A CEO’s Take: Winning with Strategy

Planning is particularly important in business to efficiently utilize our resources to win. Every hunter has a plan – without one you merely become the hunted. But for some, strategic planning is a dirty word – a painful exercise in futility, a necessary evil that steals valuable time and resources. I want to challenge you this year to rethink your approach. My experience says that a common cause for this discomfort is that most leaders are problem-solvers; they’re constantly looking for solutions.  But many don’t like uncertainty. So, they pursue strategic planning as a problem to be solved. They focus on developing plans rather than concentrating on developing winning strategies. They get absorbed in the planning end of the exercise and focus little attention on the strategy. In fact, most planning has very little to do with strategy.

Strategy focuses on direction not a specific path. It is a set of guiding concepts that, when communicated and adopted by the organization, generate a desired pattern of decision-making. It communicates how we will satisfy clients, grow the business, compete, manage, develop capabilities, and achieve objectives. It needs to be flexible to allow adjustments to the dynamic marketplace we operate in today. It is developed for the long-term and long-term plans are merely guesses. But organizations need to develop strategies to remain viable. Hope is not a strategy.

So, the approach becomes falling back on the items we can control and are comfortable with. It’s much easier to say “here is the staff or square footage I’m going to add or the new services/products we’re going to offer” than it is to say “here is what we have observed and believe will happen that we can’t guarantee or prove. These are the choices we’ll make to assure we will have more customers attracted to our offerings than our competition”. This isn’t the way managers are trained to operate. But don’t confuse being a manager with being a great leader. You’re giving the organization the opportunity to do something great.

And finally, accept the fact the plan won’t be perfect. You shouldn’t wait for it to be perfect before executing. I’m a big believer in George Patton’s quote “A good plan executed today is better than a great plan executed next week.” My experience is you never get it exactly right from the beginning. A Harvard study showed that 93% of successful strategies evolved and pivoted away from their initial plan. Instead, monitor your plan diligently and watch things unfold. It’s more important to get a good strategy out there in action and, when something isn’t working, tweak, refine, and adjust it so it gets better and better as you go along. Another factor in the urgency spectrum- recognize that while we are planning, it is likely at least one of our competitors is doing the same. We can’t spend all our time planning. At some point, you just have to get out there and start doing it.