There comes a time in our business and personal lives when we need to accept that accountability and responsibility go hand-in-hand with excellence. And in business, it means working every day to generate strategic insights, using those insights to set direction and then fiercely executing strategy with both mental agility and perseverance.
If you're not content being with the majority of the population and be content with mediocrity, then it's time to commit yourself to becoming a better strategist. This path to becoming a highly strategic manager begins with understanding the seven levels of strategy and the action steps to implement them.
1. Substituting Planning for Thinking: Since thinking is hard work, it's not uncommon for people to fall back on strategic planning in an attempt to shape the direction of their business. However, this ignores a crucial distinction-strategic thinking involves the generation of insights-strategic planning involves the application of the insights into an action plan. Relying on strategic planning without strategic thinking is nonsensical because the essential thinking function has been ignored. This results in tired, old tactical plans leading to marginally incremental improvement at best while stifling your business's potential.
Action: Educate yourself with the knowledge base and terminology clearly distinguishing strategic thinking from planning and learn to use the 'tools' to facilitate that thinking.
2. The Discipline to Say "No": Strategy involves the intelligent allocation of limited resources. "Intelligent allocation" requires us to make trade-offs and focus those resources. Too often, because tradeoffs involve risk, we take cover in the status quo and don't make any tradeoffs at all. While not making tradeoffs and not saying "no" to areas of resource allocation may limit short-term vulnerability, it is often a sure sign of long-term weakness.
Action: Identify your resources - capital, talent and time - and begin detailing how they are allocated, including your time. Any surprises? How is this allocation different from past months/years? Does it reflect the changing market trends and customer needs? Writing down the significant resource allocations (including what you spend your time on) is an objective way to begin measuring whether or not they are returning the requisite value for their investment.
3. Prepare to be a Strategist: Before you can develop great strategy, you first need to become a great strategist. Improved strategic thinking means that business owners will invest more resources in the right activities (key initiatives driving their business success) and fewer resources in the wrong activities (urgent but unimportant initiatives), leading in theory and practice to greater revenue, profitability and productivity.
Action: Provide yourself with periodic training and development programs on strategy and strategic thinking skills sets.
4. Have a clear focus: Not investing the time in a sound strategy development process results in a bumper car strategy-your business mindlessly changing directions each time it's bumped into by a marketplace issue.
Action: Invest in a strategy development process that is simple, concise and effective. Set aside one day per quarter for a "Strategy Tune-up," when your team assesses the key business issues and assumptions to gauge progress.
5. Throw out the budget: One of the most entrenched practices in business's of every size is to allow the budget to dictate the strategy. Constricting the creative strategy development process at the outset with a page of budget numbers can close off avenues that might fundamentally enhance the business in ways not previously explored.
Action: Leave the budget numbers in the folder during the initial strategic thinking sessions. Once your team has had the opportunity to comprehensively think through the business and generate strategic insights, bring the budget numbers in during the strategic planning phase to help prioritise the initiatives.
6. Link the Strategic Plan to Action: One of the great ironies is that the business's that do invest their time in strategy development often don't have an effective way of then using that plan on a daily basis to drive the activities. They've invested time, energy and money into thinking that sets strong strategic direction, only to have that direction evaporate over the course of the year due to the "out-of-sight, out-of-mind" phenomenon.
Action: Transform your traditional narrative strategic plan into a StrategyPrint-a concise, two-page blueprint for your business. Page one contains the insights your team has generated regarding the market, customers, and the organisation itself. Page two contains the action plan, aligning the goals, objectives, strategies, tactics and metrics. The simplicity of a tool such as the StrategyPrint allows you to easily update it on a daily basis, making it a functional real-time strategic plan.
7. Not challenge business as usual: At the heart of strategy is resource allocation, so at the heart the business owners work is their ability to effectively allocate their limited resources. When a business owner has had success, it is common to continue to allocate resources in the same manner that led to that success. However, as the context of the business changes in the form of market trends, evolving customer needs, etc., the resource allocation formula that led to that success will need to be renewed.
Action: Take time during the quarterly Strategy Tune-up sessions to evaluate the assumptions on which resource allocation decisions have been made. This will eliminate the business-as-usual mindset that causes many successful coaches to be cast into business status quo.
