The article “Does your business have a working strategy” mentioned three types of strategies that organisations employ to grow and prosper. The subsequent Veracles discussed the first two strategies – Nope and Hope. In this post, we talk about the third type. It is called Deliberate Strategy. It focuses on developing a working strategy for your organisation. Here we discuss “How deliberate strategy can be the working strategy for your business.”
What is Deliberate Strategy?
Deliberate Strategy is employed in an organization where business-executives show the following behaviour:
- They are growth-oriented and are looking for new areas of growth, and
- They have a risk propensity to commit resources to new approach
In this approach, businesses invest resources to develop a bespoke strategy tailored specifically to their business context.
In other words,
businesses take deliberate steps within the context of their business situation
to increase the likelihood of achieving long-term goals.
In short, the
business outcome is not left to chance. Every aspect of operating and growing
the business is deliberately and meticulously planned.
It is like a
journey one undertakes to reach a destination.
Now, a journey constitutes a starting point, a destination to reach, the route that takes from the starting point to the destination, and the resources required to undertake and complete the journey under any eventuality.
Likewise, developing
deliberate strategy requires the following actions to be taken:
- Understand
the current business context.
- Define
business goals to be achieved.
- Develop
plan to achieve the business goals from the current business situation.
- Commit
resources to achieve the business goals while adapting to any changes.
Let us look at these four steps in more detail:
1. Understand the current business context.
The business-executives developing a deliberate strategy need to develop a complete understanding of the current business context with respect to the external business environment.
This
involves obtaining customer intelligence, acknowledging operational
capabilities, understanding product portfolio, acquiring competitor insights,
and baselining financial metrics. This step will help you get a sense of your core
ideology, financial and operational resources, organization strengths,
weaknesses, and problem areas.
Why is understanding the business context important?
An organisation has to first clearly define a business objective in order to achieve the objective. The business context provides a frame of reference to define appropriate business objectives. For example, a firm with annual sales of $10million grappling with scale-up challenges cannot directly aim to become a $1billion organisation.
Moreover, the business context serves as the baseline against which the firm can measure and compare the progress.
2. Define business goals to be achieved.
Organizational purpose and vision are the guiding-light for business-executives defining business goals. Therefore, it is necessary that business goals are clearly defined. Doing so helps the executives to communicate them unambiguously to all layers of the organization.
A
well-defined business goal adheres to the QTR [read: Quarter] principle:
- Quantitative – it is measurable
- Timebound – it has a definite time frame
within which to achieve it
- Reasonable – it is realistic, even if
difficult, to achieve in the given time frame
Here
are some examples of some meaningful business goals (set by real-life firms):
- Grow
annual revenues to $865 million at a CAGR of 20% within three years
- Conquer
5% more market share in our target market by the end of the year
- Reduce
operational costs to realize 15% profitability YoY within two years
A
QTR-based business goal establishes the destination for a business to reach
within a stipulated time.
3. Identify the route to reach the business objectives.
Once the business goal is defined, the CEO and the top management need to put together a route to that end. A customer-centric plan acts as the route.
This step is crucial to developing a deliberate strategy. In fact, this is where a Deliberate Strategy differs from a Hope strategy (or any other best practices strategy).
A
Hope strategy is forward-designed and forward-implemented.
Whereas,
a Deliberate strategy is backward-designed but forward-implemented.
Let
me explain.
A
Hope strategy involves employing strategies and best practices that have worked
for other businesses. Naturally, these strategies are picked up by an
organization, customized for their use, and implemented to reach the
business goals. Thus, it follows a forward path.
On
the contrary, a Deliberate strategy starts from the end-point, i.e. the
business goals. It involves figuring out what is required to reach that state, and
then coming backwards by designing a slew of bespoke actions to reach that
state. This is how it is backward-designed.
This
is the key difference between the two.
4. Commit resources to achieve the business goals while adapting to any changes.
Once
the business goal is defined and the business strategy is rolled-out, the organization
commits to the implementation journey along the strategic route.
A
business strategy for an organization exists within the context of its current business situation. The business situation is
part of the larger business environment, which includes the market (which buys)
and the industry (which sells) among other stakeholders, like suppliers, regulators,
government and technology.
And the business environment is constantly changing.
Buyers
(or customers), sellers (or competitors) and suppliers keep entering and
leaving the business environment, like new passengers en route your journey.
Like
you, your competitors are also persistently working on their own strategies to
grow and capture market share.
Governments keep looking for newer ways to tax businesses, and regulators are bringing new regulations to safeguard fair competition.
Among
all this, technology disrupts the way of doing business.
To
reiterate the point, the business environment is continually changing.
Therefore,
it is imperative to keep looking for any changes that risk execution of your
bespoke strategy. The business needs to keep collecting data points and reviewing
its strategy at regular intervals to ensure that the journey is on the right track.
These
are the actions that make for a working strategy.
How Veravizion implements Deliberate Strategy?
At Veravizion, we have developed our own framework that we call contextual problem solving with deliberate strategy. This framework facilitates development of deliberate strategy using a Context-Drivers-Solution-Impact cycle. This framework applies to any business across industries.
There
are many companies that have employed Deliberate Strategies in the past to grow
predictably. Some examples (from across the industries) are 3M, Amazon, Apple,
Boeing, Google, Nike, Nordstrom, Procter & Gamble, among many others.
While
reading the names of these well-known companies as examples of businesses
succeeding with deliberate strategy, it is easy to think that deliberate
strategy works only for the big ones.
This
is a classic logical fallacy.
In
reality, most of these companies were virtually a nobody before they
implemented deliberate strategies.
3M were miners. Their earlier venture, started in 1902, to mine corundum failed. 3M tried their hands at other things like making sandpaper. They failed less, yet did not succeed like success.
Later, they chose to embrace “innovation and collaboration” as their Deliberate strategy.Today, 3M is known as world’s most innovative company.
More Examples…
The following example has been taken from “Built to Last”, the bestselling book by Jim Collin and Jerry Porras.
Boeing, until 1952, had been building aircrafts primarily for the military, and had virtually no presence in the commercial aircraft market. Boeing relied heavily on orders from their only major client – the U.S. Air Force – to survive. Nobody knew Boeing. Back then, their competitors Douglas Aircraft dominated and ruled the commercial market with their propeller-driven planes. Boeing wanted to enter the commercial market with a big, fast, advanced, and better-performing aircraft.
If Boeing had followed Nope strategy, we would never have known of them.
If
Boeing had followed Hope strategy, they would have probably leveraged
the competitor strategies of the time, and would have built a better propeller
plane at best.
Instead,
Boeing embraced a Deliberate Strategy.
Taking inspiration from their purpose and vision – to be on the leading edge of aeronautics pioneering aviation – Boeing announced their goal to make a jet plane for the commercial market. No other aircraft company had proved that there was a commercial market for jet aircraft. Moreover, such a project was going to cost them about three times their average annual after-tax profit – roughly a quarter of their entire corporate net worth – to develop a prototype for the jet. But Boeing committed to it. The strategy resulted in such fine planes as 707, 727, 737, 747, and 777. Douglas aircraft could never quite catch-up to Boeing. Douglas struggled to survive by merging with McDonnell aircraft in 1967. Eventually, Boeing acquired McDonnell Douglas in 1997.
Apple is a more recent example of a business that became successful by devising and implementing Deliberate Strategy. Apple believes in “breaking the status-quo”.
The strategy helped them differentiate in the crowded smartphone market and created an enviable position for them. As a result, Apple was the most valuable brands in the world for eight straight years.
To sum it up with key insights…
Deliberate Strategy helps an organization achieve their business objectives in a decisive and predictable manner.
The
predictability comes only by acting deliberately.
The
whole process is highly intentional, methodical, and purposeful.
And
Deliberate Strategy is universal. The above framework would still work if you
replace organization by an individual or an institution.
There
are many examples of successful implementation of deliberate strategy in all
spheres of life.
Deliberate
strategy is the difference between many successes and failures.
An organization’s strategy is its source of sustainable competitive advantage. Should one squander it away by following someone else’s strategy? What do you think?
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Cover photo credit: Brad Wetzler
Other photos: 3M.com, Boeing.com, Apple.com