Strategy – noun (plural strategies). A plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim: time to develop a coherent economic strategy. [mass noun]: shifts in marketing strategy.
If your weeks are anything like mine, you hear the word strategy a lot. It’s a word that dominates conversations, thought processes and actions.
What I personally find conspicuous by its absence though, is the overall aim. A lot of people can articulate a strategy and their own nuances within it like a well-rehearsed elevator pitch. Few, however, have a detailed explanation or analysis of the aim the strategy is designed to achieve.
Many will mention the generic. ‘Growth’, ‘market share’ and ‘efficiency’ are commonplace. But none of those really mean anything. “Saying everyone is special is just another way of saying no-one is,” once said Lisa Simpson, and ‘growth’, ‘market share’ and ‘efficiency’ are naturally aims for the vast majority of businesses. They’re not individual aims, they’re natural evolutions.
To survive, all business need to create value for their customers. To compete, they need to create more value than their competitors. To thrive, businesses need to create high value in a unique, captivating way. That should be the aim.
Getting to that aim, all starts with purpose.
Creating value
My boss during what I’d call my first proper job had a fantastic way of articulating how to approach creating value for the consumer. As a young writer, he’d read my pieces and rage ‘so what?’ after each paragraph. It was his way of educating me that our job was to inform and entertain and if the reader could get to the end of a paragraph and not care about what they’d just read, – so what? – we weren’t creating value. Quite the opposite, we were wasting their time.
Director of Research at Harvard Business School, Cynthia Montgomery, poses a similar question to those on her strategy courses: ‘Does your company matter? If your business disappeared tomorrow, would the world be any different? Would anyone miss it? Or could a similar company come along and service your customers in the same way?’
These are hard, uncomfortable questions that generate serious soul searching.
What these questions are essentially asking us, is:
- Is your company truly unique?
- Can what you do be easily replaced and replicated?
- How are you creating value for people in a way that no one else can?
Regardless of your answers at this point, the route to creating a truly unique company that creates more value than its competitors starts by identifying its ultimate destination: its purpose. A great strategy then allows you to map the route.
Developing your purpose using the GUIDE method
Identifying your organisation’s unique purpose can feel overwhelming – especially when you’ve been operating for years without ever having really considered the why in your story.
To help put together an outstanding purpose that will set the tone and direction for your business, I use the 5-step GUIDE method. All purposes should be:
- Guiding;
- Unique;
- Inspiring;
- Deliverable; and
- Evolving.
Guiding
Great purposes should be able to guide the biggest and smallest decisions your company makes. They should be clear enough for you to understand if a decision is aligned to your purpose, or not.
Unique
Your purpose must be yours and only yours. Your purpose has to distinguish between who you are, and who you’re not. It has to identify you from all the other organisations selling similar services or products.
Inspiring
Purposes have to motivate people to work with you, and for you. They have to galvanise and turn employees and customers into believers who want to come on the journey with you.
Deliverable
A purpose has to be something you can deliver on. It must be clear enough for you to be able to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ as to whether your day-to-day actions are delivering to that purpose.
Evolving
Organisations that stand still, die. Evolutions in purpose represent companies that know what they’re trying to achieve and how this changes, tweak by tweak, over time. Revolutions in purposes are often representative of organisations without an identity or clear purpose to start with.
Moving forward
- Is your company truly unique?
- Can what you do be easily replaced and replicated?
- How are you creating value for people in a way that no one else can?
These are all questions you can answer more comfortably once you’ve defined a powerful purpose.
Developing this takes time – they’ll likely be many revisions as you wrestle with what drives you and your team and what consumers identify to be a valuable service. But keep going! Few things that are worthwhile are easy. If you need some inspirations, there are some great examples of inspiring purposes that are just a Google away.
Once you have your purpose, it’s time to talk culture, leadership and strategy, which I’ll be touching on in the coming weeks. When you’ve developed your purpose and feel comfortable enough to share, I’d love to hear it – drop me a line or message me on Twitter.
