Opportunities abound, and are hard to ignore.
They emerge to consume resources, distract attention, divert investment, obscure the focus on strategy, and generally disrupt operations.
How do you ignore, or better still, systematically, and quickly assess them, learn, and then execute or walk away?
- Relentless focus on the long-term objective, and the framework that is the strategic plan and supporting operational plans that will deliver that objective.
- Consistency between the long-term objectives and the activities that are shorter term, tactical choices.
- Have a bias for action, coupled with the discipline that any action needs to move the enterprise towards that long term goal.
- Never underestimate the power of the status quo to water down and divert the bias for strategically oriented action.
- You need the right people, those that will measure every decision against the agreed strategic objectives. This is not to remove any opportunity to divert from the strategy, it just requires more short-term agility to take advantage of tactical situations as they occur.
- Make sure you have all the facts and are working from first principles.
Strategy is all about making choices, and making a choice for option A precludes also choosing option B. This cascading of choices becomes a Bayesian decision tree as the choices cascade through the organisation from the top to the points of tactical implementation.
