“Strategy is about making choices, trade offs; it’s about deliberately choosing to be different” — Michael Porter
“the essence of strategy formulation is coping with competition”
Taken together, Porter defines strategy as the specific way a company uses its advantages to create superior value for its customers and thus superior returns for the company.
“we often confuse strategy with ambition, vision, or financial goals”
“the core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors”.
Playing to Win defines successful strategy as two simple decisions: where to play and how to win.
Strategy is a coherent set of choices about what we are going to do in order to achieve our vision.
The point of doing strategic work is not the slide deck at the end of it - it’s the hard work of looking at your data, research, discovery, and more to derive insight and understand what you think is your unique bet on the future. As the TV trope and meme says “the real treasure is the friends we made along the way”.
Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. / Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. — Dwight D. Eisenhower [1]
Build your strategy
1. Start with the customer
2. Know where you’re going
3. Be honest
4. Make tough choices
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. — Steve Jobs
5. Prioritise and sequence
“So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is more important than working hard.” — Caterina Fake
it is your responsibility to work with the rest of your leadership team to ensure the business has a clear, overarching, mutually reinforcing strategy that gives direction to every part of the business on what they should be focusing on
Once the business strategy is clear, creating a product (or marketing, tech, sales, etc) strategy becomes much much easier. What do you need to do to achieve the business strategy? If you've made the right tough choices at the business level this will be surprisingly easy to answer.