🎱 Dwight Was Right
🎭 Goals Masquerading as Strategy
😴 Strategy vs Dreaming
🎱 Dwight Was Right
General Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
Plans are just plans until you implement them. Your company’s success is directly linked to how well your team can execute the strategy.
Planning supports execution. At Sticky Branding, we teach our clients to implement a Slingshot Strategy. Every 90 days we define:
- Objectives: What do we need to achieve?
- Levers: How will we achieve the objectives?
- Action Items: Who owns the major activities to reach the objectives?
Developing a Slingshot Strategy every 90 days empowers your team to “work on the business” and focus on what’s most important. This act of planning leads to better buy-in, better communication, better understanding, better clarity, and better accountability.
No one wants to show up to the quarterly strategy review and say, “Guys. I dropped the ball. I didn’t do what I said I would do.” That’s unacceptable. Lack of action lets everyone down.
Planning provides the structure and expectations required to execute. It gets everyone on the same page and defines what needs to be done, why it needs to be done, and who is responsible for what.
One Stat to Watch
45%
Every business and every strategy has a shelf life. According to PwC, “45% of global CEOs think their organization will no longer be economically viable in 10 years.”
🎭 Goals Masquerading as Strategy
Be wary of any business plan that sounds like:
- 25 in 5 ($25 million in 5 years)
- 30 by 30 ($30 million by 2030)
These big goals may sound appealing, but they are rarely achievable.
A goal is a destination. It’s what you want. Strategies are how you achieve your goals. “50 in 5” is a good starting point for defining a goal, but it’s not a business strategy.
Richard Rumelt writes in Good Strategy / Bad Strategy, “Strategy is about how an organization will move forward. Doing strategy is figuring out how to advance the organization’s interests.”
He continues, “A strategy is like a lever that magnifies force. Yes, you might be able to drag a giant block of rock across the ground with muscles, ropes, and motivation. But it is wiser to build levers and wheels and then move the rock.”
The desired destination of the rock is the goal, and how you move it is your strategy. “How” is the critical component. You are creating and implementing a strategy to effectively achieve a goal.
Goals become very powerful when you can clearly articulate how you will achieve them, who is responsible for what, and you have a clear scorecard to measure performance towards your goal. Now, that’s a strategy!
😴 Strategy Without Action Are Dreams
Strategy without action is just dreaming. And so much of what goes on in branding and marketing are just dreams.
Marketers and entrepreneurs can have brilliant ideas for their brands or campaigns, but without the work it’s all rather meaningless.
Ideas that aren’t acted on aren’t going to grow your brand.
It’s no accident that some companies have better brands than others. The companies with the most iconic brands are the best executors. They take ideas and make them happen!
Your company has greater capacity to execute than you may recognize. Bill Gates said, “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”
Strategy is a process, not an event. The more frequently you can work on your strategy and put ideas into action the faster you can grow.
I recommend implementing a weekly strategy huddle as a best practice. By making strategy a weekly practice, you emphasize strategy execution. You can’t hide behind missed deliverables and unexecuted ideas if you’re talking about them each week.
It’s in the work you do that results are achieved.
🤔 Thoughts on Today's Issue?
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