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10 Core Strategy Principles…
4 min readFeb 8, 2022
I was reading a piece on having a “marketing philosophy” a while back and then read another piece on having a shared language to discuss strategy.
This got me to thinking about the idea of having a philosophy or a set of principles around the areas I work in with my clients, beginning with strategy. Since that is the foundation of the work that I do.
To me, I use the definition of pricinple as a foundational idea or building block of my philosophy of strategy.
Here are the 10 Principles that guide my strategy work.
- Ambition Makes Your Strategy: To me, this is the starting spot of a good strategy because you must set in intention, a destination, or, in my language, an ambition for your organization. In strategy, it is important that you know where you are going and what this success will look like.
- Building a simple, shared language: Like a lot of folks, I hate the buzzword bingo at the heart of my corporate and cultural conversation. Too much of it is meaningless, useless, and used as a tool to hide lack of working knowledge. In my strategy work, we try to create a simple, shared language as a backbone of our strategy work: ambition, market focus, value, resources, and actions are the building blocks of our strategies.
- A focus on impact over activity: You can be busy or you can be effective. Most of the time, you can’t do both. I focus on the end result, the outcome, over the activity and the time spent working on something.
- The power of a proper diagnosis: If you don’t diagnose the challenge effectively, you are likely steering yourself down a path of endless activity and limited impact. It is important to have an understanding of the challenge to be solved that the entire business can work on. Without a common definition of the challenge, the entire organization will struggle.
- The lens of value: You need a lens to see the world through. We all have one, but we often don’t make the choice consciously. In my strategy work, I get people focused on the lens of value. Because the exchange of value is the reason some businesses succeed and others fail.
- Create your own market: Blue Ocean Strategy is one of the more famous strategy books around. At the heart is the idea that red…
