Page 175 - 100 Great Business Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

In practice

To ensure a successful strategy:

1. Create a unique strategic position for your company. Focus on who
your customers are, the value proposition offered to customers,
and how you can do this efficiently. (Do not confuse strategy
with vision, mission, or objectives.)

2. Make distinctive and meaningful choices. Combine these choices in
a self-reinforcing system of activities that fit together. Common
mistakes include keeping options open, enabling people to
ignore choices, an approach to achieving growth that forces
people to ignore the firm’s overarching strategy, and analysis
paralysis.

3. Understand the importance of values and incentives. The culture
and values, measurement and incentives, people, structure, and
processes all determine the environment of your organization.
By influencing behavior, these will affect the success of your
strategy.

4. Gain people’s emotional commitment to the strategy. Any strategy
will fail unless people are emotionally committed to its success.

5. Recognize that understanding is not the same as communicating.
Explain why the strategy is important to the organization and
the individual.

6. Do not overlook the knowing–doing gap. Individuals tend to do the
urgent things and not the important ones.

7. Do not assume that strategy can only be developed by “top” people.
Ideas can come from anybody, anytime, anywhere.

168 • 100 GREAT BUSINESS IDEAS