Strategy is a word that is bandied about in business circles. It can get pretty expansive: strategic planning, marketing strategy, financial strategy, product strategy, strategy for developing a strategy… And it’s used as if everyone clearly understands what it means.

Let’s start with what strategy is not. It is not a goal; it is not an objective; it’s not an exercise. It is an approach – the means to your end, that:

• Identifies an unmet need in the market – an opportunity to be in a place or do things where the competitors are not
• Aligns your ability to address that need to result in a competitive advantage for your company
• Considers the barriers that can interfere with execution
• Assesses what your company needs to do to execute the strategy
• And, identifies the resources to do it

We’ve recently seen two large high-visibility companies stumble: Research In Motion (the maker of Blackberry) and Borders. Borders paid the ultimate price for a poor strategy – they filed for bankruptcy on February 16, 2011 and are in the process of liquidating all of their stores.

RIM is still in business but suffered a dramatic drop in market share. According to a Wall Street Journal report, RIM is in third place behind smartphones run by Google’s Android, and the iPhone. What makes matters worse for RIM, is that they are introducing a new operating system, ONX, a year from now and are trying to convince buyers in the meantime to buy their non-ONX phones.

There are many other companies that have failed because of poor strategy and poor execution (a great strategy is useless in a business sense unless it can be executed). Look at Wal-Mart and Kmart.

Small businesses are not immune to the perils of poor strategy, unfortunately they fail faster because in part of poor capitalization. The exciting part, however, is that companies with a good strategy and the ability to execute it can succeed and grow (sometimes spectacularly). Remember, Wal-Mart was once a small 5 & 10 (Walton’s 5 & 10) in Bentonville, Arkansas.

In this week’s Quick Tips we will explore what to do about it to ensure you are not complacent in your strategy.

Copyright 2011 Kubica LaForest Consulting

This entry was posted on Monday, August 8th, 2011 at 4:37 am and is filed under Business Growth & Entrepreneurial Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.