Clear Business Strategies Set You Up for Success

Clear Business Strategies Account for 31% of the difference
Our organizational alignment research found that clear business strategies account for 31% of the difference between high and low performing companies.

Sifting through all the different possible directions you could take your business after your strategy retreat could drive you crazy and prevent you from making any real progress — but when you have clear business strategies, the path forward keeps you, your people, and your business on the right track.

The Definition of Business Strategy
Your corporate strategy should delineates the clear and compelling choices about where to play and what actions to take.  And when it is thoughtfully conceived with an eye to the future, a successful strategic plan sets your organization up to perform beyond the sum of its parts.

What You Need to Know About Your Business
Before you even start to craft your strategic plan, you should have clear answers to the following questions related to creating clear business strategies:

• Growth
  Where is the greatest growth potential for the coming year and beyond? Does it derive from your offerings? Or the markets you serve? Or the geography where you could excel?
• Differentiation
  What sets you apart from the competition?  Why do customers buy from you rather than from your competition?
• Priorities
  Where should you invest your efforts and resources, in order of strategic priority, to take advantage of your competitive edge?
• Buy-In
  Do your leaders and employees thoroughly understand and buy into your plan for success?
• Continuous Improvement
  Are systems in place to support the day-to-day behaviors and decisions that will keep you and your work force on track to implement your strategy?

What Clear Business Strategies Deliver
When you have a business strategy that is understood, believable and implementable enough by all key stakeholders you will see:

• Success
  Strategic and team goals and accountabilities are more easily and regularly achieved
• Performance
  Employees are more productive because they know what they are to do and how their job fits into the overall game plan
• Efficiency
  Less time is wasted on activities like duplication of effort, unnecessary and unproductive meetings, and following an overbearing approval process
• Alignment
  Offerings are better aligned with what customers truly want, need, and value
• Accountability
  Employees are held accountable for attaining their objectives
• Engagement
  Overall performance is higher as employee engagement increases and substandard employees improve or move on
• Focus
  Improvement initiatives are driven by their alignment with the strategy, not sidetracked by adherence to the way “it has always been done” or by company politics

The Bottom Line
Clear business strategies matter.  Too many leaders tell us about their frustrations with their carefully designed strategic plan not being carried out as fast or as well as they expect.  Don’t let your strategy become one of the reported 9 out of 10 that fail to be fully implemented.

If you want to learn more about creating clear business strategies that matter, download 7 Signs Your Strategy Is Not As Clear as It Needs to Be