Why Strategy Needs to Be Specific…

Today’s Dilbert strip hit on a couple of key thoughts, albeit in traditional Dilbert fashion…

This is a pretty simplistic, yet sadly realistic, manner in which we define corporate agendas. We lay out a concept and expect the organization to translate our words into action. What happens is that often the definition is fuzzy, which allows for all sorts of interpretation and a watering down of execution.

While a little nitpicky here, Increasing Market Share is a goal, not a strategy. Why does this matter? The primary reason is that we need to teach the organization to think along common lines. We need to communicate specificity – tell people exactly what we want. The goal is to increase market share by 5%, and we are going to do this by increasing new product revenues by 10% and by $4mil in cross selling opportunities to our customer base.

Additionally, every company is striving for the same four things – Increase Revenues, Improve Profit Margin, Elevate Market Share, and Enhance Financial Health. It is how we balance these four items that sets us apart from our competition, and how we tell the organization what matters. Will we sacrifice a launch date and potentially our 3rd quarter revenue goal if a product is offline? Will we bend over backwards to keep a customer from defecting? Will we sacrifice margin for a new customer in a new market? The company must know the trade off equation as most decisions impact something else. Without understanding this, people make decisions based on what they want, not what the company wants.

Ask yourself how deep your organization understands its goals? And then compare it to how specific the goals, strategies, and tactics are for the organization? If there is a gap, start somewhere and be very specific of what you want. Changing the culture to be more specific is not all that difficult.