capable of crafting and delivering whatever strategy is necessary to win.
- Your strategy has one outcome and that is to meet the needs of the community that it seeks to serve. Serve the community well, deliver greater value than anyone else and profit will flow. Lose that prime connection of meeting needs and focus on chasing profit, and your strategy will ultimately fail.
