When considering business leadership, strategy is often the first thing that comes to mind.
Strategy is not just an aspiration and a set of initiatives. It is a perpetual process, the purpose of which is to keep the business attuned to external threats and opportunities, and optimised as a whole, in service of its highest aim.
And it’s built around a system. A system that harnesses, refines, focuses and continually evolves the quality of the strategic analysis, planning and execution.
Strategy is not just an aspiration and a set of initiatives. It is a perpetual process
What does an effective strategic management system do? It:
- Defines the overall mission, purpose, values, success drivers and success measures: This captures the essence of why the business exists, what success looks like and how that success will be achieved.
- Continually monitors the external environment for developments in markets, technology, legislation, and anything else that could affect performance or capability.
- Develops long-term plans, including:
- Business-as-usual objectives: These relate to the performance and improvement of any core processes that have not been singled out for significant ‘breakthrough’ improvement. This means they’ll only be subject to ongoing, local, continuous improvement to maintain the required standards of performance.
- Waterline objectives: Goals that relate to upgrading any capability that is currently below the ‘waterline’ of minimally acceptable capability, or those that are likely to fall below that line within the time period of the plan.
- Breakthrough objectives: Improvement goals in a small number of areas that will build new levels of value-adding capability critical to achieving the vision, but that are not yet at that standard.
- Aligns with annual operational plans: This covers the practicalities of how the waterline, breakthrough and business-as-usual objectives will be delivered, ensuring the execution of strategy is built in as standard, rather than being viewed as an additional burden, secondary to operations.
Questions to consider
- How well does your strategic management system serves the business’s highest aim?
- In your organisation, what elements of strategic management, if improved, would bring the biggest advantage?
To dive deeper, check out our in-depth guides to the Strategic Management System and Creating a strategy map.
Let’s get to work
Over 27 years of practice, we have developed a comprehensive, time-tested and field-proven business-improvement model and toolkit. We partner with ambitious businesses to identify strategic breakthrough opportunities in capability, performance and results, and we provide the tools, support, training and coaching to complement their existing expertise and help them achieve these.
If you’re aiming to build or optimise a business system using sound principles, values and standards to deliver consistently excellent and continuously improving results, we can help you develop and implement a strategy to accelerate progress and amplify the impact of your journey.
To get in touch, contact us here to book a free consultation.
Discover more of our tools and methodology in our book Toward Excellence.
