Business Strategy: Plan, Execute, Win!

By Patrick J. Stroh

Embrace strategies for improving your business and reaching your organization's goals

"I wholeheartedly agree with Patrick Stroh: Good leaders understand strategy and good strategists need to be good leaders. Make this book a strategic tool for improving your business strategy." — Harvey Mackay, author of the #1 New York Times bestsellerSwim With The Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive

In today's fast-moving and competitive business environment, strong leadership, insightful strategy, and effective innovation are critical links to staying ahead of your competition. Getting your business house in order can often be complicated, but does it really have to be? How do you take MBA 101 lessons, great models, and exceptional concepts and put them into play in the real world? Business Strategy: Plan, Execute, Win! strives to answers these questions in an educational and entertaining format. Working as a Fortune 20 practitioner with C-level executives, author Patrick Stroh has a keen understanding of the role played by current day strategists.

With 5 chapters following the format of "All I Ever Needed to Learn About Business Strategy I Learned..." At the Movies, On the Farm, On Shark Tank, On Hell's Kitchen, and From the Bible, readers will gain valuable strategic insight regardless of industry, business maturity, or current business turbulence and how to apply these insights based on the factors impacting their own business. Each chapter ends with a One Chapter Conclusion, Two Gold Nuggets the reader is to write down and Three Additional Resources/Tools for more information, offering a practical roadmap to simplifying your success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Mar 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781118893227

Book preview

PART I

LEVEL SETTING/FOUNDATION

Part I of this book is a baseline for Parts II and III. I will set some context and give a little perspective on how strategic planning needs and processes have evolved and what the role should be for a person who is responsible for strategy today. Many companies have created and hired positions now for chief strategy officers (CSOs). I myself was a chief strategy and innovation officer in a Fortune 20 company. I have some strong feelings based on experience regarding what this role should and shouldn’t be, and I discuss the rationale for my opinions in Chapter 1. I also believe CSOs must possess certain key traits to be successful, which are discussed in Chapter 2. As we get into this discussion on strategy, sometimes we find a negative connection around its success and usefulness. Consider the conclusions of a recent survey of 300 chief executive officers (CEOs). The key takeaway is that 72 percent of these CEOs believe that U.S. companies do a better job of developing corporate strategies than implementing them. The best military analogy I’ve heard that depicts this is: The best strategy in the world can’t take the hill. Translation: Strategy without execution is worthless. Creating a three-to-five-year strategy for a three-ring binder once a year that sits on your shelf is archaic. Creating a strategy that you in turn drive into actionable plans and goals with associated metrics is invaluable. Execution is everything. Great executors of business strategy create conditions where people:

Know what to do—because accountabilities are clear.

Know how to do it—because they have the right skills.

Are motivated to do it—because they see how they are adding value to the organization.

Have defined metrics—so they can consistently monitor and measure progress and results to make necessary course corrections and adjustments to achieve goals.

Have regular management forums—so they can regularly vet problems, talk about changing competitive or market positions, or seek sage counsel from others on actions.

Now, in Part I, let’s take a quick assessment of where we have come from, where we are at, and how to move forward and learn from Part II.

Chapter 1

Evolution of Strategic Planning and Today’s Role: Chief Strategy Officer

Strategy without execution is a hallucination.

—Ambuj Goyal, General Manager, System Storage and Networking, IBM

A primary role that has become more prominent in the last two to three years is the role of chief strategy officer (CSO). In the past, this role primarily fell on the leader of the business, the chief executive officer (CEO) or president. It also could fall on whichever senior business leader did corporate development (i.e., mergers and acquisitions), as likely that person was best suited to know the market and what other competitors had for value propositions that he or she might want to duplicate or embellish and to understand specific market forces. Today, with a globalized economy, the incredibly fast pace of change, and an insurmountable supply of information, business strategy is not something you can work on the side while doing another primary role. Or can you? This chapter goes through a very brief history of business strategy and quickly gets to today’s CSO role and some perspective on what does and does not work in business strategy as we know it today.

Evolution of Strategic Planning

Strategic planning has certainly morphed over time. In contemplating this, think about decades of time versus years to look at trends and changes. One of the best articles I’ve read on this evolution was by Dr. Richard Oliver, who wrote The Evolution of Business Strategy. I include some of the main excerpts and metaphors that he uses because they mirror my own philosophy of using ideas-that-stick metaphors. It’s helpful to look through some of this history to try to predict what new megatrends and events will shape strategic planning and how we drive toward success.

Strategy as War. The word strategy is derived from the Greek word strategia, meaning generalship. For early commercial enterprises that moved beyond the family firm, business approaches often mirrored those of the military. The command and control models Army generals used moved easily into business practice with little alteration. Company heads commanded the troops while winning battles through sheer force (superior resources), because they had an impenetrable fortress (a protected market or monopoly), or via guerrilla warfare (going after competitors when they’re not expecting it). Some of these thematic elements still exist today. Many top executives regard Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, written more than 2,000 years ago, as required reading. The command and control model has been pervasive. Strategy was primarily centered on winning the war by eliminating competitors.1

We know that a lot of how we organize and execute our businesses comes from the military. Think of the hierarchies and discipline utilized and required today. However, the days of one person being in charge and knowing all the factors and dealings in a business is gone. I’m not saying that there is not a head of a business—absolutely you need to have leader—but that person, today more than ever, needs to be a master orchestrator and organizer in pulling together the many aspects of a business in a globalized economy. While we still need to command and control, we need to do it in a more collaborative