Five Questions That Make Strategy Real
Errol Braithwaite
MANAGEMENT CONSULTING & PROJECT DEVELOPMENT | INFRASTRUCTURE | MINING | CONSTRUCTION
Jack Welch was the chair and chief executive of General Electric (GE) from 1981 to 2001. In those twenty years he increased the market value of GE from $14 billion to $410 billion, nearly 30x. He had a reputation as one of the top CEOs of all time. In his later years, Jack and his wife Suzy authored several books and many articles with plain, no-frills advice for business leaders.
This is one of my favourites:
By Jack and Suzy Welch, March 2016
Lots of people – most notably academics and consultants – tend to talk about strategy as if it’s some kind of high-brain scientific methodology.?We come from a different school of thought. That strategy is a living, breathing, totally dynamic game. It’s fun – and fast.?And it’s alive. Forget the scenario planning, yearlong studies, and 100-plus page reports that “gurus” suggest. They’re time consuming and expensive, and you just don’t need them. In real life, strategy is very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell.
How?
The first step of making strategy real is coming up with a big “a-ha” for your business – a smart, realistic, relatively fast way to gain sustainable competitive advantage. To do that, you need to debate, grapple with, wallow in, and dig into – and we mean?dig?deep into –your playing field (that is, your competitive situation) and its players. Let the following five questions guide you in that process, with meetings that are alive and continually ongoing.
WHAT DOES THE PLAYING FIELD LOOK LIKE NOW?
领英推荐
WHAT HAS THE COMPETITION BEEN UP TO?
WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN UP TO?
?WHAT’S AROUND THE CORNER?
WHAT’S YOUR WINNING MOVE?
Now, after you complete this exercise, the next step is to put the right people in the right jobs to drive the big a-ha forward. The facts are, you get a lot more bang for your buck when strategy and skills fit.
From there, it’s just a matter of relentlessly seeking out the best practices to achieve your big a-ha, adapting them, and continuously improving them. Strategy is unleashed when you have a learning organization where people thirst to do everything better every day. They draw on best practices from anywhere, inside or out, and push them to ever-higher levels of effectiveness. You can have the best big a-ha in the world, but without this learning culture in place, any sustainable competitive advantage will not last.
Strategy, then, is simply finding the big a-ha and setting a broad direction, putting the right people behind it, and then executing with an unyielding emphasis on continuous improvement. There’s no?mystery to it!