Questions and Principles of Strategy
When you reflect about your business or life from a detached, higher-level perspective, what does it look like? What is the common source behind the direction(s) you have been following and intend to pursue?
This is strategy. It is the overarching framework behind your business or life decisions. A cohesive thread that unites your decision-making process. It is the container of all containers.
When there is no cohesive thread behind your decisions, you may feel lost and directionless, cognitively overwhelmed by the vast landscape of options in front of you. With the same token, when you decide to commit to overarching principles that guide your every decision, it may feel psychologically frightening because you have narrowed down the available options and you will never know how different choices/options would turn out. You experience FOMO (fear of missing out) either way. Therefore, strategy is also about choosing what not to do.
Similarly, when your business does not have a strategy, it feels as if there is no control and clear uniting principles behind what you are doing, which can create leakages and discontent throughout the team. This trickles down all the way to customers, and it can/will create issues.
What is strategy
According to Alan G. Lafley and Roger Martin, strategy is "An integrated set of choices that compels desired customer action" (2013) -- focusing on controlling internal decisions to influence customer behavior.
Strategy isn't only for top executives - people throughout an organization need to make strategic choices for success. The best organizations, according to Martin, are those that instill strategic thinking throughout the “chain of command”, effectively practicing distributed strategy and decision-making.
Strategy doesn’t have to remain fixed. In fact, it will almost certainly vary over time because culture and nature aren’t fixed. So, your overarching framework of decision-making need to remain in touch with present times in order to meet customers where they are and continue providing value to them. Failure to do so leads to the oblivion (i.e., no more relevance, shutting down).
Customers are at the core of strategy. Everything you do as a business is to continuously provide value to your customers. Your strategy provides the foundations to deliver value with consistency and high standards.
I would argue—and this is my opinion—that Strategy does not matter much if you haven’t even started your business yet. First, you want to find customers and a market that validates your offer. Once that is established and solid, you may engage in Strategizing and other similar intellectual pursuits.
In order to fully understand what Strategy is, you need to experience it yourself first by offering value. This will clear up your mind along the way and put you in the position to Strategize more effectively than simply engaging in an intellectual exercise without any practical foundations.
There are levels to the game of business/life, and level 0 is experiential learning through action.