Do you have a strategy?
If it’s Thursday – whoops, Friday! – it’s time for Three Things!
The most important lesson of the class I teach at Georgetown is this: a plan is not a strategy, and you need a strategy to make your planning and execution as effective as it can be.
The first few weeks of class is vocabulary and concepts: if a plan isn’t a strategy, then how do you define a strategy? Then we dive in to a full semester of learning models for strategic thinking and practicing applying those models to case studies. Part of the conceptual lesson consists of three diagnostic questions to determine: do you have a strategy?
1) What guides your decision making? If it’s history (we’ve always done broadcast TV ads, so we’ll do it again), gut decisions (that mail program just looks right), or data in a vacuum (click-throughs went up, do more of that!) you might not have a strategy. In the context of a strategy, decisions are driven by evidence of movement toward a particular goal, along a specific path developed with knowledge of the environment and the resources available.
2) Do you have a clearly articulated “path to victory”? Often, plans are collections of tactics – advertising, email, direct mail, meetings, etc. Strategies are different – strategies define clearly the starting point and end point and the path between them. In the context of a strategy, the tactics are laid out on that path (and tactics that are diversions from that path are avoided).
3) What perfectly good tactics are excluded from your plan because they’re not on your path to victory? This is usually the most illuminating. Is there anything you wouldn’t spend resources on because it doesn’t fit with your strategy? Anything you’ve done before but won’t do this time?
When resources are limitless, taking the time to fully flesh out a strategy to drive planning, implementation, evaluation, and decision-making along the way might be a “nice to have” that you can skip. But when are resources limitless? Never, in my experience. To put your available time, talent, and treasure to it’s best effect you need a strategy. I hope today’s three diagnostic questions help!
Do you have experience developing strategies that drive successful plans? Share them in the comments below!
And that’s the Three Things for this week! Do you have Three Things you’d like to get off your chest? Shoot us an email – we’d love to feature your ideas in this space!