100 Great Business Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

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168 • 100 GREAT BUSINESS IDEAS


In practice


To ensure a successful strategy:



  1. Create a unique strategic position for your company. Focus on who
    your customers are, the value proposition offered to customers,
    and how you can do this effi ciently. (Do not confuse strategy
    with vision, mission, or objectives.)

  2. Make distinctive and meaning ful choices. Combine these choices in
    a self-reinforcing system of activities that fi t together. Common
    mistakes include keeping options open, enabling people to
    ignore choices, an approach to achieving growth that forces
    people to ignore the fi rm’s overarching strategy, and analysis
    paralysis.

  3. Understand the importance of values and incentives. The culture
    and values, measurement and incentives, people, structure, and
    processes all determine the environment of your organization.
    By infl uencing behavior, these will affect the success of your
    strategy.

  4. Gain people’s emotional commitment to the strategy. Any strategy
    will fail unless people are emotionally committed to its success.

  5. Recognize that understanding is not the same as communicating.
    Explain why the strategy is important to the organization and
    the individual.

  6. Do not overlook the knowing–doing gap. Individuals tend to do the
    urgent things and not the important ones.

  7. Do not assume that strategy can only be developed by “top” people.
    Ideas can come from anybody, anytime, anywhere.

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