Simple Strategic Planning: Five moves to building a competitive advantage

By Phil Wilton

This guide will walk you through five definitive moves that will improve business competitiveness! Why? Because you will learn about your organizations current position in the market place, and you will deeply explore the inner workflows and processes of your organization. This will then allow you to discover an untapped treasure trove of valuable data on your resources and capabilities that has not yet been realized or fully exploited. If you're planning a pivot of you're organization, or any part of it, your plan, in effect your strategy, is going to be akin to working blind, without the priceless data yielded in these five moves.

In fact this strategic model will be extremely useful for any entity planning on pivoting and implementing competitive change, to their status quo. Five moves to checkmate is essential for leaders at all levels, and in all organizations and businesses that seek to attain, or retain their competitive advantage. Five moves to checkmate will also assist University and college educators, as well as students wishing to develop their business knowledge and acumen in strategic studies.

What you will learn in ‘Five Moves To Checkmate’ is the importance of making sure you gather all the relevant external and internal data available to you. This data will then be categorized and deposited into well-known and proven strategic templates. Once these strategic templates are completed, the fifth move will connect all the data into a well known and widely used master strategic guide. This guide will be highly valuable in aiding your organization to successfully implement a strategic plan, maximizing your competitive advantage and winning your checkmate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Sep 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662907463

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

This book will navigate businesses through disruptive—as well as small and large challenges—in an organization’s lifecycle. This will be achieved through a simple yet highly selective data-gathering processs from both inside and outside of your organization. This data will lead to a better understanding of your internal competitive advantage capabilities, and your external market competitiveness. This data-gathering process will set the benchmark on how all organizations will plan for change in the future.

Yes, it’s all about planning for your strategy. It’s about gathering the right data on your internal resources and capabilities, as well as your competitiveness outside in the market place, and the resulting marketplace effects on your organization.

At some point, your organization is going to be disrupted. This can be either by your competition or from within your own organization. Or, what is known as an inflection point may hit your business. At the time of writing this book, the COVID-19 pandemic has been inflected upon the world and many businesses. Inflection points are outside uncontrollable events or competitive situations that impact your current business model, disturbing the normal workflows and processes within your organization.

When this inevitability happens, you will need to look extensively inside your business to recapture and improve upon the application and use of your resources and capabilities. You will also need to examine the effects of external forces on your organization, known as the market competition, and identify how to combat or mitigate those external forces to enable your organization to gain or regain a competitive advantage, in effect, delivering your organization’s profitability. That, in plain English, means you will have to develop a strategy. A strategy is "neither a document nor a forecast but rather an overall approach, based on a diagnosis of a challenge. The most important element of a strategy is that your strategy is a coherent viewpoint about the forces at work that are affecting your business and not a random plan."¹

The Five Moves section of this book will guide you through five definitive moves that will improve your organization’s competitiveness. Why? Because on this journey, you are going to truly learn about your current organization. You will be discovering an untapped treasure trove of valuable data both within and outside of your organization. If you’re planning a pivot of your whole organization, or any part of it, your plan, in effect, your strategy is akin to working blind without the priceless data-gathering process that these five moves will deliver for you.

The data-gathering process described in part one fully outlines and categorizes each step of your journey, in that all data that you will discover and identify as good and the not so good attributes will be extremely helpful to you and the organization. The beauty of this is that once the data-gathering process is concluded, you will have a master Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) matrix that you can relate to throughout the implementation of your strategies. This master SWOT can now be used as a living document, allowing you to manage the implementation of your strategy, while allowing for any emergent or unanticipated² ideas or thoughts, that you find as you are executing your strategic plans, to be added to the master SWOT.

Before beginning this strategic journey, you will cover certain starting point information that you will need to know before embarking on a strategy. This information consists of positive background organizational effects or noise that you will need to be aware of. Being aware of these effects will help clarify your mindset in preparing yourself and your team, no matter the industry, size, or scope of your business.

You will then learn how to gather the right data from the right places that will enable you to simply plan a strategy. Walking you through this data-gathering process entails taking an in-depth look inside your organization at all of your resources and capabilities, and an in-depth look at your competitive status in your marketplace. This process encompasses a combination of moves.

Move one will help you look at how your organization arrived at its current place in the market and it’s history.

Move two will take you through very well established and often used Strengths, Weakness, Opportunity and Threat matrix on your organization.

Move three will look at your resource-based view (RBV) of strategy, which is an important and integral part of fully understanding the inner workings of your organization.

Move four will examine the organization’s external forces that consist of how markets impact a business, and review how you can manage these forces.

Move five will then help you connect all the dots from the previous four moves, which will enable you to build an integrated, coherent viewpoint in building a Simple Strategic Plan.

In move two, three and four you will be building your tri-matrix, which will easily demonstrate how the SWOT, RBV and Five Forces matrices interact to easily compile the data you have gathered, and enable you to build that cohesive strategic plan.

In the national and international section we discuss three helpful and important subjects that will be useful if you trade nationally or internationally.

The first subject covers a short example of external forces’ effects on a business and it’s workflows. This is followed by the second subject, which is comparative advantage, not to be confused with competitive advantage. If your organization works nationally, and certainly if you conduct business internationally you will encounter competition, but occasionally these competitors can become partners. Comparative advantage looks at the ability of your organization to concentrate on what it is really good or efficient at producing, and those things that you are not so good at, or efficient at producing, you can leave to your competition to produce for you. In comparative advantage your competition will be working for you and you will be working for them. Comparative advantage will improve both parties’ opportunity costs, especially if both organizations (or countries) have a need for each other’s products.

The final topic in this section, we discuss what is known as the Rules of the Game. Whatever size of organization you are, wherever you are located, when doing business internationally or in a large nation, you will be affected by the rules of the game. Therefore, understanding how the game is laid out will help you see how the bigger picture entwines into your business strategy.

The rules of the game will inform you about both formal and informal institutions of any business relationship. This section examines how different countries and even different parts of a single country matter. Examples that display different rules of the game are extremely large countries such as the USA, India, China, and Russia, and even Europe, which is a twenty seven country union or the United Kingdom that is a four-country union. All of these countries and unions have regional differences in the rule of law, as well as regional differences in culture, ethics, and norms in the way they conduct and complete business. Subsequently and consequently, the business playing field is not level. This subject will enlighten you and your organization’s business travelers as to what to expect and what not to expect when they are outside of their own organization and/or country.

One factor that I will point out before you embark on completing the five moves. The word ‘organization’ used throughout this book, can be substituted with any of the following: company, association, union, societies, groups, or even departments within an organization, or even down to the level of individuals. It is also possible to use these moves in a product evaluation, assessing its value and competitiveness in the market place. The five moves process for determining a competitive advantage at any level does not change.

A guide to building a competitive strategy

Holistic overview of data-gathering process. Design Author.

This book gives you the right tools to gather the right information to allow you to build the right strategic plan. Once you have been through this process and are ready to embark on building your strategy, how you ultimately end up managing and implementing those plans to ensure that you are measuring and improving your business performance is left for you to decide, based on the data you collect.

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¹ McKinsey & Company,

² Clayton Christensen – Disruptive strategy, Harvard.

MOVE ONE

Move One – Know the tools required before attempting to gather data

In this initial Move, you will discover the tools that you need to be aware of before actually planning out a business strategy. It’s all well and good that you have concluded that your current path doesn’t meet the competitive challenges that may be either disrupting or inflecting upon your business. However, unless you are aware of the first two critical points in strategy, you may not know all the resources and capabilities you currently have, or even how the organization got to where it is today. Additionally, Move One will inform you on why strategic plans fail and some of the strikingly obvious, absurd reasons that deliver those outcomes.

Two Critical Factors

Strategy is governed by the starting point, not the endpoint. That is exactly where we are going. There are two main requirements that management teams need to know at the beginning of a strategy’s pre-planning stage. These two key factors will ultimately help you and your teams engage in a strategic planning process that has a tangible chance of success. These two factors are ‘history’ and ‘where your organization is now.’

1. History is Important

Figure 1 The Final Judgment from the Book of the Dead

In this picture of the Final Judgment, (figure 1), one of the most popular paintings from the Book of the Dead in Egyptian history, is that of the deceased’s journey to the afterlife to decide his fate. Anobis, the god of death, leads the dead to the scales of justice. One side of the scales depicts the deceased’s bad deeds and the other side depicts the deceased’s good deeds in life. How the deceased is judged will decide whether Ammet, the wild animal depicting the underworld, consumes him and he spends eternity in Hell, or if he gets a ‘good certificate’ and joins Oziros, Isis, and Neftis in Paradise.

The outcome of an organization’s history will determine how the organization progresses to the next stage. As the picture in the Book of the Dead illustrates, Anobis is looking at history, and based on that history, he evaluates the strengths (good deeds) and weaknesses (bad deeds) that decide what path the deceased will take. Likewise, in business, evaluating strengths and weaknesses will decide how an organization advances.

Two factors should be examined. The first factor is your organization’s history. This process focuses on the internal actions and results of the business and asks questions such