Is your business strategy Playing to Win?
Strategy is an integrated set of choices uniquely positioning your firm in your industry to create sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition.
Today we define strategy deeper. As explained in Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, by AG Lafley and Roger Martin; Strategy is a coordinated and integrated set of five choices: a winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, core capabilities, and management systems.
My experience coaching tells me few mid-size businesses explore a strategy to this degree.
The argument is: Doug we’re not Proctor & Gamble. We don’t have the resources or time to explore and discover strategy to this degree.
The Answer: Are you okay limiting your top-line revenue Growth? If your answer is not to explore a strategy to this degree/level, you lack the required commitment to achieve growth with your business.
When I asked Verne Harnish whether or not a small to mid-sized business should invest in a Strategic Advisory Council, and how much time they should dedicate to this, Verne responded, “Douglas – generally it’s an hour a week. OTG Software, which scaled from startup to over $1 billion market cap, held their’s every Monday morning at 7 am for an hour. At Scaling Up ours is 9 am – 10 am every Monday.”
Has your business looked at strategy through these Five Choices?
Questions to Ask: Your Strategy
The following questions intentionally press on a few key points:
The focus is on very basic, fundamental questions with the intent of helping you/your team make better strategic choices.
You should spend three or four hours chewing on the few critical issues together. This might be the first exploratory and discovery meeting for your Strategic Advisory Council.
Strategy’s 5 Choices
For most businesses strategy can seem mystical and mysterious. It isn’t. It is easily defined. It is a set of choices about winning. It is an integrated set of choices, uniquely positioning your firm in its industry to create sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition.
Strategy is the answer to these five interrelated questions:
These choices and the relationship between them can be understood as a reinforcing cascade, with the choices at the top of the cascade setting the context for the choices below, and choices at the bottom influencing and refining the choices above.
If your business is small, there may well be a single choice cascade that defines the set of choices for the entire organization. In larger companies, there are multiple levels of choices and interconnected cascades. As Lafley and Martin explain, “at P&G, for instance, there is a brand-level strategy that articulates the five choices for a brand such as Olay or Pampers. There is a category strategy that covers multiple related brands, like skincare or diapers. There is a sector strategy that covers multiple categories, for example, beauty or baby care. And finally, there is a strategy at the company level, too.”
How does your business do on strategy through these Five Choices?
If you struggle to achieve revenue growth, it’s time you make better decisions about your strategy.
Read Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, by AG Lafley and Roger Martin.
When you decide you need help contact Positioning Systems. From these basic fundamentals through the Outthinker Process, we can help you achieve revenue growth, discover innovative ways to redefine your business, identify revenue-producing products, services, or markets, to grow your business.
Growth demands Strategic Discipline.
The 3 Strategic Disciplines: Priority, Metrics, and Meeting Rhythms help your business dramatically improve your forecasting, and alignment, empowering your team to achieve accelerated growth. These Execution principles pave the road to success on your 3-5 year plan.
Your Strategy Decisions should result in top-line revenue growth. Positioning Systems helps you navigate and determine your best strategy for your future growth. With experts like Kaihan Krippendorff (Outthinker Process) we bring superior experience to elevate your Strategy idea generation and decision-making.
Count on Positioning Systems to help your business achieve the following outcomes on the Four most Important Decisions your business faces:
DECISION |
RESULT/OUTCOME |
PEOPLE |
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STRATEGY |
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EXECUTION |
|
CASH |
We help your business achieve Execution Excellence.
Positioning Systems helps mid-sized ($5M - $250M) business Scale-UP. We align your business to focus on Your One Thing! To achieve growth, you need to evolve in today’s rapidly changing economic environment. Are you avoiding a conversation with yourself on how to can successfully grow your business? Contact dwick@positioningsystems.com to Scale Up your business! Take our Four Decisions Needs Assessment to discover how your business measures against other Scaled Up companies. We’ll contact you.
Aspirations are statements about the ideal future. Does your company have a statement about your ideal future? Do you tie your aspirations to specific benchmarks to measure your progress toward them? How you achieve this, next blog.