Many CEO’s and businesses don’t understand strategy:
A strategy is a coordinated and integrated set of where-to-play, how-to-win, core capability, and management system choices that uniquely meet a consumer’s needs, thereby creating competitive advantage and superior value for a business. Strategy is a way to win—and nothing less.
Unless winning is the ultimate aspiration, you will never invest enough of the right resources to create sustainable advantage.
Strategy begins with consumers, rather than products, and it’s winning relative to competition.
By the time of my election to CEO in 2000, most of P&G’s businesses were missing their goals, many by a wide margin. The company was overinvested and overextended. It was not winning with those who mattered most—consumers and customers. When I visited all our top retailers in my first thirty days on the job, I found that P&G was their biggest supplier but nowhere near their best supplier. Consumers were abandoning P&G, as evidenced by declining trial rates and market share on most of our leading brands.
(When was the last time you visited or spoke to your customers?)
I was determined to get P&G’s strategy right. To me, right meant that P&G would focus on achievable ways to win with the consumers who mattered the most and against the very best competition. It meant leaders would make real strategic choices (identifying what they would do and not do, where they would play and not play, and how specifically they would create competitive advantage to win). And it meant that leaders at all levels of the company would become capable strategists as well as capable operators. I was going to teach strategy until P&G was excellent at it.”
Lafley shares these points about building your Winning Aspiration:
Ask yourself: How is our company doing on these six points?
Have you defined what your winning aspiration is?
Do you know what winning is for your business?
TROUBLE
Aren’t they who matter most?
Aren’t your employees and consumers the ones who drive your business growth?
What’s your Why?
Are your competitors doing a better job of winning with consumers and their employees?
Finally, do you have the discipline necessary to approach strategy, follow all five strategy choices to win?
Contact dwick@positioningsystems.com to help you build your strategy and get on the road to Strategic Discipline now.
Growth demands Strategic Discipline.
Discipline sustains momentum, over a long period of time, laying the foundations for lasting endurance.
A winning habit starts with 3 Strategic Disciplines: Priority, Metrics and Meeting Rhythms. Forecasting, accountability, individual, and team performance improve dramatically.
Let Positioning Systems help your business achieve these outcomes on the Four most Important Decisions your business faces:
DECISION |
RESULT/OUTCOME |
PEOPLE |
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STRATEGY |
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EXECUTION |
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CASH |
Positioning Systems helps mid-sized ($5M - $250M) business Scale-UP. We align your business to focus on Your One Thing! 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.
People living with disabilities make up 15% of the world’s population. Accessibility to your business should be a primary consideration for both ethical reasons and for the healthy growth of your business. Karoline Clarke is my guest blogger on this subject next week as I am facilitating Annual Planning for my customer.