One, they are expressed as goals, without saying anything about how to reach those goals.
Two, they are generic and shared by pretty much all the other brands and companies in your category.
Three, they are fluffy and written in such a loose and broad way that there are no obvious actions falling out of it. What does "leverage synergies" mean? What do you do with that?
A strategy is the unique value a business provides to the market.A unique value is the benefit your customers get from your product, which they can't get anywhere else, and which a hell of a lot of people want or need.
The intellectual content of a strategy - the thinking behind it - is only half the battle. The other half is converting that thinking into a strategy that is actually usable.
So what can you do?
You can put your strategy through the subjectivity test where you remove all subjective language, anything like 'good', 'great', 'world-class', 'best' and 'smart', and see if there are any substance left.
You could also play the opposite game where you ask yourself if the opposite of your strategy also make logical sense. If the answer is yes, then you probably have a good strategy on your hands because it represents a true strategic choice.
PowerPoint or Word?
Most strategies float around in "The Deck". A nice long PowerPoint presentation with a few pillars, onions, missions, visions, and the like. A PowerPoint lets you get away with all the things that wouldn't fly in a conversation or email.
Instead, just write it the way you'd tell it.
A single page of A4 with a few paragraphs of argument and explanation, culminating in the punchline ("therefore we are going to do X"). Your job is simply to explain it so that anyone who reads it, gets it.
Even a super-crisp strategy is still, ultimately, going to be fairly abstract, so it's important you really land the idea (and get the ball rolling) by listing some key actions arising from it.
- What must you do to deliver on this?
- What needs to change?
- What do you need to stop doing?
- What needs to be added?
If a strategy doesn't prompt ideas automatically then it has a problem - probably one of being too abstract, and not practically grounded enough.
"No Bullsh*t strategy" by Alex M H Smith
