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What is a Strategy Map?

Contents:

Seven Strategy Questions: A Simple Approach for Better Execution

Marketing strategy - Wikipedia

Corporate Strategy

Marketing strategy

Seven Strategy Questions: A Simple Approach for Better Execution

In other companies, it may be customers. There is no right or wrong, but choosing is necessary.

Making Strategy Simple

Once you're confident that the foundation of your implementation is sound—you've allocated resources correctly and provided guidance for tough decisions—it's time to get everyone who works for you focused on the job at hand. Tracking performance goals —the third implementation imperative—requires you to set the right goals, assign accountability, and monitor performance.

Marketing strategy - Wikipedia

It's easy to fail this imperative by focusing on the wrong performance indicators or monitoring scorecards that have an overload of irrelevant measures. Underperformance is the result. It's your job to ensure that your managers are tracking the right things by singling out those variables that spell the difference between strategic success and failure.

Like the preceding two questions, the focus in this question is again on an adjective, this time the word critical.

I will show you a simple but counterintuitive technique that you can use to be sure you're tracking the right things, and I will describe how companies such as Nordstrom and Apple illustrate some unorthodox performance measurement choices that provide the pathway to superior results. Every strategy brings with it the risk that an individual's actions will pull the business off course. Here again, it's easy to fail to inoculate the business against this risk. As we will see, the trick is in setting clear boundaries. Controlling strategic risk is the fourth implementation imperative.

Strategic boundaries—which are always stated in the negative—ensure that the entrepreneurial initiative of your employees aligns with the desired direction of the business. Strategic boundaries can also protect you from the types of errant actions that destroyed Enron and brought financial service firms such as Fannie Mae and Lehman Brothers to their knees.

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Once you're satisfied that you are tracking the right performance goals and controlling strategic risk, it's time to turn to the fifth implementation imperative: This imperative is woven into the fabric of every healthy organization, and we all know that companies that fail to innovate will eventually die. No company is immune. But sustaining ongoing innovation in organizations is notoriously difficult. People fall into comfortable habits, sticking with what they know and rejecting things that cause them to change their ways.

Corporate Strategy

On the other hand, managerial marketing is focused on the implementation of specific targets. But sustaining ongoing innovation in organizations is notoriously difficult. As we will see, the trick is in setting clear boundaries. Free Strategy Skills Resources See the full list of Strategy Skills eBooks, templates and checklists available for free download right now. According to Porter, these strategies are mutually exclusive and the firm must select one approach to the exclusion of all others. Each bubble is automatically colored red, yellow, or green based on your actual measures and the goals you set for them. Here's an excerpt outlining the seven questions every manager should ask.

To overcome such inertia, you must push people out of their comfort zones and spur them to innovate. I will provide a menu of techniques you can use to generate creative tension to ensure that everyone is thinking and acting like a winning competitor. For most companies, it's critically important to build norms so that people will help each other succeed—especially when you're asking people to innovate. But there are exceptions.

Some organizations can, and should, be built on self-interest, with every man or woman working for him- or herself. I suspect that the choice between commitment to help others and self-interest is deeply ingrained in your organization, yet has never been discussed.

Marketing strategy

But if you haven't addressed this choice explicitly—and worked to make it happen—you have increased the potential that your strategy implementation will fail. Building commitment is the sixth implementation imperative. I will offer a menu of techniques to foster commitment to achieving shared goals. Or, if rewarding self-interest is more appropriate for your business, I will explore alternative approaches you should employ.

It is crucially important that you have an overall corporate strategy in place, as that strategy is going to direct all of the smaller decisions that you make. For some companies, outlining a corporate strategy will be a quick and easy process. For example, smaller businesses who are only going to enter one or two specific markets with their products or services are going to have an easy time identifying what it is that makes up the overall corporate strategy. If you are running an organization that bakes and sells cookies, for instance, you already know exactly what the corporate strategy is going to look like — you are going to sell as many cookies as possible.

However, for a larger business, things quickly become more complicated. Carrying that example forward to a larger company, imagine you run an organization that is going to sell cookies but is also going to sell equipment that is used while making cookies. Entering into the kitchen equipment market is a completely different challenge from selling the cookies themselves, so the complexity of your corporate strategy will need to rapidly increase.

Before you get any farther into the strategic planning of your business, be sure you have your corporate strategy clearly defined.

In other words, the strategies that you outline at this level are slightly more specific and they usually relate to the smaller businesses within the larger organization. Carrying over our previous example, you would be outlining separate strategies for selling cookies and selling cookie-making equipment at this level. You may be going after convenience stores and grocery stores to sell your cookies, while you may be looking at department stores and the internet to sell your equipment.

Those are dramatically different strategies, so they will be broken out at this level. Even in smaller businesses, it is a good idea to pay attention to the business strategy level so you can decide on how you are going to handle each various part of your operation. The strategy that you highlighted at the corporate level should be broad in scope, so now is the time to boil it down into smaller parts which will enable you to take action.

This is the day-to-day strategy that is going to keep your organization moving in the right direction. Just as some businesses fail to plan from a top-level perspective, other businesses fail to plan at this bottom-level. This level of strategy is perhaps the most important of all, as without a daily plan you are going to be stuck in neutral while your competition continues to drive forward.

As you work on putting together your functional strategies, remember to keep in mind your higher level goals so that everything is coordinated and working toward the same end. It is at this bottom-level of strategy where you should start to think about the various departments within your business and how they will work together to reach goals. Your marketing, finance, operations, IT and other departments will all have responsibilities to handle, and it is your job as an owner or manager to oversee them all to ensure satisfactory results in the end.

Again, the success or failure of the entire organization will likely rest on the ability of your business to hit on its functional strategy goals regularly. As the saying goes, a journey of a million miles starts with a single step — take small steps in strategy on a daily basis and your overall corporate strategy will quickly become successful.

Once you have sound strategies in place, the focus of the organization will shift toward executing those strategies properly day after day.