Insightfulstrategy

A good strategy which supports the proven and interdependent business growth model will provide visibility, capability, and agility.

Given the “VUCA” normality of contemporary business and given the challenges of ever-evolving dynamic ecosystems, business strategies today are usually dynamic and have a lot of moving parts.

 Digital strategy crafts upon how, in an interconnected world where everything talks to everything, where values, behaviors, and expectations are shifting all the time. Strategy management is not a linear step scenario, but an iterative strategy making and implementation continuum.

 

Strategies need to be forethoughtful: Every organization is on the journey of business evolution. Learn to stay alerted, observe with subtlety and move fast. The strategy is about overall direction, and the direction from the current market to the future market is anything but a straight line. Admit those disruptive events may occur. Vision and strategy are interconnected. Vision is on the horizon; strategy is about how you will get there.

Visions inspire; strategies compel; vision comes first, strategies along with a set of roadmaps enable the company to realize the vision stepwisely. A vision describes the desired future position of the company. A strategy is an action or ways chosen to move into the desired future. Strategy formulation is a combination of planned and emergent thinking. You formulate a strategy and then encounter the real world of implementation, which provides you feedback that allows you to continuously adjust the strategy on the move

Strategies need to be descriptive: Strategy is directional and needs to allow for the organization to move forward coherently in the described direction. However, strategy in many companies is the shelf ware no one understands; or in some organizations, there are many versions of strategy or sub-strategy with conflicting or infeasible goals. Miscommunication and misalignment are one of the root causes to fail the strategy execution. The mistake that most organizations make in this regard is to fail to translate the high-level language of strategy into the professional language of the various staff specialties.

Infeasible or conflicting business strategies perhaps never get resolved but drive wasteful or conflicting behavior. A good strategy has clarified logic and well set prioritization to achieve business goals and objectives. Because they outline the areas where possible conflicting priorities may lie and outline how they are able to be handled by the organization in terms of resource allocation such as time, budget, people, etc. Ultimately a strategy has to end up expressed in people's job descriptions and workloads.

Strategy needs to be prescriptive or customized: There is no “one size fits all” strategy formula. At all levels, the strategy can always be crafted via collective insight. The creation of a corporate strategy, or even sub-level strategy, also depends upon where the company is in its life cycle. It perhaps takes a few weeks to craft a good enough strategy. But in some cases, it can take years or even a decade for a company to build the knowledge, relationships and/or business partnerships that are required in order to successfully implement a long term strategic planning.

The strategy is how that state is realized externally. The road to somewhere can be reached by many different routes. Strategy needs to be prescriptive because different companies have their own set of differentiated capabilities. Capability-based strategy has a significantly high success rate. It’s also important to strengthen the strategic alignment of projects and programs to prevent business initiatives being undertaken that do not support the enterprise strategy and prioritizing the top programs that can make a significant impact on strategy execution.

A strategy is the light to guide you through. In the strategy-making process, one must assess the environment, competitions, other threats and opportunities and devise contingencies accordingly. A good strategy which supports the proven and interdependent business growth model will provide visibility, capability, and agility.

Posted in: Strategy