The essence of the strategy development will manifest in the organizational activities – choosing to perform activities differently or to perform different activities than rivals. Otherwise, the strategy will be nothing more than a marketing slogan that will not withstand competition.
The Problem
Organizations often battle to define a lasting competitive strategy or purely implementing a strategy. Crafting strategy is an analysis-driven exercise. It’s not an activity where executives can succeed by sheer effort and creativity.
One of the biggest challenges in implementing strategies is the inertia of the business. Organizations struggle to break free from traditional budget cycles and the replication of last year’s capital spending. For many organizations, more than 90 percent of a given year’s capital expenditures simply reprise those of the preceding year.
Good Strategy vs. Bad Strategy?
- A good strategy is rare as many organizations who claim to have a strategy do not, instead, they have a set of performance goals, or, worse, a set of vague aspirations.
- Strategy is the application of strength against the most promising opportunity. A good strategy doesn’t just draw on existing strength, it creates strength through the coherence of its design. The opposite, however, is often the reality – organizations pursue multiple objectives that are unconnected with one another, or worse, that conflict with one another.
- The most powerful strategies arise from game-changing insights – of customers, markets, competitors, regulators, and industries. It creates advantages by anticipating the actions and reactions of others, by exploiting the leverage inherent in concentrating effort on a pivotal or decisive aspect of the situation, and by creating policies and actions that are coherent, each building on the other rather than canceling one another out.
- The strategies we develop for our clients are all about how to move them forward. Doing Strategy is figuring out how to advance the interests of our clients.
Our Promise
Judging what strategy to pursue for your organization will be grounded in a probing assessment of your organization’s external and internal situation. Based on this probing assessment we’ll develop a competitive strategy for your organization which will result in you being different – it means we’ll deliberately choose a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value to your clients.
Once the competitive strategy has been developed, we’ll ensure that your strategy can be implemented by defining the desired objectives and measures that will drive the required behaviors. We’ll therefore ensure that the developed strategy will create a line of sight between the organizational strategy and the individual performance measures.
Tell-Tale Signs of a Winning Strategy
- An activity system that looks different from your competitor’s system. It means attempting to deliver value in a distinctive way.
- Customers who absolutely love you.
- Competitors who make a good profit doing what they are doing. It means your strategy has left where-to-play and how-to-win choices for competitors who don’t need to attack the heart of your market to survive.
- More resources to spend on an ongoing basis than competitors have. This means you are winning the value equation and have the biggest margin between price and costs and the best capacity to add spending to take advantage of an opportunity or defend your turf.
- Competitors who attack one another not us. It means that you look like the hardest target in the (broadly defined) industry to attack.
- Customers who look first to you for innovations, new products, and service enhancements to make their lives better. This means that your customers believe that you are uniquely positioned to create value for them.