January 24, 2005

STRATEGY. MUST. TRAVEL.

🚀 Audacious Move™ of the Week

STRATEGY. MUST. TRAVEL.

A successful business strategy must be simple enough for employees to understand, remember and use every day to make decisions that drive growth and competitive advantage.

Bold Decisions Create Extraordinary Businesses.

I hope it helps you create yours.

🧳 Most strategies don’t travel

Most organizations have a strategy.

Few have one that can travel.

It sits in a deck.

Lives in a planning document.

Gets hauled out at the annual retreat.

And depends on a handful of executives to explain what it actually means.

That’s not a strategy that travels.

If your strategy can’t move through your organization without you constantly interpreting it, you have a problem.

I learned this building a startup to more than $1 BILLION in annual sales.

Strategy has to leave the executive suite and get into the hands of the people doing the work.

🎯 Give people four answers

People need to know four things:

HOW BIG?
What is our 24 month revenue goal?

WHO to SERVE?
Which Customer Groups have the potential to get us there?

WHAT do they CRAVE?
What do those chosen customers care deeply about and desire?

HOW will we COMPETE and WIN?
What will make us The ONLY One™ who delivers what they crave?

That’s the Strategic Game Plan™.

Simple enough to understand.

Specific enough to guide action.

🔥 Creating it isn’t the Audacious Move

Making it travel is.

Baking it into the way the organization operates.

Hiring decisions.

Investment decisions.

Customer decisions.

Service decisions.

Priority decisions.

People should be able to look at an opportunity and ask:

Does this help us achieve HOW BIG?

Does it serve our WHO?

Does it deliver what they CRAVE?

Does it strengthen what makes us The ONLY One™?

If the answer is NO, why are we doing it?

That’s when strategy stops being something leadership talks about and becomes something people actually use.

👀 Give everyone Line of Sight™

When strategy travels, something powerful happens.

Your people no longer need you standing beside them telling them what to do.

The strategy tells them.

It creates Line of Sight™ between where the organization is going and what people do every day.

People can make decisions.

Set priorities.

Say NO to things that don’t fit.

And act without waiting for someone higher up the organization to tell them what to do.

That’s when strategy becomes an operating discipline rather than an annual planning exercise.

✈️ Can your strategy travel?

Here’s my test.

Can someone three levels away from the CEO explain your strategy?

Can they use it to choose between competing priorities?

Can they act on it when leadership isn’t in the room?

If not, simplify it until they can.

Because the purpose of strategy isn’t to demonstrate how smart the people who created it are.

It’s to help everyone else make smarter choices.

Build a strategy that can travel without you.

🚀 Want more Audacious Moves™?

🎙️ Listen to Audacious Moves to a BILLION™ for practical, contrarian ideas for building an extraordinary business.

✍🏻 Explore more articles, ideas and proven tools at BE DiFFERENT or be dead.

Extraordinary businesses aren’t built by ordinary decisions.

They’re built one Audacious Move™ at a time.

Now go make yours.

Cheers,
Roy

• Posted 1.24.05 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
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