Strategy, Never been as important as it is now

The COVID-19 economic impact calls on leaders to step up on multiple fronts: attending to people's immediate needs, ensuring the health of the business, scanning the continually changing business and societal landscape, and positioning the enterprise to thrive in a new normal. Organizations need to rethink their strategies and go-to-market plans, and the right approach has never been as vital is it is now.

Every day we make decisions. Some we make at home, some at work. Some choices are relatively small, but others can have huge implications, and may ultimately make the difference between us thriving and failing. Big decisions can feel daunting, especially when our context is uncertain, when we feel a tension between the present and the future, and when we lack tools to help us tell the right choices from the bad. No wonder we sometimes fail to choose at all. But the good thing about having choices, even the hardest ones, is that we can take action.

We can influence the world we live in, not just today, but into the future. We can shape our world rather than simply live in it. A strategy is a set of choices that you can make today, in the face of uncertainty, to increase the likelihood that you will win now and into the future. So, this definition of strategy is pretty straight forward. How would you create the right strategy is a real challenge as we are facing now with COVID-19.

In my first job out of university, I was invited to a strategic retreat. I was one of about a hundred people spending three days in a hotel ballroom to create a mission, a vision, and a set of values for our organization. After a lot of arguments about whether we wanted to be world-class or merely exemplary, we finally settled on a compromise and captured everything we discussed. Then we went back to work, and nothing changed. We just kept doing what we'd always done.

Since that time, I've seen this pattern and other strategy trap like it again and again. In multinational companies, in small businesses at all levels. Sometimes, as it was in my case, a strategy is treated as a thought exercise with no grounding in the real world, and no real impact on the organization. In other cases, it can feel as if the C level executives only set a strategy, and it's up to the rest of the organization to simply execute what they're told. In other cases, a strategy can be framed if it's all about mitigating risks, budgets, and financial forecasts, but no emphasis on building innovative ideas for the future. 

You may have experienced the process of creating strategy in one of these ways. It may have been fanciful or top-down, or purely financially focused. And ultimately, ineffective. 

Some estimate the success rate of strategy somewhere between 10 and 40%. That's an astounding number considering all the time and resources we allocate to it. Our approach to strategy has to change, and I wanted to share some of the top article, sources, and book that can support you in changing the way that you would approach in creating and communication strategy:

Papers:

Books:

• Playing to Win by Roger L. Marting
• Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors by M. E Porter.

Articles: