Exploration of Strategy through Exploitation of Execution

Strategy is the direction that leads you to achieve the outcomes you are chasing. Outcomes that lead you to new opportunities. It's not the same as having an idea. You need to support an idea to fruition through strategy. The paths can be varied, but what makes the path shorter and smoother is a shockproof strategy backed by a thorough evaluation of opportunities and threats that can lie ahead. When you set out on a journey, you need to prepare. You will need to see the road map clearly, understand the distance you will need to cover, the time you will need to spend and the investment you will need to make. Access your abilities, plan the sprints you can run, and the pitstops you will need to revive yourself to move ahead. There could be some opportunities that you can ride on and some hindrances along the way. You can go in blind and then handle situations as they come. Or, you can go prepared by preempting the opportunities and the threats that lie on the road ahead, planning for each step. Putting a method to draw the opportunities closer to you, and eliminating the hindrances will help you in moving ahead with confidence.

Working towards a goal is like a journey. It brings you out in the open where you cannot hide behind closed doors, but going out there and setting your foot out on the road. It can be tiring and exhausting, but the sheer thrill of the journey will keep you going.

I have seen professionals getting stuck under the burden of execution, where they grow up to be great execution specialists, but not making the move to strategizing. So what does it take to make the move? I guess, the conviction to start the journey. We get too comfortable in our roles and too frightful to break out from the safety net of executing someone else's strategy.

There are two clear steps in my mind that constitute a strategy. The first is to have the chutzpah and confidence to own the strategy. Chutzpah is a mindset to surge ahead being cognizant that failure could be a part of the game. But that's ok. You can pack away the excessive fear and shove it inside the loft for a while, while you take the necessary fear to capitalize on. Fear is good, it makes us alert and keeps us in the moment. It can be a great asset in planning. All you need to do is pay attention to the fear, list down the reasons and tighten the screws right away. You bring Imagination into the picture and boom! you are ready to take off to planning.

The second and the most important aspect of strategy design is pre-empting the road ahead in the journey. If you have been good at execution you already have a bonus point to start with. In my opinion, you cannot pre-empt a road if you have not dipped your hands dirty in execution. When you execute, you go through the process, you know the pitfalls and the peaks. You have the experience of the execution by your side and you know exactly where things went wrong, and what played in your favor. It's so much easier to pull references from reality than to just dream about the journey. While making s strategy, it's important to empathize with the situation and the people involved. To do that you have to immerse yourself in that situation, and what better than to take a walk down the memory lane to relive the highs and lows that you came across while executing on a strategy. Once you have done that you will be in a position to create a detailed list of the things you need to prep for - how to play on your strengths, how to make up for your weaknesses, where to look for opportunities, and how to mitigate risks. The best way to bring confidence in your strategy is through meticulous preparation. Create frameworks to ensure that you have covered the minutest aspects on the list you have put together. In my experience, the best frameworks don't come from management books, but from first principles thinking supported by your experience of execution.

Strategy and execution go hand in hand. Making a solid strategy needs your strategy to be explored 360 degrees and that can happen only when you have exploited the learnings from the execution thoroughly, which in turn, feeds into making a great strategy for execution.