Where and how does one begin the innovation process? Autodesk’s Innovation Strategist, Bill O’Connor, offers 7 questions:
How to create an integrated view of strategy? According to Kevin J. Boudreau, the most essential questions to address are:
Read more at
(1) https://hbr.org/2017/10/a-short-guide-to-strategy-for-entrepreneurs
Is your strategy aligned with your organizational culture? Who are you becoming in the pursuit of your goals? Who do you need to BE in order to achieve your biggest goals? Here is a fun exercise by http://fasterthan20.com:
Image Source: http://fasterthan20.com/toolkit/strategy-culture-bicycle/
What do you do better than others?
Is your entire organization aligned to do everything with this thinking?
If yes, then you are a “coherent” company. Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi suggest taking a “Coherence Test” as illustrated in the image below.
Based on this, Paul Leinwand and Matthias Bäumler have listed the following 8 tough strategy questions.
References: (1) https://hbr.org/2017/11/8-tough-questions-to-ask-about-your-companys-strategy (2) https://hbr.org/2010/06/the-coherence-premium
How effectively are you implementing your business strategy?
The seven questions designed by Harvard professor Robert Simons could help answer that question:
1 – Who is your primary customer?
2 – How do you prioritize the needs of shareholders, employees, and customers with your core values?
3 – What critical performance variables are you tracking?
4 – What strategic boundaries have you set?
5 – How are you generating creative tension?
6 – How committed are your employees to helping each other?
7 – What strategic uncertainties keep you awake at night?
See more details at http://www.free-management-ebooks.com/news/simons-seven-strategy-questions/
Karl-Erik Sveiby [Hanken School of Economics · Department of Management and Organisation, PhD, Professor Emeritus] has presented a “A Knowledge-based Theory of the Firm to guide Strategy Formulation”.
Here are a few strategy questions listed in the research paper – based on competence and conversations.
How does an entrepreneur GET CLEAR? Really clear about business, customers, profits and the entire spectrum that makes up an entrepreneur’s life.
How CLEAR are you about your business goals, most profitable market segments, long-term strategy, day-to-day business operations and the integration of all these with your life goals?
You may have an immediate sense of what you think you want. It could be one or more of the following:
Whatever is on your list, it is often difficult to decide where to start.
Seth Godin has a riff titled “The Priority List”. He says, the ability to decide “what to do next” is an underrated skill. For example, he says:
Is it better to email an existing customer, send a brochure to a prospect or improve your product a bit? Should you tweet or post a new blog post? Should you have a meeting to coordinate your team or spend ten minutes returning phone calls instead?
His tip:
Do you have a list? Have you figured out which metric you’re trying to improve? Can you measure the impact of the choices you make all day?
I see this mistake in business development all the time. Assume for a moment that the goal of someone in this department is to maximize profit. Why then would this group spend most of its time tweaking existing deals (looking for a 3% improvement in yield) instead of spending the same time and effort doing new, game-changing deals?
If you already have your LIST along with corresponding MEASURES, and you are still struggling to “Get Clear”, then what could be missing is clarity regarding your goals.
When did you last review your Goals? What are you REALLY up to?
Stephen R. Covey said “Priority is a function of context.”
So, WHY are you doing whatever you are doing?
Is that CLEAR?
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