Strategy is one of the most overused and overloaded words in management, let's ponder a bit on how to define it and, more importantly, differentiate good strategy from bad one.
What do you think of the definition of strategy from 'good/bad strategy' book?
I slightly ammened it to look as following "A strategy is a set of coherent actions designed to tackle the identified challenge in achieving the goals leveraging the particular insight in a defensible way".
This means a good strategy needs to have
1. An identified challenge. The more fundamental the better I think. Something like a universal supply constraint in the particular industry.
2. An insight. This is something unique you have a chance to develop as an organisation. Ideally you know this insight before anyone else in the industry.
3. Coherent set of actions. Coherent is key to ensure alignment of the functions in the organisation.
4. Defensible way. Answering how we are going to end up with the result which will be hard to copy. Unique value, increase in network effects etc.
You write a lot, without actually saying something tangible and actionable.
Maybe good for the academia.
What do you think of the definition of strategy from 'good/bad strategy' book?
I slightly ammened it to look as following "A strategy is a set of coherent actions designed to tackle the identified challenge in achieving the goals leveraging the particular insight in a defensible way".
This means a good strategy needs to have
1. An identified challenge. The more fundamental the better I think. Something like a universal supply constraint in the particular industry.
2. An insight. This is something unique you have a chance to develop as an organisation. Ideally you know this insight before anyone else in the industry.
3. Coherent set of actions. Coherent is key to ensure alignment of the functions in the organisation.
4. Defensible way. Answering how we are going to end up with the result which will be hard to copy. Unique value, increase in network effects etc.
Quite good. As mentioned I’m more interested in testing criteria than strategy definition as such.
Thank you for the post.
Sharing a paper that I read long time back on this topic and found it fairly comprehensive.
https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/matnat/sfe/ENT4400/h07/undervisningsmateriale/are%20you%20sure%20you%20have%20a%20strategy.pdf
It’s ok, but for me the quintessential question is how to tell bad strategy from good one, and it doesn’t really answer that from the quick read.
Structural components are quite specific to the domain, which is why most definitions are vague.