Strategy

Strategy is an incredibly misused word. It has a thousand definitions. Here's ours:

Strategy is a lucid, agreed-upon understanding of your unique, sustainable, defensible competitive advantage.

That deceptively short sentence describes something extremely important. If business is a journey, strategy is not the road map. Strategy is an agreement about where you're going in the first place, why you're going there, what you think you'll find when you do, and why you want it. It's the foundation for everything else you'll do. Without a clear business development strategy that everyone understands and has bought into, you're making it up as you go along. Very bad idea.

Developing a strategy means answering a long series of questions, many of which will be new. To make things even more complex, these questions need to be answered from the perspective of your customers, not you. A few of them:

• What are your strengths?
• What are your weaknesses?
• Who do you compete with?
• Why are you better than your competitors?
• How do you know your customers care?
• How long will you remain better?

These questions, and others like them, force our clients to think about their businesses in new ways, sometimes far outside their comfort zones. Strategy requires a great deal of research, soul-searching, and a commitment to complete candor. That being said, a strong, thoroughly thought-out strategy is an incredible asset. It's measuring twice before picking up the saw.

Here's an example: Federal Express does not sell package delivery. That's what they provide. What they sell is peace of mind. That single insight is the foundation of their entire strategy.

If you'd like to read more about this subject, we recommend Kenichi Ohmae's The Mind of the Strategist: The Art of Japanese Business.