What Exactly Is Business Strategy? (P.S. It’s Not a Plan)

It’s not a plan, it’s not pillars, and it’s definitely not a tagline.

with Milan Veverka & Ged Roberts

Share this Episode:

Strategy is probably the most misused term in my industry.

Everything is “strategy.” Yet ask a CEO “what is your strategy?” and you’ll rarely get a good answer.

Ged has a story that captures the problem perfectly. He’d just kicked off with a new leadership team, and the CEO kept telling him the same thing: don’t spend time on strategy, we’re already aligned.

So Ged handed out Sharpies and sticky notes and asked each person to write down the strategy. Would it surprise you to know that no one wrote the same thing?

The problem starts with what “strategy” actually means: the creation of a unique and valuable position, involving a different set of activities.

Listen to this episode on:

Unique: compete to be different, not best. Choose what you’ll be great at and what you don’t care about.

Valuable: to whom? Just because what you make is cool doesn’t mean it will sell. A white space in the market might be empty because nobody has claimed it, or because there’s no customer standing in it.

Set of activities: strategy is not a single action. It’s the framework that decides which actions deserve your time and what gets left in the dust.

Strategy is not what you want to do next. It’s the framework that tells you what deserves your time. If yours can’t do that, you don’t have a strategy, you have a to-do list with ambition.

Read the Transcript

Tags: