Strategy is different

During my recent PhD reading and thinking I've come to the conclusion that strategy, although lumped in with all the other management areas, is different, fundamentally different.  And because of this it needs to be thought of and treated differently as well and I don't think that is done.

Why is strategy different?

Two things;

  1. It is about positioning the organise in a future environment
  2. The competition are doing the same thing so you are competing.
A simple analogy is a car race - The team decides what strategy to start with and what to do in the race, every other activity is about keeping the car on the road and making it go faster.  To bring this into a business context, strategy is about what to do and every other activity is about efficiency and effectiveness.

For this reason strategy it is a skill set that differs and you really can't just think about it every now and again and hope to be good at it or even competent.  The teams that race cars spend countless hours week in week out thinking about how they are going to tackle situations and what they should do.  Imagine if they only met at the start of the year and that was the strategy done for the season!!!!  It would make the drivers job pretty difficult.

So you need to start thinking differently about strategy and putting in time to get better at it.  After all it is the pointy bit of the arrow and once the arrow is flying it is to late to change........... 

This area starts to bring in the concepts of proactivity and reactivity but today I'm out of time...........


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