Episode 5: What Makes A Successful Strategy?

Hello & welcome back to all you Leaders In Strategy. I'm Mike Harris and this is episode five of my blog, which I am calling ‘What Makes A Successful Strategy?' This episode has come from a request from one of our readers, so thank you very much. It's come from Henry and what a great question! It’s a subject that I regularly talk about at my workshops, so I'm absolutely delighted to be able to share my thoughts on this with you.

Before I do that, I just want to welcome you back if your returning & also welcome everyone who is joining us for the first time. Great to have you here.

So, if you are new or like me you just have a short memory, I'm just going to provide a quick recap.

I am an experienced leadership consultant, and most of what I do is through workshops, seminars, and coaching.

Last year, I decided 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 is through the lens of strategy. For some of you this will be new and for others this will act as a refresher. It will help sharpen the skills that you already have. Hopefully this will remind you of what is currently affecting your business and therefore should be considered when looking at a strategy. 

This Blog links to our 2nd episode, which was called “What’s the point of a Strategy?’, when I set out the importance of having a strategy for your business, department, unit, organisation etc. Check it out if you missed it.

There are plenty of books, blogs and podcasts which will take you through what they see as being a successful strategy. They’ll talk about the Vision, the importance of being authentic. That it should set out achievable but stretched goals. It’ll probably talk about Values & Culture, getting everyone to buy in and having the right resources.

All of which is important, but I’m not going to talk about those things. I’m going to focus on 4 strands that I have found will make or break your strategy. Get these 4 things right, & you’re over halfway to achieving success in your strategy!

These 4 strands are:

1. The Ambition.
2. The Identity of your organisation.
3. The company’s Competitive Advantage.
4. The Key Challenges.

These are so important to making your strategy a success, and therefore I will be re-visiting each one individually in detail in future blogs. With an episode dedicated to each one. But today I will give you a brief overview of each strand.

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1. Ambition

As I said previously, everything we look at is through the lens of strategy and as I explained in our 2nd Blog one of the high-level objects of a strategy is to frame your destination. Identify where you want to go, and the Ambition helps you achieve this.

In my workshops I describe this as follows:

Picture taking a time machine into the future, to the end of the Strategy period, say 3 years. When you get out, define what it is that you want to see. What is the business that you hope to be at the end of that period. That might be the size of the business, the shape, the culture. But it's what you want it to be.

By doing this you are defining the finishing line of the strategy. By knowing what you want to achieve, you are able to hold this picture in your head and it becomes much easier to make decisions that align with the overall strategy.

Therefore, in affect what the Ambition is doing is allowing you to start with the end in mind.

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2. Identity

This is actually a difficult topic and is probably the hardest of the 4 strands to grasp. By Identity what I mean is how would you describe your company to a new customer. So effectively your elevator pitch. Whereby you have just 30 seconds to get the key points across to your customer.

So, what do I mean by Identity?

Well, if I was talking about a person’s identity then I think we all know what I mean. We would describe it something along the lines of “a unique set of characteristics that identify as person as themselves & no-one else”. However, then we talk about identity in the context of a company, it becomes a more difficult.

Normally when I say to somebody “what is the identity of your business” what they tend to do is tell me what they do. They’ll say things like ‘we are a bakers to large supermarkets’, or  ‘plumbers on new build hospitals’ or ‘we provide accounting services to SME’s’.

But that’s that not their Identity because that’s what all their competition do as well. It is not setting out what is unique to them, what nobody else does.

If we are to define it from the point of view of Identity for businesses, then we would say that it is “a unique set of characteristics that identifies your business as itself & no-one else.”

It's really critical to identify what your company’s Identity is and when you get that right, it will make your strategy a success. It always has done in my experience.

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3. Competitive Advantage

The Identity then flows into the next strand – Competitive Advantage. For me this is one of the most important, if not the most important, aspect of every successful strategy.

Your Competitive Advantage is how you differentiate yourself from your competition based on your company strengths. It’s what sets you apart.

But it’s not just about winning work, it should also go to the heart of your organisation, improve your performance and improve the bottom line.

A quote that I like in relation to Competitive Advantage is: “If you don’t have competitive advantage, don’t compete!”

In other words, if you don't have a plan of how you will win, then what's the point in turning up and taking part.  We all know that’s true in sport, but it’s equally important in business. You have to have a plan on how you will beat competition, or how you will secure more orders etc.

When I talk about Competitive Advantage, this is what I mean:

• Leveraging your strengths to your greatest advantage.
• Using your strengths against your competition’s weaknesses.

Something I really like when looking at Competitive Advantage is doing something unexpected that will put you to the front in the dealings with your customers.

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4. Key Challenges

When we talk about the Ambition, we are talking about whatis going to make your strategy a success.

When we talk about the Identity and the Competitive Advantage were talking about why it is going to be a success and how are you are going to make it a success.

Whereas the Key Challenges is looking at the Why Not. Why it might it not be a success, why it might go wrong.

So, what you’re looking at is anticipating what are those obstacles going to be that are going to stop your strategy.

This is not to be defeatist. The reason for doing it is if you can identify these early, you can put counter measures in place. You can develop action plans which address the issues that you've identified so hopefully they don't happen. Or if they do, you've already got your mitigation plan.

I find that this is a really important aspect of any strategy. Interestingly when I talk to customers and they have produced a business strategy in the past, they tell me that  they not done this, and they can see that maybe that’s one of the reasons the previous strategy has failed.

The four key components that I have found makes a successful strategy are:

1. Ambition: Define the finishing line of the strategy so you can start with the end in mind!
2. Identity: Understand and describe the unique set of characteristics that identifies your business as itself & no-one else.
3. Competitive Advantage: How you differentiate yourselves from your competition based on your company strengths, it’s what sets you apart
4. Key Challenges: The obstacles that need to be overcome to make the strategy a success

Once again thank you to Henry for suggesting this subject. As I said earlier, I will be revisiting all of these in more detail in future Blogs.