On Strategy, a most Wonderful thing, with a Lousy reputation
The word strategy often has a bad press in many businesses & organisations. Rightly so, in my experience, I’m afraid.
You must have encountered it yourself …
… too much focus on long term planning. Strategic plans that sit on the shelf because they don’t consider tactical execution enough. Strategies that aren’t based on a clear competitive advantage. And my personal pet hate – strategic plans that don’t privilege interdependencies.
Some say that’s a failure in strategic management. But I can’t help but think that that’s simply bad strategy. What good is a strategy unless, erm, it works?
Good strategy should allow you to tactically direct your budget, energy & resources to the right place, to get the desired result. Right? So in this blog – with the most splendid help (tactical criticism!) of my partner in crime, Michiel - I’m going to be doing what I can to demystify strategy & share some practical tools & insights to develop good strategy for yourself.
However, that’s not all. Business strategy has also been impacted by the social web.
Think about this for a minute …
- 15 years ago e-commerce began
- 10 years ago crowdsourcing wasn’t even a word
- 5 years ago newspapers & mass media were people’s only trusted source of information
- 2 years ago only geeks (apologies to my friends & teachers) knew about search engine optimisation
- 18 months ago everything suddenly became connected thanks to mobile, geo-location, RFID etc
- 12 months ago social networks became the largest search engine on the planet
- Now, social media is the biggest activity on the web
So what?
Consider this report from global consulting gurus McKinsey, published December 2010, which concludes that the ‘networked enterprise’ (one that has developed a fully integrated web 2.0 strategy) benefits from; ”more effective marketing …. faster access to knowledge … increased customer satisfaction … reducing communications costs” & so on.
The punchline of the report?
“McKinsey’s new survey research finds that companies using the Web intensively gain greater market share and higher margins.”
So it’s pretty darn clear. If you are going to develop strategy, you need to make a) It’s good strategy. And b) It’s 2.0 savvy.
Not a big job then 
