Taking stock of your strategy
Posted by Grant Brewer
The start of a new year is always a good time to step back a little from your day to day leadership or management tasks and think. As a leader, it is valuable to make time to think, to learn and refresh your ideas. When it comes to strategy, time away from the business can add clarity to your ideas and ensure that you don't mistake the strategy process for the real outcome of organisational strategy. This is a common mistake and it leads to strategy ceremonies that serve the strategic planning process, but that are not focused on getting the organisation to focus around a specific purpose and direction.
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Essays | Strategy | Intelligence Strategym
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implementation (10) | leadership (7) | execution (3) | people (1)
Operations: implementing strategy
Posted by Grant Brewer
Operations is what a company does. It is the core. Strategy tells us what we're going to do and how we might be doing it - operations gets down to the doing and actually implements a strategy. It is easy in conversations about strategy to lose sight of the fact that all strategies need to be implemented otherwise they remain concepts or ideas. No business can be successful by focusing only on building strategy. At some point every organisation (even a non-commercial organisation) has to implement. Operations is perhaps not seen as the glamorous side of business strategy, but it is equally important because it is where the doing gets done.
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Essays | Strategy | Intelligence Strategym
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implementation (10) | execution (3) | innovation (3) | operations (2) | lean solutions (1) | business process (1) | agile operations (1)
Strategy is not a competitive advantage
Posted by Grant Brewer
Strategy is about choice. It’s about implementation. It’s about reality. It is about so much more than a document or a planning session. Strategy is worthless when it exists only as an idea, trapped in the intellect of its originator. Only the capacity to act creates value or competitive advantage. Strategy is about direction and a business concept that has focus, a purpose and has a clearly understood way of creating value. Most importantly, good strategy is about bringing the the ideas and the implementation together in an ecosystem that becomes far more valuable than the sum of its parts — an infinitely more difficult and costly for competitors to copy.
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Essays | Strategy | Intelligence Strategym
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implementation (10) | strategy (8) | execution (3) | value (1) | creating value (1) | complex systems (1) | competitive advantage (1) | choice (1)