A good strategy has a meaning, is motivating for people and can be measured. The strategic level creates an image of the market trends and developments that are used to formulate a vision, market opportunities are connected to ambition, ambition is quantified in terms of business objectives; the strategy
Achieve an executable
strategy. Obtain a
competitive advantage
Do the following sound familiar?
We have a strategy but it is not being communicated effectively to all employees
Our people are not sure what our strategy is and do not know how their work contributes to achieving our strategic goals
We launch several strategic initiatives but they don’t seem to be delivering as expected
What is in the way of achieving your strategy? Diagnose the problem: We help you identify issues related to your strategy, their true nature, cause and extent. Where are we today?
Find the unifying idea: A good strategy is coherent and leads to a unifying idea, an approach that will help you overcome the obstacles identified in the diagnosis. What is your true competitive advantage? Where do we want to be?
Craft a coherent plan: What is your plan? What is the set of coordinated actions that will help achieve your goals? How do you ensure execution?
Steps in our approach
- Problem Statement
- Opportunities / Objectives
- Situation / Constraints/ Context
- Recommendation / Big Idea
- Validation
- Design principles/models
To produce clear strategy and execute it, a clear process that drives performance and the health of the organisation is needed, along with appropriate metrics.
Strategy is a coherent path to achieve goals that lead to a competitive advantage
Stefanos Marcou
Associate Partner
sm@businessin.biz
Strategy formulation
Where do we want to be? Are we headed in the right direction?
Can we say what our strategy is? What are its’ basic components?
Are we setting the right targets?
Is everything we are doing contributing to achieving our strategic goals? How do we know?
What are we measuring? Why?
Strategy Integration
Does everybody know what our goals are? Are their goals aligned to our strategy? Are these goals part of their everyday work life?
How effectively are we communicating our strategy?
How are we ensuring engagement and commitment from our people to our strategic goals?
How do our departmental goals feed our strategic ambitions?
At the tactical level business operations is structured in a manner that objectives are achieved and the strategy is implemented, This is done by translating each strategic pillar into a critical success factors. These are the key factors that are crucial and make the difference between success and failure. Each CSF is translated into a performance indicator in order to measure performance.
Strategy Execution
Does everything we do reflect our strategy?
How do we measure this?
Are the outcomes produced the desired ones?
Are we doing what needs to be done right from the first time, every time?
Performance indicators are targets on operational level that drive the strategic execution, To be able for staff to manage these targets it is necessary to determine the steering variables for performance. Steering variables are activities and characteristics that have an impact on performance levels such as “buttons” that can be used to increase or decrease these levels.
Innovation
Have you found yourself solving the same problem over and over again?Then you are probably not addressing the problem at its root.
Have you caught yourself saying something like “this is the last time we…”. It probably won’t be the last time.
Sometimes it’s about asking the right questions.
The right question in many cases is “what could we be doing differently?”
How much time do you invest in rethinking?
Thought Leadership
As we progress, an increasing number of organisations are realizing that employee engagement is the main driver behind great work. Once you have the right people in place it is a matter of engaging them, offering an environment in which they can thrive. So many talents have been crushed or driven to competitive organisations by small minded or simply indifferent management and leadership. If employee engagement is to drive great performance, leadership must first drive that engagement. Starting at the very top, the leaders of an organisation recognise the need to continuously develop and in turn provide the means for their people to receive the training and feedback they need to develop and grow professionally.
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live your strategy
Strategy has gone – and will keep going – through many evolutions. Strategy today is twisted like a golden thread by growing overload of disruptions.
Greater innovation has emerged to cope with the disruptors (agility, thought leadership, flexibility, resilience) but none has exhaustively resolved the problems around strategy)