Strategy? Why? How?*
by Gyöngyvér Szabó I plantconfident.com
I am proudly owning my habit of buying airport reads almost every time before a flight. I used to travel a lot for projects, and I was always up to washing gold in the sea of Jane Eyres and Catcher in the Ryes in the airport bookstore if I had the time. My first buy, about ten years ago, was The Economist's Business Strategy - A guide to taking your business forward.
That book has helped me understand the logic of strategising, and I'm here to share that with you.
Over my career, I have been working with highly skilled strategists and poor ones, too. It was always with the latter that I felt we lost our heading, and focused efforts went down the drain. Your strategy indicates where resources - people, effort and finance - should be concentrated. If you have it in place and your team sticks to it, no one should experience a dead-end.
A master plan that determines and schedules essential tasks and budget-controlled activities is an active result of strategic thinking. However straightforward it sounds, I've seen decision-makers struggling with it. A classic pitfall in strategic thinking is "jumping to cause" - making assumptions about the cause of a problem that is wrong. Hello, cognitive biases! Trying to fix the wrong thing won't resolve the issue, no matter how strategic you think you are.
To avoid pitfalls, follow these guidelines in approaching strategy:
gather the right information and base your logic on data;
develop a solid market awareness- you're not working under a rock;
decide what actions you need to take first to move the needle;
assess risks - I can't emphasise this enough and lastly
practice critical thinking.
Such an approach allows systematic planning activities as well as the benefit of incremental, learning-by-doing processes.
* This is how my husband would name a blog post; short and succinct, leaving much to your imagination. It's Sunday morning, and it seemed a good idea to use his tactic.
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snippets. short essays about the ins and outs of creating and delivering value digitally.