How Do You Strategize?
Strategy is an important part of business. After all, you can’t work on a project without a plan. Before you begin working, you would need to come up with a strategy on how to work on it, what would be the strategy and what would be the approach. Strategic planning process is one of the most basic things in business. It is a set of tools which enables an organization to get a better view of the opportunities, the competition, and the market condition. An organization can utilize this information to set both short-term and long-term goals. The idea behind coming up with a strategy for a business is to help the organization move forward.
However, what would you do if your managerial professionals and employees, don’t like the way you strategize or the way you implement them?
According to a study conducted in 15 organizations, only 68% of managerial professionals believe that their organization is good at developing strategy. Hey, but 68% is still a good number, right? Nope, that number was 80% in 2012. There has been quite a drastic change in the last few years, don’t you think? But, hang on there are more to come, 61% respondents have said that their firms don’t know how to bridge the gap between strategy formulation and day-to-day implementation of strategy. What is worse? Only 2% business leaders are confident that they would achieve 80–100% of their strategy objectives.
Dumbstruck? Who can blame you? We are baffled too. So, what can be done to improve this scenario? The answer is simple. It is all about how you strategize, how you present and explain your strategy, and the implementation of that strategy. And to do that, you can follow the following steps:
Assess
Assessing is the first step of strategizing. To come up with a plan for your business, you would need to assess the market, your competition, and your consumers. Apart from that, you would also require to assess your team, company, and organization. Only by assessing everything would you be able to come up with a proper strategy.
Analyze
Analyzing the scenario of the business, the condition of the market, and the situation of the competitors is very crucial. Without it, coming up with a strategy would be a job half done.
Evaluate
You need to evaluate your company. By doing so, you will be able to determine your organization’s place in the market. You will also have to evaluate your competitors to understand where they have their upper hand. This will help you exceed the performance of competitors. One of the most important parts of this evaluation is acknowledging your own weaknesses and your competitors’ strength. To come up with a good strategy, this is necessary.
Define
What do you need to define? A lot of things; your vision, the roles of the members of your team, and more importantly your goal. It is very important to articulate your vision to everyone in your team, so that they can understand the strategic planning process. Explain their roles to them and define the goal that you are striving to achieve.
Formulate
This is the most important part as well as the most interesting one; formulating a plan. An organization’s resources are limited, and planning will determine how these resources are utilized. You will have to be thorough while planning as the success of your business will depend on it.
Execute
The final and the most crucial part is executing the strategy. Whether or not you reach the goals you have set will depend on how well you execute the plans that you have formulated. This last step of this procedure can literally make or break your business.
Did you get all that? Then, maybe you will do well as a strategist. Strategizing for business is nothing short of strategizing for a war. Many dynamics of business are similar to the dynamics of warfare. As a result, it becomes very important to come up with a good strategy. One that will help you achieve your goal in the most efficient way possible.