Why Organisations aren’t Realising the Value of Strategy

The full potential for Strategy to realise value for organisations is rarely acknowledged by business leaders and ‘strategists’. I say that as a reflection both on my time as a business leader — at times with specific responsibility for ‘strategy’ and on my two years study of strategy theory and research.

As a result of this, I will be discussing and exploring Strategy in detail on my Company Page, with the aim of answering four important questions regarding Strategies impact on any and all organisations:

1. What strategy are you trying to execute?

2. Do current processes and activities provide the level of differentiation over competitors to give a material competitive advantage? And if not…

3. What new processes and activities are required to giveth required competitive advantage

4. What is the cost and process of implementing those new processes and activities?

Strategy Defined

To begin this discussion, I want to state that a strategy cannot be developed without understanding what exactly strategy is. At its very core, Strategy can be defined as “a plan designed to achieve a particular long-term aim.” However, before developing a strategy of your own, it’s imperative to explore the different elements that collectively work together to generate a strong strategy. It’s best to see strategy as:

1. A roadmap to the future and to goals

2. Being concerned with how the goals are achieved (including through allocation of resources)

3. Being required due to competition

4. Considered to be the concern of ‘top management’

There are two distinct strategies that all organisations should adopt and follow in order to develop a competitive advantage in busy marketplaces: corporate strategy, and business strategy. Together, these enable your organisation to identify ways in which you can outperform your competition and produce goods and services as efficiently as possible.

Corporate strategy is about choosing the markets to operate in. When launching a company this is the best place to start, but it’s also important if you’re an established organisation that’s looking to diversify.

A business strategy is more concerned with internal workings. i.e. how a business should operate and maintain itself to have a competitive edge. For this, you must be reflective: identify what your business does well, and how this can be seen as an advantage against other businesses operating in the same industry.

Conceptually Simple, Operationally Complex

By definition then, strategy and strategy types are conceptually simple. Getting your head around the domain of strategy — what it’s concerned with and how to think about it — is neither contentious or challenging. There is significant agreement amongst those who have studied, thought about, and written about strategy. Things begin to get more complex when it comes to the process of deciding on and developing strategy, as there are many different and well-established approaches to that. In this sense then, strategy is operationally complex.

One example of a period in which strategy becomes farmer complex is during its activation stage. Here, you may be unsure as to whether the plan you’ve put together is going to be successful, but I can’t stress enough how important it is to be committed and follow things through rigorously. At this stage it’s also vitally important to make sure that the strategy is aligned with stakeholders, as their influence and input will be critical at moving strategy from a plan to something that ensures the right activities happen day to day across the organisation; it’s all too easy for those creating the strategy to pay too little attention to whether or not the strategy permeates the organisation.

So How Can You Master the Art of Strategy Planning and Implementation?

Over the next few months, I will be building on this discussion through a series of articles and insights that will explore core strategic decisions, formulations and strategy’s link with performance. If you are interested in developing strategies that turn into value-adding activities, then join in the discussion by following my LinkedIn Company Page here.