Even the most seasoned executives often conflate operational plans with strategic ones. Of course, knowing what you’re going to do is important, but the real key is determining how you’re going to do it. A strategy is the plan of action and framework you employ to achieve an overall aim. Executing on a successful strategy is what differentiates household names from just another company. Businesses on the brink of failure can often trace their demise to the absence of a clear, cohesive, and comprehensive strategic plan.
Underpinning a startup’s strategic plan is its purpose. Purpose serves as a North Star for determining your strategy, which in turn serves as the North Star for business decisions. A purpose is the glidepath for determining what problem you are trying to solve and how you’re going to solve it better than anyone else. It simplifies decision making and allows companies to move aggressively forward in complex, mercurial, and highly competitive markets. By narrowing the field of vision, purpose and strategy join forces to channel innovation powerfully.
What's the Problem?
Generating a problem statement might seem like a tedious business school task but the end-product serves as much more than a grade on a report card. A thoroughly defined problem for which the company is solving can serve as a litmus test for all initiatives – if a new project helps solve the greater problem, it is fast tracked. If not, it can be jettisoned.
Every startup is founded with a grand mission to solve one of the world’s many problems. Somewhere along the way, founders often become distracted and distanced from the initial mission. They begin to decouple their business decisions from the main objective and lose sight of the goalposts. A startup can do a lot of things, but there is always one overarching problem guiding the way – we are looking to do X to achieve Y as measured by Z.
Big Goals & Little Wins
A strategic plan and problem statement serve as the clear and cogent groundwork that will enable the company to reach a state of maximal value creation for all stakeholders. After embracing the grander goal, leaders must parse the work into concentrated segments with clear milestones. It’s easy to become so intensely focused on the endpoint that you lose sight of the short sprints you need to complete today.
Attentiveness to bite-sized projects constructs high-quality building blocks for the company’s master narrative. Small incremental gains have a compounding effect that in the end produce a true market leader. Measurable, quantitative, and time-oriented milestones complete the roadmap with pitstops for reflection and revision.
Revisit, Review, Revise, & Repeat
With a PDSA mindset in tow, founders need to be cognizant of the fact that an initial strategy (or pieces of it) will need to evolve. Sometimes it’s macroeconomic shifts and at other moments it’s the realization that the strategy was simply wrong. A company must be able to both learn from the past and also break from it. Without a blueprint, startups struggle to find a baseline for comparison to determine when they have gone off track and when their approach is no longer working. A good strategy sets boundaries, acts a catalyst, and puts a business on a successful growth trajectory.
Recommended Resources
- Book: Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone – Satya Nadella
- Book: Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High-Performance Companies- Ranjay Gulati
- Book: Blue Ocean Strategy – Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim
- Website: Windrose Ventures – Apply for Consulting
