Maximizing Profit, Passion and Product to Hit Your Business Sweet Spot Zone

Sweet Spot Dirty Little Secret - Can You Say What Your Strategy Is?


It’s a dirty little secret: Most executives cannot articulate the scope, objective, and advantage of their business in one simple statement. An the truth is that if they can’t, neither can anyone else!!!

Can You summarize your company’s strategy in 40 words or less? If so, would your colleagues easily frame it the same way you did?

Our experience shows that very few executives can honestly answer these simple questions positively. Even those executives that are the most successful in their industry. One is Edward Jones, a St. Louis–based financial brokerage firm. The fourth-largest brokerage in the United States, Jones has more than quadrupled its market share during the last 20 years and, has consistently outperformed its rivals in terms of ROI through good and bad markets. It’s a safe bet to hope just about every one of its 37,000 employees should be able to express the company’s simple strategy statement: Jones intends to “grow to 17,000 financial advisers by 2012 by offering trusted and convenient face-to-face financial advice to conservative individual investors who delegate out their financial decisions, using a national network of one financial advisor offices.”

By contrast, companies that don’t have a clear, simple strategy statement are likely to fall into the sorry category of those that have failed to execute their strategy or, worse, those that never ever had one. In an most organizations their frontline employees, executives, and all those in between are frustrated because there is no clear strategy for the company or its business. The kinds of complaints that occur in such firms include:

•    “I don’t know whether I should be pursuing this market opportunity. I get mixed signals from the powers that be.”

•    “I tried for months to get this initiative off the ground, and then it they shut it down because ‘it doesn’t fit their strategy.’ Why didn’t anyone tell me that from the beginning?”

•    “May I cut the price for this customer? I really don’t know if we would be better off winning the deal at this lower price or just losing the business altogether?”

•    “Why are we bidding on this customer’s business again? We lost it last year, and I thought we agreed then that it was a waste of and to keep chasing the contract!”

Leaders of firms are often mystified when what they thought was a beautifully crafted strategy is never actually implemented. They assume that the initiatives described in the all the paperwork that emerges from an annual budget or a strategic-planning process conference will ensure their competitive success. They fail to appreciate the absolute necessity of having a clear, simple, succinct strategy statement that everyone can understand and internalize, to use as a guiding light for making those difficult choices.

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