Organizations often formulate their strategy as being the best in their industry, being the vendor of choice, or being the most innovative. That’s not a strategy, but we can easily convert it into one.
Why Being the Best is Not Strategy
A quick answer: because it’s an aspiration.
Being the best in the niche is a desire, aspiration, or high-level goal of the company, but it doesn’t explain the idea of the “best” and how the company is going to get there or what unique choices will be made along the way.
In this video, Michael Porter, a renowned management expert, explains it in simple words:
There is No 1st Place in Business
Another important idea that Michael Porter highlights is that there is no such thing as the best in business. What is the best car? It depends on who uses it. The needs of premium segment customers will be quite different from the needs of those in the economy segment.
Broadly speaking, this idea leads us to the conclusion that “being the best” should be seen in the context of stakeholder needs. The “being the best” strategy only makes sense when we do a proper stakeholder analysis and define for whom we will be the best.
Let’s take BSC Designer’s business domain, strategic planning software, as an example.
In our case, the stakeholders are as follows:
- End users of the software (strategists) who are looking for a platform to automate their daily challenges.
- The client’s security team, ensuring we follow the best practices in developing and delivering our platform.
- The procurement team, which wants to ensure our offer is price competitive.
- The technical team, which analyzes the possibility of integration via data connectors.
- The legal team, ensuring compliance, especially in the context of AI usage.
We can further analyze the profile of the end users, which will have quite different needs, including:
- Independent consultants who need flexibility to maintain a diverse portfolio of clients.
- SMBs looking to migrate from clunky Excel spreadsheets to a more consistent strategy scorecards.
- Enterprise-level clients facing additional challenges of standardization and scaling.
- Academic clients who are price-sensitive but demand adherence to proper strategic planning approaches.
The geography of the users adds an additional layer of complexity!
Convert “Being the Best” into Strategy
Now, let’s use the results of stakeholder analysis and the aspiration of being the best to formulate and implement a clear strategy.
To do this, we would need to break down the high-level goal of being the best into more specific and actionable parts.
Keeping our stakeholders and their needs in mind, let’s break down the high-level aspiration of “Being the vendor of choice for strategic planning software” into more tangible parts:
- Strategy Automation: Achieving excellence in the automation of strategic planning.
- Security and Connectivity: Implementing best practices in security and data connectivity.
- Regulatory Compliance: Addressing new regulatory requirements in a timely manner.
- Customer Service: Providing efficient customer service.
This starts to look more tangible. We can continue the breakdown by adding more levels and details. Eventually, this will be translated into specific goals and initiatives, quantified by KPIs. We will also identify and map many risks along the way. If you are interested in exploring the topic further, we discussed the key features to consider when choosing effective strategic planning software in another article.
When performing this breakdown, we will always encounter decisions or trade-offs. For example, should we enhance customer self-service by providing prerecorded tutorials? Good idea, but how can we do it in a cost-effective and unique way that creates value for customers and is difficult for competitors to replicate?
These choices are what will make the strategy unique. Ultimately, they will be translated into what Porter calls positioning:
- “Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it’s about deliberately choosing to be different.” — Michael Porter
Strategy Implementation System
Looking for more specific examples and guidance on how to implement your strategy? In our strategy implementation system, we specifically cover the discussed steps:
- Describing the needs of stakeholders.
- Cascading high-level strategy into strategy and functional scorecards.
- Breaking down high-level objectives into goals, KPIs, initiatives, and risks.
You can check out free materials from the system available here and start using our platform to automate your strategy.
Alexis is a Senior Strategy Consultant and CEO at BSC Designer, with over 20 years of experience in strategic planning. Alexis developed the “5 Step Strategy Implementation System” that helps companies with the practical implementation of their strategies. He is a regular speaker at industry conferences and has published over 100 articles on strategy and performance management, including the book “10 Step KPI System”. His work is frequently cited in academic research.