Episode 1: What is a Strategy?

Hello to all you Leaders In Strategy! I’m Mike Harris and welcome you to my very first blog. I am an experienced leadership consultant, and most of what I do is through workshops, seminars, and coaching.

Late last year, I decided I wanted to widen our reach and help a new audience, and someone suggested doing a blog. So here we are, and each episode will cover a different subject related to leadership & strategy. I will share insights from my successful workshops & seminars & hopefully you will gain a different perspective and some helpful insights.

Everything I look at will be through the lens of strategy. For some of you this will be new and for some this will act as are fresher. It will help sharpen the skills that you already have. It will also remind you about things that perhaps you should be doing at work but you have forgotten about, or you don't have time to do.

We are going to start with looking at what a strategy is and what makes a good strategy.

‍

Let me take you back to the early 2000s to when I first had to think about strategy. I had just finished a major project in Edinburgh, and I had been asked to manage a similar project in Birmingham. However, I wasn't particularly keen to do it as I felt I'd ‘been there, done that’.

‍

Ultimately, I decided if I was going to run the project in Birmingham, I was going to use it as an opportunity to learn about leadership in order to progress my thinking and progress my career.

One of the first things I found when looking at leadership was the importance of strategy. It's hard to be a leader if you don't have a strategy. If you don't have a vision of where you want to take people. So that was my first experience of strategy.

I went to find a definition of what strategy means. Back then I couldn’t just Google it, so I looked it up in an English dictionary.

‍

‍The definition I found was:

“The art of planning and directing large military movement and operations in a war or battle.” 

Clearly that related to strategy in warfare and didn’t apply to business, so I kept looking for other definitions. Whilst I found plenty, I didn’t like any of them. They were too complicated or explained a strategic plan not a strategy.

After a while, I kept coming back to the definition above. The one related to war. As I looked at it, I realised with a bit of tweaking it could be used for my purposes. So, I changed ‘large business movement’ and ‘war or battle’ and came up with my definition:

“The art of planning and directing a large business movement and operations in a competitive environment.” 

It worked for me, and I’ve been using it as my definition ever since, for over 20 years. The reason I really like it is because it keeps it loose. It can be adapted to different situations.

‍

For instance,

• If you are heading up an HR department at a manufacturing business, it becomes ‘the art of planning and directing HR operations and movement in a manufacturing company’.

• Or if you work in sales and marketing it’s ‘the art of planning and directing sales and marketing movement within a sales environment.’ 

• Or if you are leading an infrastructure project, it's ‘the art of planning and directing project operations & movement on a large Infrastructure contract.’ 

‍

So, it's adaptable and usable in different context. You can insert the part of the business or the operation you're involved in into the actual overall definition.

‍

 In practice, your strategy should:

1. Describe the general direction set for the business and its various components to achieve a desired state in the future.

2. Determine your basic long-term goals.

3. Contain a plan of action designed to achieve your long-term or overall aim. The actions should be those taken to attain one or more of your goals.

4. Include the resources necessary for carrying out these goals & actions.

5. Normally result from a detailed strategic planning process.

My definition of a strategy is: “The art of planning and directing large business movement and operations in a competitive environment.”

Your business strategy outlines your vision, sets your objectives, includes your plan of action, guides the decision-making processes to improve performance. In other words it’s a high-level plan that helps a unit achieve its goals.