A Strategy or a Plan?

A strategy isn’t a plan and a plan isn’t a strategy.

A strategy is a like a compass for your business. It points to the direction in which you will travel, and it also tells you where you are __not__ going. A plan, on the other hand, is like a map showing how you will get there.

A lot of people get impatient with the strategy and head straight for the plan. But without a clear strategy, the plan is destined to be generic and bland, and will not produce competitive advantage. You end up doing work that you don’t want to do, competing on price and losing market share to larger, more powerful competitors.

As Lewis Carroll wrote in Alice in Wonderland, “If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there.” Your plan may be very creative, but if it is not pointed in the right direction, that’s all it is – creative.

To have a competitive strategy, you need to be able to state:
*Which target market(s) you choose,
*How you serve that market differently from your competitors, and
*What strategic assets you have that underpin these choices.

These questions can be really hard to answer, and even harder to answer innovatively. It’s no wonder a lot of people give up on strategy.

The strategy is often confused with the plan. The result is a catalogue of operational action items such as:
*”Hire marketing staff”
*”Develop branding”
*”Build relationships with customers”
*”Increase sales”
*”Upgrade the computer system”
*”Build a new web site”
*”Introduce KPI’s”
*”Improve internal and external communications”
*”Introduce customer satisfaction surveys”
*”Implement systems”
*”Advertise more widely”
*”Seek new customers”
*”Undertake market research”
*”Start viral marketing campaign”

These could all be valuable steps but none of it is strategy (even if you made them more specific). Without a strategy it’s just a grab-bag of scattergun actions.

Further, because each of these activities resides in some area of functional specialty, they tend to become the responsibility of the relevant “expert”. This tends to dampen any wide-ranging discussion of the possibilities. Either everyone looks to the expert for the answer, or the expert protects their “turf” by taking the lead and defending their position.

With strategy, you are all on neutral territory, because no one knows the answer. By definition, when you create strategy you are pioneering and forging a new path.

Strategy is not action. It is an exercise in conceptualization and articulation. It requires the expenditure of mental energy, and time for reflection and incubation. It can drive action-oriented people crazy. They will not find the answers because they are not even asking themselves the questions.

However, patient people who persevere will be rewarded with an original strategy which provides focus and enables the business to compete on its own terms.

Are you making a strategy or a plan?