What is strategy?

The right strategy is key to taking your business forward, but what is strategy?

To answer that question we turned to four important strategic thinkers.

  1. Richard Rumelt is Emeritus Professor at UCLA Anderson. He is an internationally known writer, speaker, and consultant on strategy.

  2. Stephen Bungay is a British management consultant, historian and author.

  3. Roger Martin is an author and strategy advisor to CEOs. His passion is helping businesspeople use more effective models to guide their actions.

  4. Colonel John Boyd was a United States Air Force fighter pilot and military consultant during the second half of the 20th century. His theories are highly influential in military, business, and litigation strategies and planning.

Strategy is not

Let’s start by stating that strategy is not:

  • A high-level plan

  • A harmless synonym for important

  • Only done by the senior leadership team

  • Needed once a year for budgeting

  • Useless when making day-to-day decisions

Strategy is something we both design and execute.

Strategy design

Stephen Bungay helped us see that strategy design establishes coherence between our current aims, the opportunities (or challenges) we discern and the capabilities we have or plan to acquire.

A good strategy is a framework for decision making that tells us how we expect to generate competitive advantage and then helps everyone in our organisation do their bit to achieve it.

Roger Martin looks at strategy from a similar angle. He sees five simple choices that must be made to drive competitive advantage:

  1. Winning aspiration (aims)

  2. Where to play (opportunities)

  3. How to win (competitive advantage)

  4. Must-have capabilities (capabilities)

  5. Enabling management systems (support your capabilities)

Strategy execution

Strategy execution relies upon technical excellence and an appropriate communication structure that is used to ensure aligned autonomy.

Richard Rumelt pointed out that the kernel of a strategy is a diagnosis of the critical challenge, a guiding policy for dealing with the challenge, a set of coherent actions to implement the policy, and coordination to accomplish the guiding policy.

We can map Rumelt’s advice to the famous OODA loop proposed by Col. John Boyd, as both Rumelt and Bungay acknowledge the iterative nature of strategy design. Whilst we execute strategy, we must also be prepared to re-design it.

Strategy sprint

This led us to develop the strategy sprint idea. It is a quick sprint through the OODA loop with the focused attention of the leadership team facilitated by external experts who can ensure the critical challenges are properly surfaced and discussed. See our Services for more on how that works.