Have you got a strategy? (No, probably not.)

Most businesses don't have a strategy.

What they have is a series of impressive-sounding words that sound much the same as everyone else in their industry when they talk about the same subjects.

Calling something "a strategy" might make it feel like that MBA was a good investment after all. But frankly, spouting me-too mumbo-jumbo isn't something you need a postgraduate qualification for.

Although having worked in a higher education for about a decade, I can certify that plenty of people with advanced degrees are indeed perfectly capable of spouting me-too mumbo-jumbo.

Whether inside or outside higher education, here are some of the things I most often see going wrong with strategy development, and what to do about them.

1. They confuse "strategy" with "procedure"

A strategy should be taking you from wherever you are now to somewhere else.

So an "expense reimbursement strategy" is just an expense claim procedure.

While it might suit the ego and the longer-term career ambitions of someone proposing the expense reimbursement strategy, it's not taking you from anywhere to anywhere. It just tells you how to get your money back if you've spent some of your own cash while on company business.

Make sure you don't confuse these two concepts. There's nothing wrong with procedures - you'll need some of the to run a business of any size. Just don't trick yourself into believing that just because something is called a strategy that it's remotely strategic in nature.

2. It doesn't clear the materiality threshold

A strategy is for those activities which are going to move the needle in your business. Frankly, there are likely to be very few of those.

If you've got 40 or 50 strategies, or more, you've almost certainly got a set of procedure manuals, not the "bold new vision for the 2020s" you told your board you had.

When your "strategy" is all about operational policies, checklists, and procedures in the day-to-day running of your business it still might be worth doing, but it isn't a strategy.

You don't need a strategy to get your offices cleaned every night. You just need to hire someone to clean your offices.

3. It's the same as everyone else's strategy

I used to do an exercise with clients where I cut and pasted sections from two or three of their competitors' websites, mixed in a few sections from their own website, and took all the company identifier information out.

Then I asked the board to identify which sections were from their website and which were from a competitor's. Let's just say the hit rate was, in general, very low.

Everyone says their customers are at the heart of their business. Everyone claims their employees are their most important asset. Everyone is striving to "get it right first time" and lead in innovation in their sector.

The whole point of a strategy is to stand out from your competition. You'll never do that by being the same as everyone else.

4. Check the opposite

In a counterpoint to point 3 above, I've always liked Rory Sutherland 's definition of a good strategy as being one where the opposite also makes sense.

If you think not putting customers at the heart of your business, or treating your employees like garbage, or taking a cavalier attitude to quality and service is your route to success, best of luck to you!

An example Rory sometimes gives is of Ryanair and Emirates. They are both very successful airlines, but they do the exact opposite of one another, and it still makes sense.

Would the exact opposite of your strategy make sense? If it wouldn't, odds are you don't have a strategy.

5. What it isn't

One of the most powerful concepts from Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter is that "the essence of strategy is in choosing what not to do".

Or, or as Meat Loaf put it, "I'll do anything for love. But I won't do that."

If you don't know what you're not going to do in order to achieve an objective, you don't have a strategy. You just have a perpetually-cycling wish list of ideas from which somehow, sooner or later, you hope to stumble across a magic recipe that might work.

Some years ago I ran a large call-centre business. At the time most of our competitors were setting up operations in India, the Philippines, or South Africa to take advantage of the lower labour costs there.

We took the view that we weren't going into this world and would remain a UK-only call centre. To be competitive, we couldn't be the cheapest on a pure cost per labour-hour basis. That was mathematically impossible.

Instead, that fuelled our creativity in finding hundreds of different ways, large and small, which made us vastly more effective than our low-cost overseas competitors, and thereby provided a vastly better end result at a comparable price.

Not everyone wanted that. Some potential clients wanted to grind out every last penny, no matter how much it upset their customers.

But enough clients cared enough about how good their customer service was to make our business a success regardless.

6. The best practice trap

Over the years, I've lost count of the number of people I've worked with who were obsessed about gathering best practice so they could replicate it inside their business.

But the mistake they made was in forgetting that if you and 20 other businesses in your sector are doing the same thing, even if you call it "best practice" it doesn't mean you're the best.

Odds are it means you're somewhere about the average of the other 20 businesses doing pretty much the same thing.

There's a role for best practice, of course. Finding out what other businesses in your sector are doing is instructive. But your job isn't to replicate what everyone else is doing, it's to do something entirely different that blows the competition out the water.

Calling something average "best practice" makes it sound like you're streets ahead of your competition. The reality is you're nothing of the sort. You're more likely somewhere in the middle of the pack.

But everyone I worked with who confused strategies with procedures (see point 1 above) found it impossible to wrap their heads around that concept.

7. The cost

It's slight counter-intuitive, but one of the things that often (but not always) defines a good strategy is that it costs nothing to manage.

For example, how much did it cost to manage a strategy of saying "no" to everyone who wanted us to set up a call centre operation in India?

Nothing. It didn't cost us a penny.

We didn't track a load of KPIs about it. We didn't have meetings about it. We didn't have a whole department inside the business paid big salaries to control it and report on it.

We just said no.

If you have a cadre of people whose sole job is to perpetuate a bureaucracy in order to manage a "strategy", you probably don't have a strategy. You've just got a procedure.

And probably a very costly procedure that's eating away at your bottom line instead of adding to it.

A good strategy can make a big impact on your bottom line. The problem is there aren't many good strategies about.

Mostly, organisations just have expensively-managed, low-level procedures which they've buffed to a sheen, dressed in their Sunday best, and pushed out into the world, hoping people won't be able to tell the difference.