A Guide for Aspiring Strategists

by: MJ Harris

MJ Harris
MJ Harris
Jul 20, 2017 · 3 min read

What makes many businesses successful? One of the most important factors is that their decisions revolve around their company’s mission. They develop strategies. All businesses have (or will have) struggled developing and executing their own perfect business strategy. In this post, I will introduce two useful frameworks. Then, I will go on to explain specific tactics that you can use in or out of the work place.

1) There is no such thing as a “perfect strategy.”

Most people like to think of strategy as a set plan that can be created once and implemented forever. There’s a problem with that, though: one strategy can’t solve for everything. Life isn’t perfect: you have forces that you can control and forces that are outside of your reach. Strategies must work the same way. Cynthia A. Montgomery, author of The Strategist, represents this as the industry effect, where competitors in the industry can influence its profitability, and ultimately, your company’s value. So while your company may be focused on building a good product, your strategy should also account for what the industry deems as valuable. Ignore this, and it’ll be no bueno.

2) Trust is key.

It’s not enough to just create the perfect strategy. You’re also going to need to implement it. When running strategies as the group leader, it’s crucial that the people working for you BELIEVE in what you’re doing. Your peers depend on your leadership to do their jobs. In exchange, they’ll put in all of their effort and execute the strategy well. Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreseen Horowitz, cites in his book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things,

“A CEO’s ability to build this trust over time is often the difference between companies that execute well and companies that are chaotic.”

Under these frameworks, you can apply many tactics to perfect your strategy. In this case, here are three tactics that can be applied.

1) Make a clear, mission statement & delegate roles.

Take time to think of your (company’s) goals and priorities. Once you know what you want to achieve, brainstorm two or three important actions. One example of a company who’s implemented a successful strategy is Gucci, shortly after overcoming their downfall in the industry. You can read more about it here.

2) Find the lead bullets (bottlenecks).

Ask yourself: what’s stopping you from getting to your end result? Once you’ve identified what is wrong, fix it, even if it seems like it’s too big of a problem.

3) Invest in training/management programs.

You can’t force people to work for you, but you can get them to work with you. If you notice that there are small feuds going on between your marketing team and your product team, for example, hold a quick meeting between the two.

One company that can benefit from this is TIDAL, an online music sharing platform similar to the likes of Apple Music and Spotify. While TIDAL claims to differentiate themselves from their competitors by offering high-quality sounds and giving newcoming producers a fair chance to succeed in the music industry, some of its tactics to attract buyers differ from that. Celebrities like Beyoncé, Jay-Z, and Prince released their music on TIDAL before making them accessible to the public. To consumers, these moves make TIDAL appear less like a high-quality, community-oriented, music-sharing platform and more like an expensive streaming service, which isn’t good if you’re trying to attract more buyers.

Overall, for me, I find strategy-making useful because I can set easier goals for myself. It also makes me stop to think about a problem and respond to it logically instead of lashing out just on emotions and intuition.

Have any other suggestions? Feel free to comment on this blog post. Hopefully, this serves as a good foundation for understanding strategy.

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    MJ Harris

    Written by

    MJ Harris

    Came up from the Bay. Go bears.

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