Most people massively over complicate the concept of “strategy”. Ultimately a strategy is the general approach you are going to take in order to deliver your company mission/goals. Having a clear strategy is important as it allows people to decide between competing approaches, markets, customer segments, activities and product features. As such your strategy is the thing that informs and connects what the company is trying to do and how it is trying to do it, with the people who are responsible for delivering it.
The thing most people get wrong is creating an overly complicated or ambitious strategy which nobody can remember, and where pretty much everything is on the table. People create overly complicated strategies due to “ego” and “expectation”. “Ego” because they want to create something super clever that nobody else could have thought of and “expectation” because people will question what you’ve been doing with your time if it seems too simple. This leads to a strategy that’s effectively useless as it doesn’t allow you to effectively marshal resources or prioritise against. So people essentially ignore it and get on with the things they’ve been told to do, and are mostly likely being judged against.
Most organisations have an inbuilt immune response to strategy, because they’ve seen so many clever strategies get written, shared and ignored. Why will this one be any different? The hardest part of any strategy isn’t coming up with the approach, but getting anybody to take it seriously/care. Strategy is essentially organisational…
